from Benjamin Hochman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

He liked his hand. Sure, Vegas can fog your mind a little. But he liked what he’d been dealt, what he’d picked up. This was a winning hand.

So on that mid-November day after practice on the road, Doug Armstrong sat on a bench at a rink, looked at Ryan O’Reilly and said, “Trust us,” to the new Blue.

“He and I had a chat in Vegas about trust,” the Blues general manager shared Monday. “‘You’ve got to trust the process. This team is going to turn around.’ I just wanted to make sure that he felt that he signed on to something that was going to be (successful). Coming from an organization that wasn’t winning, I wanted to make him feel like we’re close. Just hang in there.”

Five days later, Armstrong fired his coach and doubled down on his hand.

Asked Monday about their Vegas chat, O’Reilly said, “It was just good reassurance that he believes in this group and myself. It was one of those things to say ‘Hey, it’s going to come.’ And it did.”

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