How the St. Louis Blues Are Saving Nail Yakupov's NHL Career

Nail Yakupov entered the NHL just four years ago as the consensus best prospect available in the 2012 draft and a future franchise cornerstone. Now the question is whether the 23-year-old can salvage a major league career.

The St. Louis Blues are determined to give him the best possible chance.

The Blues have several advantages over the Edmonton Oilers that give them a better shot at success with Yakupov than his former team ever had. They have a veteran roster, one with the ability to both complement and shelter the young winger. They have an experienced coach who knows his team. Critically, they also know exactly what they’re getting into.

When Yakupov joined the Oilers, it was as a high-profile scorer who was expected to shoulder some of the burden of turning around the team’s long, slow rebuild. He couldn’t live up to those expectations, and as the package the Blues traded for him shows, his goals in Missouri are going to be much more modest.

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A 2017 third-round draft pick (which turns into a second-round pick in 2018 if Yakupov scores 15 goals) is at the heart of the deal, and it isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things. Other players moved for picks in that round include Zac Rinaldo, Mike Weber and Eric Gelinas.

Meanwhile, ECHLer Zach Pochiro carries negative value as a player with an NHL contract who is unlikely to ever play in the majors.

That’s a reclamation project price, and longtime Blues head coach Ken Hitchcock is the man with the primary task of making it pay off. Yakupov—who has never had a 35-point season in the NHL but has had a minus-35 campaign—might seem like an odd fit for the infamously defense-minded bench boss, but Hitchcock made it plain to NHL.com in the aftermath of the deal that he had a plan for Yakupov:

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He has a skill set, and we want to enhance the skill set. We look at the stuff without the puck, it’s going to take time, and we’re in no hurry. We’re not going to turn a player into a defensive specialist; we don’t anticipate doing that at all. We want to take what his strengths are and get him to really focus on that.

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In the early going, that’s precisely what Hitchcock has done. Rather than focus on hammering a square peg into a round hole, he has treated Yakupov as an offensive specialist. The results have been somewhat uneven, but the plan seems to be working.

The first thing Hitchcock did was shelter Yakupov like he’s never been sheltered before.

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In terms of quality of competition, Yakupov ranks ninth among St. Louis forwards, right in the middle of the team’s bottom six. Entering action against the New York Rangers on Tuesday, he had been on the ice for 35 offensive zone faceoffs, as opposed to just 12 on the defensive end of the rink, per Corsica. Other coaches, most notably Dallas Eakins, have tried similar tactics, but none of them came close to giving Yakupov a 3-1 ratio of offensive to defensive zone starts.

Saturday’s game against the Los Angeles Kings was fairly typical. Yakupov played just under nine minutes at five-on-five, virtually all of them with Patrik Berglund and Robby Fabbri and with more than half of them coming against the dregs of the Los Angeles lineup—the forward line of Nic Dowd, Andy Andreoff and Dustin Brown and the third pair of Tom Gilbert and Derek Forbort. That’s what it looks like when a coach chases a favourable matchup, and few do it better than Hitchcock.

Yakupov has just four points in 10 games, which may not sound like much of a return for those efforts. The important thing to remember, though, is that Hitchcock isn’t using Yakupov on the power play yet. At five-on-five, Yakupov’s four points are tied for the team lead, and he collected them with far fewer minutes than most of the team’s other scorers.

Player	5v5 TOI	Points	PTS/60
Nail Yakupov	91.3	4	2.63
Patrik Berglund	97.9	4	2.45
Vladimir Tarasenko	116.8	4	2.05
Alex Steen	118.7	3	1.52

Yet it was Yakupov’s defensive game that caught the coach’s eye following his debut, as reported by Jeremy Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

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You know what? He was much better defensively than I thought. He’s got great outside speed. ... I think we’ve got a lot of work in progress there. What I liked more than anything was his conscience. His conscience was there.

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Yakupov’s underlying metrics look pretty good; he’s close to the team lead in terms of Corsi. Given how he’s been used, it’s not worth reading too much into that, but it’s a welcome change from past campaigns.

The caveats are both numerous and obvious. It’s early, for one thing. It’s also a different matter to succeed inside the bubble that Hitchcock has so carefully constructed around his project than it is to do so outside of it. How Yakupov handles the inevitable adversity he’ll face over the remainder of this season and beyond is still open to question.

Right now, however, it appears the relationship between player and team is flourishing, to the benefit of both parties.  

Statistical information courtesy Natural Stat Trick and Hockey Reference. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.