MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. -- The St. Louis Blues have been down this road before, and general manager Doug Armstrong is quite familiar with them.

Second chances.

As Armstrong said on Wednesday, the day before training camp for the 2025-26 season begins, " Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t."

The latest for the Blues is veteran Milan Lucic, who will attend training camp on a professional tryout.

The 37-year-old, who last played for the Boston Bruins at the start of the 2023-24 season (four games) before a domestic incident curtailed his career, comes in with no strings attached who has spent the past nearly two years rehabilitating himself from the off ice issues that resulted in his stoppage from playing the game.

The Blues are certainly no strangers of second-chance opportunities. The most recent was trading for Jakub Vrana, who was in the league's player assistance program in the 2022-23 season; Blues coach Jim Montgomery was given a second chance when he was hired as an assistant coach under Craig Berube after his firing from the Dallas Stars for alcohol-related issues in 2019; the team recently traded for defenseman Logan Mailloux following an incident off the ice with a woman in Sweden; and going back to 2018, the Blues hired Darryl Sydor as an assistant coach under Mike Yeo after a DWI incident in Minnesota in 2015.

" We certainly did our due diligence," Armstrong said. "I talked to Milan obviously, I talked to his family, I talked to his sponsor, I talked to the league. He’s 22 months sober now. There’s a lot of things that he does behind the scenes, I’ll let him describe.

"I think one of the things I appreciate about Mr. [Tom] Stillman is his willingness to allow me to discuss second chances, allow me to paint the picture of why I believe it’s worth the risk. … But it’s not just a second chance based on hockey. You have to have everything else in place, and Milan does. Now it’s his responsibility to continue that off the ice. We’ll monitor that. Now we’ve got to see if he can play hockey in the NHL; he hasn’t done that in a while. If he can, he’s an element player."

The odds of Lucic making the roster are against him, but one of the things Armstrong mentioned that's intriguing is that Lucic, who is 6-foot-3, 236 pounds, is someone that certainly can add an element of muscle in front of the net, a physical presence in the offensive zone and most importantly, someone that can help police the lineup on the ice.

"He’s a big, strong player. He commands respect," Armstrong said of Lucic. "He makes everybody on the team stand a little taller, maybe hang into the scrum a little longer knowing he’s coming in from behind them. He and I have talked about this. The NHL, I don’t think we got pushed around last year, but there was three or four teams that felt a little more comfortable than they will be if he can still play and be on our roster.

"I’ve known Milan off and on from Hockey Canada at different times. I was the manager of the World Championship team he was on that won a few years ago. You spend a month with the guy, you get to know them."

Lucic made a mistake, everyone understands that. There's no denying it, but it sounds like there's a great amount of respect from a player's perspective is that they're pulling for him to succeed.

"One of the things I shared with him that was very interesting, the orientation camp in Calgary, how many of the competitors that were there are hoping for good things for him," Armstrong said. "Not just the players like [Brad] Marchand. He has universal respect for the way he plays the game, played the game. If he’s earned it, which I think he has off the ice, guys would love to see him write the chapter, whatever the finishing chapter is, different than the way it is today."

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