Buffalo Reportedly Made Push for Thomas, Blues Didn’t Blink

The Buffalo Sabres came to the table. They made their best offer. And by all accounts, it wasn’t enough.

TSN insider Darren Dreger reported Wednesday morning that trade talks between the Blues and Sabres on center Robert Thomas went the full distance, with Buffalo mounting a serious push to position itself at the front of the line for the 26-year-old. The effort, however, appears to have fallen short. 

According to Dreger, the Sabres were not willing to part with the combination of prospects, a player and a first-round pick that St. Louis requires to move its franchise center. The Blues, for their part, did not waver.

Doug Armstrong’s asking price remains unchanged seeking a substantial, specific and non-negotiable return. That posture has not changed simply because one serious suitor blinked. There are still teams circling, Dreger noted, but the message coming out of St. Louis is clear: the return for Thomas has to be right, or Thomas stays.

What has shifted, at least in the short term, is where Buffalo’s attention has pivoted. 

With the Thomas talks stalled, the Sabres have reportedly turned their focus toward the Blues’ blue line, expressing interest in either Justin Faulk or Colton Parayko as Buffalo attempts to address a roster built almost entirely of left-shot defenders. Rasmus Dahlin, Bowen Byram, Owen Power and Mattias Samuelsson form an impressive top four, but every one of them shoots from the left side. 

General manager Jarmo Kekäläinen is clearly hunting for a right-shot option to slot into a second-pairing role alongside either Byram or Power, pushing the other into a third-pairing assignment and giving Buffalo a defensive depth that evokes memories of Tampa Bay’s dominant left-side trio during its back-to-back championship runs.

Faulk is the name drawing the most traction, and it is not difficult to understand why. At 33, he is in the midst of one of the more quietly impressive seasons on the Blues’ roster. His 11 goals and 21 assists for 32 points leads all St. Louis defensemen and ranks fourth on the team overall. He has appeared in all 60 games this season, a durability that matters enormously to a playoff contender. He has contributed 101 blocked shots, second on the team behind only Parayko. And he is doing all of this on a team that has been outscored by 52 goals on the season. 

What makes Faulk particularly attractive for a team like Buffalo is something that gets overlooked in these conversations: he is not a one-playoff-run rental. Locked up through the 2026-27 season, Faulk gives any acquiring team two full postseason runs with a proven, right-shot veteran defenseman on their blue line. That kind of term on a player of his caliber is genuinely rare on the trade market, and it is a significant part of what Armstrong will be pricing into any deal.

Parayko is a more complicated case, though perhaps not in the way the surface numbers suggest. At 32 years old and under contract through the 2029-30 season, he remains one of the league’s premier shutdown defensemen by reputation. A player who, in his best seasons, has been as good as anyone in the NHL at protecting his own zone. This has not been one of those seasons. His 14 points in 58 games are trending toward the worst offensive output of his career, his Corsi numbers at 5-on-5 are the worst among Blues defenders, and back spasms have kept him out of the lineup recently. His performance at the Olympics for Team Canada was similarly underwhelming.

But one difficult season does not rewrite a decade of elite play, and Armstrong is unlikely to sell Parayko at a discount because of a rough stretch. The full no-trade clause gives the player significant control, and with four-plus years remaining means St. Louis has no urgency to move him now, particularly if the return doesn’t reflect what he has been and, at 32, can still reasonably be expected to be.

Faulk has become the more plausible outcome if Blues and Sabres find a way to connect before Friday. His contract situation is cleaner, his no-trade clause is limited to 15 teams rather than a full block, and his value on the open market is well understood. 

The Blues would be parting with one of the better right-shot defensemen available at this deadline and they will expect to be compensated accordingly.

Armstrong didn’t blink on Thomas. There is little reason to think he’ll blink on anyone else.