The St. Louis Blues and Brandon Saad are mutually terminating his contract after he was put on waivers on Wednesday.
Saad will need to go on waivers again before the move can be made official on Thursday.
Saad, 32, will be walking away from $5.425 million in cash owed to him, per PuckPedia. The Blues had tried to trade Saad over the last several months, sources told ESPN, but did not find any partners.
“Obviously the production’s not there,” GM Doug Armstrong said in a midseason news conference on Tuesday. “Right now the cap is tight, and obviously, statistically, he’s not having a great year and he’s got another year left. If we could find a match, we would try.”
Saad has just 16 points (seven goals, nine assists) in 43 games this season, along with a 9.3 shooting percentage — the second worst mark of his 14-year career.
Saad, a two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Chicago Blackhawks, is under contract through the end of next season with a $4.5 million cap hit. Saad would like to continue playing in the NHL, sources said, but the additional year remaining on his contract and the high cap hit was a roadblock for other teams to claim him on waivers Wednesday or agree to a trade. Saad will now be a free agent and can sign with any other team. The Blues would have been charged a $1.15 million cap hit had Saad played for their AHL affiliate in Springfield; the team will now be cleared of his full contract giving them financial flexibility.
It’s already been a season of transition for St. Louis, which fired coach Drew Bannister in November and hired Jim Montgomery after he was let go in Boston.
The Blues are in what Armstrong has called a retool. The team doesn’t feel it can afford a full rebuild and is working to transition on the fly around a new core group of players in their early 20s: Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou, as well as Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg who were acquired over the summer from offer sheets.