from Damien Cox of Sportsnet,

- Hard to believe the Blues failed in the post-season again, albeit at the hands of a Minnesota squad that has been among the very best in the league in 2015. Iffy goaltending hurt St. Louis again, a familiar theme, as once again a 100-point regular season team crashed early in the post-season.

Without a contract, head coach Ken Hitchcock is obviously vulnerable. Organizationally, the Blues tried to add a key piece for last year’s playoffs in Ryan Miller and that didn’t work, then this year they signed Paul Stastny to help buttress the roster up the middle, and that didn’t work....

- The Canucks are another team with major thinking to do concerning their future. GM Jim Benning tried to go in two directions last summer, adding youth while at the same time trying to make the club more competitive by adding the likes of Miller and Radim Vrbata, and to some extent he was successful in both efforts.

But with the 23rd pick in June’s draft, no second or third rounder, and only Jake Virtanen possibly a blue chipper on the depth chart, the Canucks need to move more aggressively into a rebuild mode. But will ownership allow that? And can you do that with the Sedin twins still on the roster?

- Neither the Bruins nor the Oilers have yet said for sure whether a second round pick will be going from Edmonton to Boston as compensation for Peter Chiarelli signing on as the new hockey boss in Alberta's capital. That’s the new compensation schedule set down by the NHL to govern hirings of executives and coaches around the league who are already under contract.

The two sides say they’re “talking,” but what we know is it’s either a second rounder or the Bruins can choose to waive it, but they can’t negotiate a different price. Given how badly the Oilers obviously wanted Chiarelli, why wouldn’t Boston take the pick? We’ll see what happens.

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