Armstrong: "I'm going to obviously let things settle in here. I'm trying to come up with a good analogy. It's like going to the dentist. The freezing is coming out and now it hurts. I'm going through that freezing coming out and it's really painful. Today is a lot harder than it was yesterday, I know that. We got to figure out a way to get better. With the goaltending, Jake Allen is going to be here next year. He’s earned the right. He’s the top American League goalie. He's got that team in the playoffs, now we're going to see how far he can take it. He will be one of two. Who his partner will be will be discussed at the appropriate time and that will be over the next few weeks. It's a two-way street with Ryan at this time. He has opportunities. I want to sit and talk to him, I want to get his feelings about our organization, how he felt about coming in, where he thinks we're at ... see if he even has any interest being a St. Louis Blue."

Armstrong: "Well we haven’t got it done and we have to find out if the chemistry is correct. It’s a difficult league to acquire players. My job is to find a way to get it done. But I look at what happened at the trade deadline, I look at people signing their free agents ... we did it with (Jay) Bouwmeester, we did it with (Alexander) Steen. I look at last year's free-agent pool that was available, what players from that pool are excelling in this year's playoffs ... are they the players that are pushing you over the top? I'm not sure that I've seen that from a free-agent group and I'm not sure if free agency is the way to go. Then it's getting a team to want to move a top-scoring player and I know the cost of doing that. I haven't found the team that really wants to give us the 50-goal guy yet. But I know the two or three names they're going to ask for and that's robbing Peter to pay Paul. So, I have to sit with the coach and find out if there's a different way to complement this group. Is there a different formula used on the ice to create more opportunities? It doesn't come down just to puck luck, but at some point we've got to start getting some puck luck. We're going to search the market, we're going to see how we can improve our team. But we're not going to do something that is a knee-jerk reaction or something that doesn't fit in to what we believe will be successful. There are good players out there. As I said, most of them usually stay with the teams that they're at. If we can improve our team, (but) I trust the players that are here. I have trusted them now for three years. The coach has trusted them and more importantly they trust each other. And I'm going to have to sit with these guys, not in the next two or three days. This is something I'll do over the end of May into June, meet with some of these guys, talk to them either in person or on the phone and get their assessment. We need to be better at this time of year."