St. Louis Generated Fewer Chances Than Every Team but Chicago. Mason McTavish Is the Right Fix. The Price Was Jordan Kyrou.

Strip the St. Louis Blues' summer down to what actually moved and it is one transaction with two dates on it. On June 23, Jordan Kyrou went to the Washington Capitals for Connor McMichael, prospect Milton Gastrin and the 16th pick in the draft. Three nights later, on the draft floor, the Blues sent the 15th and 29th picks to the Anaheim Ducks for Mason McTavish. Net it out and general manager Doug Armstrong traded his highest-paid winger and a late first for a 23-year-old centre, a 25-year-old forward and a prospect, and got younger at every position he touched.

The question is not whether McTavish is good. He is. The question is whether St. Louis identified its real problem and paid the right price to fix it, and the numbers say yes to the first half and something more complicated to the second.

The problem was never a secret

The Blues finished 37-33-12 last season, 86 points, four short of the last playoff spot in the West, and the reason is on one line of the MoneyPuck team table. Across all situations, St. Louis generated 222 expected goals. Only the Chicago Blackhawks, who were the worst possession team in the league by a distance, generated fewer, at 219. Thirty teams created more scoring chances than the Blues did, and most of them created a lot more. The league's best offences, Colorado and Carolina, generated 300.

That is a roster-wide problem, not a bad-luck problem. St. Louis scored 230 goals on those 222 expected, so the finishing was fine. The shooting was fine. There were simply not enough chances to shoot at, and at 5-on-5 the forward group tells you why. Not one Blues forward with 600 minutes generated three expected goals per 60. The best mark on the team was Kyrou's 2.89. Robert Thomas, the best player on the roster and one of two point-per-game players nobody talks about, was at 2.81. Below him it fell away fast: Jimmy Snuggerud 2.68, Pavel Buchnevich 2.56, Pius Suter 2.55, and a bottom six that generated chances at a rate that would embarrass a good AHL team.

Into that group walks McTavish, who was on the ice for 3.12 expected goals per 60 at 5-on-5 in Anaheim. That would have led the Blues by a margin, and it is exactly the thing they did not have.

The catch is the other column

Here is where the Anaheim environment has to be accounted for, because it cuts both ways. The Ducks were the third-most productive chance-creating team in the league with 286 expected goals across all situations, and they got there by playing a fast, open, trade-chances style that inflates every forward's offensive numbers and deflates every forward's defensive ones. Eight of Anaheim's nine regular forwards generated 2.9 or more expected goals per 60 at 5-on-5. McTavish's 3.12 was second among them, behind Beckett Sennecke, so he was a real contributor to that engine rather than a passenger on it. But it was not a number out of the ordinary in that room.

What was out of the ordinary was the other side of his ledger. McTavish was on the ice for 2.95 expected goals against per 60, the worst mark of any Anaheim regular. Leo Carlsson, the centre ahead of him, was at 2.50. Troy Terry was 2.44. On a team that gave up chances freely, McTavish gave up the most, and it showed in the goals: the Ducks were outscored 58-45 with him on the ice at 5-on-5, a minus-13 that was the worst on the team by eight goals. Some of that is the goaltending Anaheim had behind him, which cost the Ducks around 17 goals against expectation at 5-on-5. Not all of it. His expected share was 51 percent, which on a 52 percent team makes him roughly break-even, a centre who trades chance for chance.

That is the opposite of the player he is replacing, and it is worth being precise about it. Kyrou's reputation as a defensive liability was never supported by the numbers. He was on the ice for 2.01 expected goals against per 60, the best of any Blues forward, and his 59 percent expected-goal share led the team. St. Louis has traded its best suppressor for the Ducks' worst one, and its best driver for a break-even player, in exchange for a generation rate the roster badly needs. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on which of McTavish's numbers travel.

The production dipped, and the reason is not what you would guess

McTavish's counting numbers went backwards last year, from 52 points to 41, and that will be used against the trade. It should not be, or at least not in the way it will be. His ice time fell to 15.3 minutes a night, the lowest since his rookie season, as Carlsson became the unquestioned No. 1 centre and McTavish settled in as a second-line centre on a team with the depth to keep him there. His production per minute fell by less than the raw total suggests. What really moved was the finishing: he generated 23.5 expected goals on his own shots across all situations and scored 17. A season earlier he scored 22 on 180 shots. The chances were there. The pucks did not go in.

That is the good version of the argument for St. Louis. A 23-year-old who was a third overall pick, who has already had a 52-point season, who was the second-best chance generator on the league's third-best chance-generating team, and who scored six and a half goals fewer than his shots deserved, now moves to a roster where he is the second-line centre by right, with power-play time to go with it. On the ice time alone, 41 points becomes something in the 50s. If the finishing normalises it is more than that.

What the Blues actually paid

The picks matter, so let us be honest about them. Nos. 15 and 29 is a serious price for a 41-point season in a draft we graded team by team. But the Blues had just taken No. 16 back from Washington in the Kyrou deal, so the true outlay for McTavish was one late first and a one-spot swap. The rest of the cost is Kyrou himself, and Kyrou at 28, on $8.1 million through 2030-31, coming off his lowest full-season point total since he became a regular, is an asset whose value was more likely to fall than rise.

McMichael is the part of the return nobody is discussing, and he should be looked at squarely. He scored 57 points two seasons ago and 46 last year, he was a 47 percent player in Washington at 5-on-5, and he loses more faceoffs than he wins. He is a useful middle-six forward on a reasonable contract, not a hidden top-line piece, and St. Louis should not confuse him for one. Gastrin is a lottery ticket.

So the trade, in full: Kyrou and a late first for McTavish, a middle-six forward and a prospect, with the Blues getting five years younger at the position that matters most. That is the kind of deal a team makes when it believes its window is 2028, not 2027, and on the evidence of an 86-point season with the second-worst chance generation in the league, that belief is correct.

The one thing to watch

McTavish's expected goals against will decide this. On a Blues team whose forwards mostly sit between 2.2 and 2.7 against per 60, a McTavish who lands at 2.5 with his 3.1 generation is a 55 percent player, the best on the roster, and the trade is a steal. A McTavish whose 2.95 comes with him is a break-even centre who scores 55 points, which is fine, and not what you spend Kyrou to buy. The difference between those two outcomes is worth more to St. Louis than any single player it could have added this summer, and it will be settled by whether his defensive numbers were an Anaheim problem or a McTavish problem. The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, including Armstrong.

What it means

The Blues have made the correct decision about what was wrong with them, which is more than most 86-point teams manage. They could not create chances, so they bought the player who creates them and sold the one whose value was set to decline. The goaltending is still the goaltending, and no forward fixes that. But if McTavish's generation holds and his suppression improves to merely average, St. Louis will have turned its worst weakness into a strength for the price of a winger it was going to regret paying anyway. Watch the chances against. Everything else about this trade is already in the Blues' favour.