The St. Louis Blues fired head coach Craig Berube late Tuesday night amidst a disappointing 13-14-1 start to the season the club announced.
In the interim, AHL coach Drew Bannister of the Springfield Thunderbirds will take over head coaching duties while GM Doug Armstrong conducts a search for a permanent replacement.
“We went through this five or six years ago,” Armstrong said Wednesday. “Good play will dictate a lot of things. Bad play will dictate a lot of things at a player level and all levels of an organization.
“Obviously, I’d like to thank Craig. He and I started working together in 2016 … helped right a ship and take it to a championship. We built a friendship over the years and it’s difficult to have that talk with him last night. He’s a true professional. We talked a little bit, we had a beer, we reminisced for a second and now my job is to move forward and Craig will now regroup and he’ll land on his feet. He’s too good a coach not to be in this league.
“I feel personally responsible for the situation that we’re in and I also hope that the people that I just talked to personally feel responsible too. If they don’t, that’s their decision. It’s not a great day, but it’s a new day, and now we move forward.”
The 57 year old bench boss replaced former coach Mike Yeo back in 2018, and helped guide the Blues to a Stanley Cup championship a year later. Across 6 NHL seasons in St. Louis Berube posted a 206-131-44 record as head coach of the club.
“I don’t know if tomorrow’s going to be different,” Armstrong continued. “I just know one of the things has been removed from the equation that we can focus on was the head coach and now, when you make that change, we’re getting now to the center of the hour glass. That’s myself and that’s the players.
“What we want to stress as we’re going through whatever we’re going through is a level of compete and a level of accountability. Starting with Drew tomorrow night, that’s his mandate: accountability and compete.”
The move makes Berube the 3rd head coach fired thus far in 2023-24 following Edmonton’s Jay Woodcroft, and Dean Evason in Minnesota. Losers of 4 straight contests, St. Louis finds themselves 9 points behind Colorado for top spot in the Central division, with 5 teams currently ahead of them, including the lowly Arizona Coyotes.
“At the end of the day, players in this locker room are going forward knowing that the accountability is going to be there,” Blues captain Brayden Schenn told reporters. “You just can’t fire a coach and the players just turn the page and act like nothing’s going to happen. I have to be better, we have to be better in this locker room.”
“We’re underachieving, we’re underperforming through 28 games. It’s been a roller coaster and even when we’re winning, I don’t feel like we’re winning the right way for the most part. I would say time to pull the rope in the right direction and dig in and buy in as a group. ‘Chief’s’ a guy that takes the fall for it, but it’s on these players in this locker room to be better.”
The Blues will get their first taste of life under Bannister on Thursday night as they play host to the Ottawa Senators in an 8pm ET showdown.
Photo: Michael Miller. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.