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From his days with the Minnesota North Stars, the Dallas Stars, Hockey Canada, and now the ӣ����Ƶ Blues, Armstrong has won two Stanley Cups and two Olympic gold medals. He’s signed or traded for many players, and evaluated countless others.

This week, Armstrong sat down with The ӣ����Ƶ to discuss the Blues’ training camp and impressions the prospects left, before diving deep into how Armstrong and Blues have evaluated players through the years.

Here is a sample from the extended interview with Armstrong. To listen to the complete interview, tune into the latest episode of Net Front Presence. Click ; .

Q: One thing you mentioned earlier when you met with a group of us was the way that preseason games have gone, and maybe the need for a guy like Milan Lucic. I look at the Tampa-Florida games as examples of that. Has that changed the way you view his potential role in the league right now?

Armstrong: “I just think that physical hockey seems to be making a return, for whatever reason. It’s not just that last game, it was probably the game before that when they were NHL players doing it to NHL players. It does get your attention for sure.

“It’s an area of the game that we’re comfortable in. We have players that aren’t afraid, players that can take care of themselves. Sometimes, it’s nice to have the meanest guy on the block.”

Q: Does that show in the preseason for Lucic?

Armstrong: “When you’re Luc’s caliber, young guys want to show respect to him. He doesn’t want to play that brand of hockey against someone that’s not capable of doing it. It doesn’t play itself out for a veteran to do a lot of that. But it’s an area of the game where we’re not looking for someone to come in and just fight. But someone that can play a physical brand of hockey, that can answer when the temperatures get hot. I think the day of the guy that sits on the bench and fights is gone. What we need to do is make sure we have a capable player that that’s one of the elements he has.”

Q: What was the feedback after training camp for prospects like Dalibor Dvorsky, Otto Stenberg and Aleksanteri Kaskiamki?

Armstrong: “A player like Dvorsky, it’s playing away from the puck. His skillset, his ability to make 10-foot passes is excellent. His ability to make the puck do its magic is high. It’s getting in those harder areas and playing through traffic, playing into traffic, playing closer to contact is something that he has to embrace and learn how to do. It’s not a negative, it’s a maturity thing. That’s just an example.

“You see a player like Stenberg, who has excellent two-way ability, it’s adding size, it’s adding puck protection skills. It’s learning how to push the game along at different times. There’s a time to take a risk and there’s a time to not take a risk.

“When we talked to Kaskimaki, Jim (Montgomery) said the opposite. ‘You play too conservative. At points, you have to take risks in this game. You have to not just be a clock-killer.’ Everyone is a little bit different. What we try to do is pick out things that each player can work on.”

Q: How has the role of analytics in player evaluation changed over time with the Blues?

Armstrong: “We were one of the first teams to have analytics. We had Coleman Analytics, and we used it for synergy. We used it for things that were very enlightening. Now, we have a five-person analytics department that gives presentations. I’m not as comfortable with the presentations as a younger generation are. That’s just reality. I wish I was. I wish I had a better understanding of it. I understand the 30,000-foot view of analytics.

“I think AI is something that can really revolutionize. I’ve talked to our group about that. Then you could use that as a teaching tool. But to do that, you have to incorporate all those things into a machine, you have to tell them what you think is right. The reason I got that is I saw last week is there’s an actress, and AI actress, that’s taking over the world right now, and a company is trying to sign the creator of it. When I saw her, she looked like an actress.

“It got me thinking, ‘Why couldn’t you have a penalty killing unit as a teaching tool that’s all AI-created?’ And then they said you can, it’s just you have to then construct the mechanism to do it, which is millions and millions of dollars. I think it’s going to get done. It’s going to happen over time.”

Q: You added three members of the analytics staff this offseason: one from PuckPedia (Jay Gudsson), one from Sportlogiq (Zyler MacDonald), one from an investment banking firm (Will Cooper). Why did you want to expand the team? What are their roles?

Armstrong: “We always try and stay never below the midpoint. In this game, in any sport, if you’re following the leader, then you’re playing catchup. What we want to try and do is get as deep as we can into things. It’s like our practice rink here, for example. We built it in 2018, 2019. Now, you look at Utah’s and you look at Florida’s, now you’ve got to redo it again. The game is always changing. Everything is evolving. That seems to be evolving at a quicker pace.

“We have Mike Pearlman, who heads that department up. We tasked him with finding the proper people that could give us different information. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but we’re starting down a process. We’re going to see. We’ll probably skin our knees along the way. If you’re not trying, you’re not giving yourself the best opportunity.”

Q: What do want to impart on Alexander Steen before he takes over as general manager?

Armstrong: “He’s going to have his own vision on what his team wants to look like. What I want to impart on him is how to build the organization. Not with the players, you handle that. How do you build a scouting staff? How do you build a coaching staff? How do you build an analytics group? How you build that infrastructure are things he shouldn’t know, he’s never been part of. You don’t learn that in a day or a year or two years. You learn that over time.

“I want to be able to impart on him the things that he doesn’t have knowledge of. As I’m doing that, he’s sharing knowledge of things I don’t know. What it was like to be drafted in the first round and then go in as an offensive player, and then win a championship as a high-character glue player that the coach counted on to do the right things all the time. That’s about as big a gamut as you can find in the NHL, and he did it.

“So I learn from him every day on things that he went through. He’s fortunate, he can pretty well talk to everybody at his own level of, ‘Yeah, that happened to me, too. Yeah, that happened to me, too.’ I think that’s important. And I can share to him contract things. Like I did his contracts. He’s seeing us do that, and he goes, ‘I didn’t know it went like that.’

“You don’t know what the player’s being told by the agent on the demeanor, how the conversation is going. You can’t really get hung up on that, but he sees all the work that Ryan Miller does behind the scenes to prepare. He sees how we’re trying to go about doing it in a certain way. He said, ‘It’s funny, as a player, you just don’t know that stuff’s getting done behind the scenes.’ I said, ‘That’s good, you don’t want the player worrying about that.’

“You go back to the old (saying): owners own, managers manage, coaches coach, players play. But when you’re the manager, you have to be able to deal with the owner and understand what he wants. Then you have to be able to share your wisdom with the coaches and the players from your experiences. So you’re really the center of the hourglass from the business of hockey.”