Jakub Vrana made available for trade by St. Louis Blues after waiver wire reporting
The St. Louis Blues were reportedly going to place winger Jakub Vrana on waivers Monday but those plans have apparently changed. The Athletic’s Jeremy Rutherford first reported the news on his Twitter account but Vrana did not make it onto waivers at 2 pm.
Hockey insider Elliotte Friedman added his own reporting that St. Louis has made Vrana available for trade. He mused that the Blues may have worked out a deal prior to placing the Czech forward on waivers.
The Blues initially acquired the 27-year-old from the Detroit Red Wings last season for a 2025 seventh-round draft pick and a prospect.
Vrana has played 19 games for the Blues this season and tallied just six points (2g, 4a). The Czech forward does not have a point in his last seven games and is minus-8 in plus/minus during his last four games.
“Sometimes you’ve got to watch and learn from it, and hopefully he’s better,” Berube told Rutherford in October. “That is what you’ve got to do sometimes. It’s the hard part of the job, and it’s the hard part on the player, too.
“We just need a response. That’s up to him. In the end, he’s a talented guy that can score goals for us and be a good player for us: power play and five-on-five. But you’ve got to work. You’ve got to work.”
Berube was not wrong as Vrana has struggled tremendously without the puck this season. Micah McCurdy’s HockeyViz heatmaps tell that story well. In the bottom half of the below chart, you can see just how much offensive volume teams are getting from very dangerous areas of the ice with Vrana over the boards.
Vrana carries a $2.625 million cap hit for the rest of this season after the Red Wings kept 50 percent of his salary in last year’s trade. The Capitals’ 2018 Stanley Cup champion had a rocky 2022-23 campaign after starting the year in NHL/NHLPA Player Assistance Program and going unclaimed on waivers.
The Czech winger had seemingly found a better home in St. Louis, scoring 10 goals and recording 14 total points in his first 20 games with the Blues but has been unable to match that sort of production this season.
Vrana’s last, full successful NHL season came with the Washington Capitals during the 2019-20 campaign. That season, a 23-year-old Vrana recorded 52 points (25g, 27a) in 69 games for a Todd Reirden-led Caps squad.
“Overall, we had a great group here,” Vrana said last February. “We obviously won the Cup. The most important thing is that we stick together as a team. We were like one family here. That brings the memories into the future.”
