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Confirmed with Link: Blues and Saad agree to Mutual Contract Termination

A Real Barn Burner said:
I would be extremely surprised if Vancouver moved Petey over Miller. Not saying I wouldn’t be happy. Also I don’t see how Vancouver does that without getting a center back in trade and the only option we have is Dvorsky. How likely are we to hear if Vancouver was scouting Springfield? Would think there would be some smoke somewhere.
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I'm sure they would prefer to trade Miller. But he has a full NMC, is clearly a less valuable asset, and they very well might not be able to get anything of actual value for him. You have respected guys like Friedman going on national TV and saying that they are shopping Petey. He want as far as saying he thought that a deal was almost done to send him to Carolina the day before the Rantanen trade got done. The Canucks beat writer just wrote an article about the potential that Petey could be the one who gets moved due to the lack of a market for Miller. Jeff Marek is talking about Petey potentially being the odd man out.

Rumors aren't gospel, but there is absolutely every indication that they are genuinely considering a Petey move.

And while they absolutely want a center back, this was their GM's quote about it in an interview a couple days ago: “So yeah, if a centre goes out of here we have to get some kind of centre back but it’s not going to be the same as the centre going out. It might not even be a No. 2 centre, but you’d have to do the best with what we have until we figure out how to fill that spot back in." Emphasis mine.

That certainly doesn't sound like a guy who is fielding offers that include centers that they like. That sounds much more like a GM who is prepping his fanbase for a trade where they get a warm body who can play center in the short term while they try to address the problem long term. Not for nothing, but one of Sunny or Faksa would be perfectly expendable if we swapped Kyrou for Petey. Petey would bump Schenn to 3C and those two would be competing for the remaining 4C spot. I'm sure we would be more than happy to throw Faksa into a deal and we could even retain 50% and still come ahead on the cap.

Again, I'm not expecting an imminent Kyrou for Petey swap. But I also think that Vancouver has done a terrible job managing this issue between Miller/Petey and it appears to me that the markets are drying up. Carolina was one of the few teams reportedly on Miller's trade list and I don't see them looking to commit money to Miller long term now that they will be trying to extend Rants. They were reportedly close to a deal with Carolina, who doesn't have an abundance of centers to offer in return. I think it is pretty likely that Jack Drury would have been the center going back to Vancouver in a deal where the other asset(s) were the primary target. That primary asset very well could have been Necas.

I think it is getting more and more likely that there simply isn't (and won't) be an offer that includes the type of center that plugs the hole they create in the short or long term. I think they are probably dealing with a reality where any deal for either player will leave them needing to make an additional move to bring in another center.
 
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MortiestOfMortys said:
Perunovich and Saad. Army said this in his presser yesterday. Something to the effect of “maybe we’re overvaluing our own guys.” This is how you run out of options. You hang onto guys past their sell-by date, or give them extensions you KNOW will age badly (or both), and then when you need to move on from them you can’t. Or if you can, you’re eating salary, or paying to send them out, or waiving them, or accepting future considerations (or a condition which could end up being that). Whatever options remain available to you are bad ones. Which is why Army seemed so surprised at other GMs offering him bad deals to take Saad on.

So two guys we’ve held onto for years, taking up roster spots, preventing prospects from playing up, and eating cap that could have been allocated elsewhere, return essentially nothing. Two guys who had some value at some point, and who could have returned something at some point, now return nothing because we overvalued them, and hung onto them until their value was zero.

I get (and mostly agree with) wanting to stay competitive through this retool. But getting nothing for players you’re sending out is awful roster management. Earlier this week we had Saad and Perunovich and very few draft picks, and now we don’t have those guys and the same number of picks. That’s less than ideal!
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I can't blame Army too much for Saad. His drop off this year has been unbelievable to witness. He had a bit of a down year defensively last year, but he scored his 25 goals and 45 points like clockwork again. We had every indication this year would be no different - as I've said before, I've always thought Saad was such an interesting player b/c it almost never mattered who he was playing with - good players, mediocre players, didn't matter, the dude was a 20 goal/45 point machine that never broke. Whelp, he broke this year, and no one saw it coming. Peru I think we did have high hopes for, but the shoulder and elbow injuries just cratered his shooting mechanics to the point where he can barely even get a shot on net from the blueline anymore. I'm not really sure if his value was really ever higher then a late round pick, he had never proved anything at the NHL level to entice teams to spent on him as a reclamation project.
 
shpongle falls said:
I’m with Army in that I’ve been wanting to see Texier play more too, there’s definitely untapped potential that hasn’t been unlocked yet.
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I don't see it but maybe I'm wrong. He consistently looks like the worst player on the ice and either doesn't know where he is supposed to be or what to do, and make terrible decisions with the puck. I would love to be wrong about him but maybe an extended look will help him settle in a little and get his game together.
 
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SirPaste said:
I'm sorry but you said guys we wouldn't have dreamed of moving on from, not sure anyone cared that much about moving on from either of those players 2 years ago.
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Well, agree to disagree about Scotty Hockey. People would have lost their minds if we traded him for a conditional 5th two years ago. With Saad, I think posters here probably would have understood.

But I’m talking about Army, not hfboards. If he wanted to trade either of them, there was nothing keeping him from doing that. Even with his contract, a 20/20/40 guy has value that a playoff team would have paid for, especially one with two rings. But we valued Saad more than anything we would have gotten back. So we held onto him, and now we got nothing back for him. And now that he’s cleared, we don’t even get rid of his salary or his roster spot.
 
MortiestOfMortys said:
Well, agree to disagree about Scotty Hockey. People would have lost their minds if we traded him for a conditional 5th two years ago. With Saad, I think posters here probably would have understood.

But I’m talking about Army, not hfboards. If he wanted to trade either of them, there was nothing keeping him from doing that. Even with his contract, a 20/20/40 guy has value that a playoff team would have paid for, especially one with two rings. But we valued Saad more than anything we would have gotten back. So we held onto him, and now we got nothing back for him. And now that he’s cleared, we don’t even get rid of his salary or his roster spot.
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A terrible bit of GMing by Army. He accomplished almost nothing.
 
Assuming there isn't an incoming trade where we retain and move him, I expect Saad to light up the AHL while he's down there. Maybe he will need a few days to get his head/heart into being an AHL player, but he has every shred of motivation to prove that he doesn't belong in the AHL.

He has a newborn baby at home and another year under contract. I'm sure he doesn't want to spend the next several months riding the bus in the AHL away from his family. And there is little chance that his family is uprooting everything to come with him in the short term. Unless he wants to walk away from the $5M+ he is still owed on his deal, the AHL is a potential reality next year too. Even if he is willing to terminate his deal, mediocre half-hearted play in the AHL isn't going to lead to many NHL contract offers this summer.

He's an extremely well-compensated employee, but this is the hard reality of pro sports. This objectively sucks for him and his only way back to the life he's used to (and potentially hitting the 1,000 NHL game milestone) is to be a good pro, mentor the kids for a bit, and make it resoundingly clear that he's too good for the AHL.

I don't think Saad has played his final NHL game.
 
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Well my post about him trying to play his way out of the AHL is moot.

That said, I very much do not believe that he's played his last NHL game. He's going to have a number of teams looking to add him on a cheap 1 year deal. I'd wager that Columbus will be on the phone with his agent ASAP. Same with Calgary. And Colorado. And Edmonton. Really any team that doesn't want to spend assets (or have the cap) to go after a rental.

From our perspective, I can't say I'm upset about freeing up the cap space. All my hopes of eventually trading him (before the major dip in play) were based on retaining 50%. Freeing up the full $4.5M cap space for this year and next isn't as good as a pick, but it does create more options and flexibility. We will no longer be utilizing LTIR relief when this processes.
 
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StlBigFly said:
I didn’t see the report.

Did he clear waivers or did they pull him before the deadline and change course?
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He cleared, was assigned to Springfield but then the change of course about an hour later so he probably requested to walk away from the money instead of going to AHL

PerryTurnbullfan said:
Tampering? How do you manage this legal cartwheel?
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I don't think anyone will care. I am sure the Blues are fine with him walking away from the money and get the actual savings as well as no cap hit for the remainder of this season and next. If there was tampering they were doing Army a favor.
 
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SirPaste said:
He cleared, was assigned to Springfield but then the change of course about an hour later so he probably requested to walk away from the money instead of going to AHL


I don't think anyone will care. I am sure the Blues are fine with him walking away from the money and get the actual savings as well as no cap hit for the remainder of this season and next. If there was tampering they were doing Army a favor.
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I can’t believe the players association will be happy. Oh well. Glad the caps free!
 
StlBigFly said:
I didn’t see the report.

Did he clear waivers or did they pull him before the deadline and change course?
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The player has to clear waivers to terminate. So he had to clear for this to be an option. They may have planned this from the start if he cleared or they changed course when it became a reality. Either way, we are only able to do this because nobody took on his current deal

PerryTurnbullfan said:
I can’t believe the players association will be happy. Oh well. Glad the caps free!
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Why would they be unhappy? Saad has to agree to it. If he wants the money, he reports to Springfield and does not sign the termination agreement.
 
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I wonder if he is more likely to pull a Burglund and just walk away from the NHL. The only thing you can point to as a difference between this year and last is him becoming a father. Benching him multiple times didn’t send a wake up call. If his heart isn’t in it he should just hang up his skates.

He could sign a contract this year and suck on another team then seriously jeopardize his chances for a contract next year. If he gets two strike good chances he would end up as a PTO next year at some camp. If he does go to some other team and light it up with scoring I am going to be pissed that he didn’t give any effort here. It shouldn’t take being sent down to the AHL to light a fire under a professional’s ass.
 
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Well, his hat trick after the healthy scratches was cool. His willingness to do this is cool too. Good luck to him.

Kinda wild how it was less than 2 weeks ago that they beat Calgary B2B, but here we are. We have one obvious and noteable exception to the rule a few years ago, but generally when teams are talking about games like it’s a playoff series in January, that’s a pretty good sign you are cooked, and it’s looking like we are.
 
This termination is with Saad's blessing. There's a good chance Army wasn't willing to retain, and that left a lot of teams uncomfortable with his cap hit. He can now sign a 1 year deal for league minimum with a contender as Corey Perry does and try to chase Cups/rebuild his value in the playoffs. He very clearly had zero interest in playing in the AHL for the rest of the season, for good reason(s).
 
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