ST. LOUIS -- In a season that was blatantly obvious, at least prior to the Olympic break, that the St. Louis Blues were not a playoff team and looking more and more like a shoe-in for a lottery pick, the fan faction became divided.

On one side, you had the 'Embrace the Tank' faction, that was clamoring for a lottery pick, getting one for the first time since 2008 when the organization took defenseman Alex Pietrangelo with the fourth pick, and on the other hand, you had the loyal diehards that wanted to see the team turn things around and play competitive hockey.

And with each Blues win, when they went 17-5-3 in the final 25 games to go from second-worst in the NHL standings only to the Vancouver Canucks to now jumping all the way up to 11th from the bottom and having just a slim three percent chance (3.5 percent if it includes the first-round pick of the Detroit Red Wings the Blues acquired in the Justin Faulk trade) of winning the draft lottery and moving up, the tanksters continued to get louder and louder.

Why in the world would you double down and not only mess the season up but also mess up the chance at a lottery pick, they screamed? And when the Blues were putting together a stretch of three four-game winning streaks among their 17 wins in the final 25 games, the other side could be heard from with a collective, "finally."

So how should this be viewed? Did the Blues mess up their chance at drafting the next star in the organization or is this a steppingstone to finding a blueprint for playing the way that this group can have success moving forward and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to draft prospects?

Of course, there will be more clarity on this when the draft lottery takes place on May 5, but from the Blues' perspective, they've prepared for either scenario. But in the process, there was never a question of playing poorly just to play poorly and lose compared to playing the right way.

"Once the season’s over, you wish you had the high pick," Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said. "It’s the pain of going through that to get it. I did talk to the players after the trade deadline and I told them, our mandate (was) we’re going to bring up younger players and we’re going to put them in positions that reflect what we want to see them. Theo [Lindstein] came up, he never played an NHL game and he was a top four defenseman. It’s not like we hid him as a seven. [Dalibor] Dvorsky against the other teams’ top players a lot of nights with Robert [Thomas]. [Otto] Stenberg came up, [Logan] Mailloux, what was his ice time pre- and post-Olympics? I said to the players, ‘We have a plan. Your job is to disrupt the plan. You’re professionals. This is how you make your living. I expect you to disrupt our plan, and they did and I give them full marks. Could we have picked (No.) 2 or 3 this year? It would have ... I think there would be less belief in our group. In the players that you have asked about, that you have talked about, there would be a lot less belief in that if we just had rolled over and just got door-matted for the last seven weeks of the season."

As it sits now, the Blues have the Nos. 11, 15 and 32 picks in the first round; they have the New York Islanders' second first-round pick from the Brayden Schenn trade, which belongs to the Colorado Avalanche, and Armstrong was asked if those picks, depending on where they align after the draft lottery and playoffs are concluded, could be part of a trade or move up.

Everything is in play.

"We’re all going to have our amateur scouting meetings," Armstrong said. "We’re all going to go to the U-18s, Alex [Steen] and I and the decision-makers on the amateur side. That’s (today), we leave. We’ll be in Slovakia for 10 days. We’ll come back, we’ll go to the combine, we’ll interview the players. After that we’ll go to amateur scout retreat with part time, full time (scouts). We’ll get our list together and the way that I’ve done it in the past is OK, give me lines, blocks of players. Where’s a block? So if there’s a block of four guys and we want to get into that block, then yeah. Yes we would, I guess that’s the long answer. We would move up if we can. We’ll also move back if we don’t like what we see. We can use the picks, we can use prospects, we can use players, but every team is the same in that fashion. If there’s somebody there that we believe is in a block outside of our pick and we can acquire him, we’ll give it our best chance. You also have to have someone that wants to move out of that pick too."

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