Versatile forward Ivan Barbashev was traded Sunday to the Vegas Golden Knights for prospect Zach Dean, as general manager Doug Armstrong continued his housecleaning in advance of Friday’s NHL trade deadline.

Dean, 20, was a first-round pick (No. 30 overall) by the Golden Knights in the 2021 draft. He still is playing junior hockey. In fact, he had two assists in a game Sunday for the Gatineau Olympiques in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.

In 38 games this season, Dean — a center — has 24 goals and 27 assists. He also played for the gold-medal winning Team Canada in the World Juniors this season, and had one goal and two assists in that tournament.

Dean currently is in the first year of a three-year entry-level NHL contract that averages $883,333 against the salary cap.

With the Blues floundering in the standings and facing a salary-cap crunch for next season, it became increasingly obvious in recent weeks that the team wasn’t going to be able to re-sign Barbashev, a 27-year-old Moscow native.

He counts $2.25 million against the cap this season, and is expected to command at least $3 million a year — maybe a lot more — on his next deal. Unlike the Tarasenko and O’Reilly deals, the Blues retained no salary in the Barbashev trade.

Armstrong was in Springfield (Mass.) checking out the Blues’ AHL affiliate on Sunday and was unavailable for comment. He’s scheduled to meet with the media on Monday in St. Louis.

Barbashev can play wing or center, and can move up and down the lineup. He kills penalties, can fill in on the power play, skates pretty well and is a physical player. At the time of the trade, his 132 hits ranked second among Blues this season.

In that sense, Barbashev went out with a bang in Saturday’s 3-2 overtime loss to Pittsburgh, with a season-high eight hits.

Coming off a breakout season in 2021-22, in which he had 60 points on 26 goals with 34 assists — all career highs — Barbashev’s modest production this season was more in line with his previous time with the Blues. In 59 games, he had 10 goals and 19 assists. His ice time of 16:24 was just off his career best of 16:26 last season.

He will get a St. Louis homecoming in just two weeks, on March 12 when the Golden Knights play the Blues at Enterprise Center.

This trade comes on the heels of the Feb. 9 deal with the New York Rangers in which the Blues shipped Vladimir Tarasenko and Nikko Mikkola for Sammy Blais, minor-league defenseman Hunter Skinner and conditional first- and fourth-round draft picks.

Next came the Feb. 17 trade that sent Ryan O’Reilly and Noel Acciari to the Toronto Maple Leafs for first- and third-round picks in the 2023 draft, a second-round pick in 2024 plus minor-leaguers Adam Gaudette and Mikhail Abramov.

All five of the traded Blues — O’Reilly, Tarasenko, Mikkola, Acciari and Barbashev — are scheduled to be unrestricted free agents after this season. The Blues simply weren’t in position to re-sign most of them because of a tight salary cap for the 2023-24 campaign. As it turned out, they didn’t re-sign any of them.

There were reports earlier this month that Armstrong had informed Barbashev he probably would be traded, in part because there was so much interest in him from other teams .

Barbashev’s agent, Daniel Milstein, said the reports were inaccurate. But league sources informed the Post-Dispatch that Barbashev indeed was told he would be moved.

In any event, the trade had been anticipated for a while, to the point that Barbashev told Matthew DeFranks of the Post-Dispatch a few days ago: “Basically everyone knows what’s going to happen. It’s kind of tough. I’ve been here for six, seven years.”

Barbashev was a second-round pick by St. Louis in the 2014 draft, No. 33 overall, and made his Blues debut during the 2016-17 season. All told he played in 410 regular-season games for the Blues over all or parts of seven seasons, scoring 78 goals with 100 assists.

His departure leaves just six Blues remaining from the team’s Stanley Cup run in 2018-19: Blais, Jordan Binnington, Robert Bortuzzo, Colton Parayko, Brayden Schenn and Robert Thomas. It’s seven if you count Jordan Kyrou, who played in 16 regular-season games that season but did not appear in the postseason.

As for Dean, he’s expected to complete the regular season with Gatineau . He’s eligible to play for the Blues’ Springfield affiliate in the AHL — or even the Blues for that matter — once his junior season is completed.

But he might be playing for a while because Gatineau is one of the top teams in the Quebec League. He could run into another Blues prospect in the playoffs in Zachary Bolduc of the Quebec Remparts. Bolduc was taken in the same 2021 draft, at No. 17 overall — 13 picks before Dean was selected.

Although he was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Dean’s parents are from the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and his family moved back there when he was a toddler.

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