{"id":499831,"date":"2026-02-26T02:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T02:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/499831\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T02:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T02:26:10","slug":"blues-robert-thomas-to-take-personal-leave-of-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/499831\/","title":{"rendered":"Blues’ Robert Thomas To Take Personal Leave Of Absence"},"content":{"rendered":"

The St. Louis Blues will be without their leading scorer and top center as they return from the Olympic break. The team announced that Robert Thomas<\/a> will be taking a personal leave of absence<\/a> until Friday of this week. He will miss Thursday\u2019s game against the Seattle Kraken but should be back with the team beforf Saturday\u2019s game against the New Jersey Devils.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019 role in the Blues lineup can\u2019t be understated. He has been a pillar of the Blues offense, averaging the most ice time (19 minutes) and scoring the most points (33) among St. Louis forwards through 42 games this season. Thomas entered this season on the heels of two career-years, marked by 60 assists in both seasons, to go with 86 points and 81 points respectively. He has been St. Louis\u2019 main playmaker since the departure of Ryan O\u2019Reilly<\/a> and leaves a major hole to be filled for next game.<\/p>\n

Thomas sat out of four games in late October and missed an additional 11 games after sustaining a lower-body injury on January 10th. St. Louis leaned heavily on Pavel Buchnevich<\/a> in response, placing the veteran Russian winger into Thomas\u2019 role atop the powerplay and penalty-killing units. Buchnevich also moved into the team\u2019s top-center role, though he has struggled on faceoffs, with a 39.8 faceoff percentage this season. The Blues could look to Slovakian Olympian Dalibor Dvorsky<\/a> to take center duties off of Buchnevich\u2019s hands in the short-term, or could task Brayden Schenn<\/a> and Jimmy Snuggerud<\/a> with platooning in the role form their spots on the second-line. No approach will be perfect as St. Louis looks to replace their star in an important, Western Conference matchup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The St. Louis Blues will be without their leading scorer and top center as they return from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49,48,5718,4247,72294,82,759],"class_list":["post-499831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-injury","tag-newsstand","tag-robert-thomas","tag-sports","tag-st-louis-blues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}