St. Louis Blues new General Manager Alexander Steen will inherit several restricted free agent decisions as one of his first orders of business. While none of them will define the offseason, how they are handled will say something meaningful about the organizational philosophy taking shape. The RFA class breaks cleanly into two tiers. At the top sits Jonatan Berggren. Below him are Matthew Kessel and a handful of AHL-level prospects whose fates will be decided largely by arithmetic and pipeline depth.
Berggren Is the Easy Call
Berggren arrived in St. Louis under modest circumstances being claimed off waivers from Detroit in December after the Red Wings ran out of patience. The 25-year-old winger posted 6 goals, 10 assists, and 16 points in 36 games with the Blues, and his production accelerated as the season wore on, adding 8 assists and 11 points over his final 18 games. He is a compact, skilled winger whose game is built around puck control, agility, and finding seams in traffic. While Berggren may or may not be a top-six piece, he provides genuine depth value on a team working through a transition.
A bridge deal should fit his market accurately and should appeal to both sides. There is no reason this does not get done.
Kessel Should Be Qualified and Monitored
Playing only 29 games this season, the defenseman scored two goals, one assist, for three points, and averaged 12:32 of average ice time. These are the numbers that paint an accurate picture. Kessel is a depth option, not a building block. With Logan Mailloux ascending, Theo Lindstein locked in, and a defensive pipeline that includes Adam Jiříček, the path to consistent minutes in St. Louis is narrow. Qualifying him at a low cost makes sense, but expecting more than a seventh-defenseman role would be wishful thinking.
The AHL Group
The four AHL-level restricted free agents — Dylan Peterson, Zach Dean, Thomas Bordeleau, and Will Cranley, at this point are more organizational decisions, not roster construction decisions.
Peterson, 24, finished the Springfield season with 24 points in 57 games and 85 penalty minutes. He is a 6-foot-4 energy forward who has more than earned a contract renewal on compete level alone, and there is a realistic path toward a fourth-line role in St. Louis for the 2026-27 season. While the line is all but set, the physical nature that Peterson brings is a style that the team has been missing since Patrick Maroon.
Dean, 23, is the more complicated case. The former first-round pick acquired in the Barbashev deal who has appeared in just 9 NHL games and posted 14 points in 36 AHL contests this season. His development has been slower than his draft pedigree suggested, but his center-ice skill set and upside are more than worth retaining. He was one of the top forwards down the stretch in the hunt for the playoffs and again in the postseason. Like Peterson, a fourth-line conversation in the near future is plausible.
Bordeleau added seven goals and six assists in 25 games with Springfield after arriving mid-season and is worth a low-risk qualifying offer.
Cranley posted a 3.03 GAA and .892 save percentage in 10 AHL appearances. He is a distant fourth or even fifth goaltender on the depth chart behind Hofer and Binnington in the organizational depth chart and not a priority to retain.
What It All Means
None of these decisions will move the needle in isolation, but together they offer Steen an early opportunity to demonstrate how the new front office manages its roster edges. The summer’s bigger headlines featuring the coming NHL Draft and free agency are still to come. Every general manager eventually faces the quiet paperwork, and how you handle the margins says as much about organizational discipline as any splashy move.