NHL Rumors: St. Louis Blues, and the Pittsburgh Penguins

The St. Louis Blues have a short coaching candidate list

Lou Korac of The Hockey News: Drew Bannister took over as interim coach of the St. Louis Blues back on December 12th.

GM Dough Armstrong said that his head coaching candidate list is shorter than it once was and the Bannister is a candidate.

“I talked to Drew in the last week or so and told him that he’s going to be a candidate for the head coaching job,” Armstrong said. “I feel that for the process it’s necessary to interview a few people, but what I told him is when we made the coaching change, I was creating a list and the list was deep and extensive and as I watched him perform and I watched our team perform, I started to cross names off that list, and now Drew is one of a very small number of people I want to talk to about moving forward.”

Bannister had the 10th best record in the league after taking over, 30-19-5, a .602 winning percentage.

Sidney Crosby will talk to management this offseason about an extension

Wes Crosby of NHL.com: Pittsburgh Penguins forward Sidney Crosby said that he’ll talk with management this offseason about the possibility of a contract extension. He has one more year left on his 12-year deal.

“Obviously, I’m going to talk to and have a conversation with him,” Crosby said Thursday. “We’ll see. I think it’s just something that I’ll have conversations with him about.”

At this time Crosby doesn’t look at retirement on a year-to-year basis.

“I’m saying just, when you’re looking at year to year and evaluating your game, whether I was 26 and had a good year, it’s nice that I felt good and I was able to play all the games, things like that,” he said. “But as far as the outlook, I don’t think it changes how I approach that.”

Crosby finished the season with 42 goals and 52 assists in 82 games. He’s been a point-per-game for 19 seasons.

Wes Crosby: Crosby said that he hasn’t thought about how many more years he wants to play.