Crisis Averted....
The hysteria of the major roster movement period has now settled and the Blue Jackets find themselves more-or-less exactly where they started: Zach Werenski and Kirill Marchenko are Blue Jackets but the longer future still far from determined.
Don Waddell added only minor context to the statements released by himself and Zach Werenski over the weekend. The quick hits in bullets:
Waddell Press Conference:
Never a miscommunication between Werenski and Waddell, only media driven drama. Once Werenski was offered the trade, he stated emphatically that he wanted to be a Blue Jacket (Dallas rejection was not Dallas specific but all trades). Noncommital on whether he is a captain. Noncommital on a future extension.
Marchenko will be a Blue Jacket when the season starts, situation is different than Werenski’s, getting him signed is a goal for Waddell this offseason
Waddell wanted Nichushkin as far back as the Coyle deal last season, wanted a fast big guy, emphasis on size being important
CBJ are around $100 million with his contracts (Fantilli, Sillinger, Greaves presumably). Cap is going up but money will go fast with Marchenko, KJ, Voronkov, Mateychuk
Re-signing Erik Gudbranson shortly. Blue Jackets need his physicality, everyone else is puckmovers. He finished the season really strong (lmao).
Likes Hemming, Lindstrom, Smith because of size and skating. Described Smith as special player.
The worst case scenario has been avoided, that of Werenski essentially leaving with a vote of no-confidence in the organization and only accepting a trade to a limited list of teams and therefore mediocre return followed by a swift Marchenko exit. Waddell now has the remainder of the off-season to accomplish a few things but we’ll put a pin in that for now.
In some ways, the assumed Dallas trade (Thomas Harley and Mavrik Bourque plus more perhaps) wouldn’t have been a bad scenario at all. There is certainly some risk in Thomas Harley’s $10.5 million deal, especially if he doesn’t take the continued steps required to become an Elite 1D, but he’s more likely to get there than basically any other single defenseman in the league at this point. That risk is especially muted when you consider the Bowen Byram $12.5 million x 6 years signing and the potential explosive off-season that might be coming when Werenski, Hughes and Makar are all eligible for extensions.
Alas, the Blue Jackets are left with one of the singular best drivers of offense from the defense position and a player whose personality and process are a lynchpin for the organization. Perhaps it would be more honest if he weren’t here, some of the flaws of the roster laid more bare, but there’s plenty of time for that later. For now, Winning Time is back.
What do we make of the media circus? Well, it seems fair to take what the two parties have said at face value. Werenski did not want to commit to signing an extension in 2028, which wouldn’t have made sense in either direction. As such, a market survey was possible. Based on his reaction after the trade offer, it seems like he has a genuine desire to be in Columbus and win here. This was what we expected heading into the offfseason.
The hysteria, then, was driven by media speculation that worked from the assumption that Zach Werenski was following Brady Tkachuk and Dylan Larkin and reporting on the accurate survey for trade offers conducted by Don Waddell. The action in between appears to have been pure editorialization. Werenski rejecting the Dallas trade “because he was upset how this was handled” and “only wanting to go east to Tampa and Toronto” appears like pure fiction. It logically follows that Waddell wouldn’t have felt an urgent pre-draft meeting was necessary if he didn’t believe Werenski had outright requested a trade.
In any case, we’re still left with plenty of questions about how this was actually handled. Why did Waddell believe Werenski would commit to signing an extension in 2028? Is it even safe, or wise, to operate on the information should he have said yes? Why did Waddell seem so distraught and mysterious at the pre-draft press-conference?
The benefit of our perspective, or difficulty, is that we don’t have to believe any one thing. The mysteries of the media x front office relationship with respect to this fiasco will forever remain a spectrum of possibility for us. Whether Waddell is a master media-manipulator, the insiders got caught up in a frenzy with baked-in assumptions and bullied him into potential action or whether everything since then has simply been damage control by the Blue Jackets is impossible to know.
The Blue Jackets’ twitter account said it best. If none of this happened, we’re right where we expected we would be.
Budget Contending Plan
There are more shoes yet to drop, so this could be rendered pointless shortly, but it feels like Waddell has, so far, still gone the “hedge” route with respect to roster building. He continued his “budget” mining, by which I mean eschewing asset spend risk for age/term risk. He has, essentially, fortified a roster with all of the secondary assets at his disposal while continuing to build the second wave with first round picks.
Coyle, Garland and Nichushkin could all be very good players next season. They’re also over 30 and have movement restriction. As it stands, the roster looks like this. Recent reports suggest Isac Lundestrom has ruptured his achilles and Waddell has projected the Blue Jackets’ cap at $100 million give or take so I have spent commensurate with that dollar amount.
Given some of the rumors of Bedard, Carlsson or Celebrini’s next contract, it almost seems optimistic for Fantilli to get $10 million at this point. There is a quite alarming video of a possible Bedard shoulder injury, so to be determined on that front as well.
In any case, the roster still doesn’t feel quite complete.
Waddell is leaving some cap open for in-season flexibility which means move-potential might make sense. Frankly, it still feels like we’re a forward extra or perhaps a couple of good forwards short, depending on how you want to think about it. I cannot really envision Olivier being moved away from Coyle’s matchup line, nor Garland really taking that place, but it doesn’t really make sense to arrange it in any of the other possible ways either. Perhaps Voronkov and LDBB form a sort of very slow fourth line with one of the pacier fourth liners in Wood, Lomberg or Pyyhtia.
The defense feels miserable. The top four has a lot of potential, especially if Mateychuk continues stepping forward, but bringing back all of Fabbro, Christiansen and Gudbranson for the third pair feels quite unfortunate. Reading Waddell’s comments, it seems like he might believe Jackson Smith ready to jump into the NHL after his NCAA season. In that case, a Smith-Fabbro third pairing is desirable but a Smith-Gudbranson one more likely.
Waddell has also mentioned that a Kirill Marchenko extension is on the list of goals for the off-season which is great to hear after some nefarious information presentation by way of his agent. If the rumored Dorofeyev $11 million x 7 years extension is desired by Marchenko, that’s quite easy to sign. If he doesn’t want to be a Blue Jacket, it appears that his movement will be saved for a later date. Waddell said quite definitively that he will be a Blue Jacket at the start of the season.
Identity Formation
The throughline between each of Waddell’s moves with regards to the roster has been the imposition of a certain style of play and an emphasis on size and physicality. Valeri Nichushkin certainly points in that direction, as do Waddell’s comments on Gudbranson and the Lomberg signing, and the recent draft picks of Cayden Lindstrom, Jackson Smith and Oscar Hemming do very little to dispute it.
Mason Marchment was also emphasized for some of those same respects but I think he brought a degree of skill and tactical refinement that might be missing from some of the more recent additions. That doesn’t mean he needed to be kept, though he does seem preferable to Conor Garland as a complementary player, but does mean that the Blue Jackets will have to find small-space and complementary skill through other means.
I wrote after Florida’s Cup win that it was very easy to get some of their brilliance wrong. Assuming they won because of “nastiness” or just forechecking would be the exact wrong takeaway. The Florida team was suffused with a specific type of skill and Carolina’s recent cup more emphasis on the same.
Both teams wield ice-covering and excellent skating defensemen (this is an issue for the Blue Jackets outside of Werenski and Severson). Both teams have forwards, and specifically wings, who are excellent small space creators, centers who are excellent defensively but are also willing to build diverse identity between their forward lines.
Florida’s top small-space players are all excellent playmakers. Matthew Tkachuk, Brad Marchand, Evan Rodrigues and even Aleksander Barkov is brilliant puck-protector below the dots. Sam Bennett, then, offered a different direct attacking approach that complemented Tkachuk’s playmaking. Carolina featured Jackson Blake, Logan Stankoven, Seth Jarvis, Andrei Svechnikov with Aho and Staal as defensive centers and Hall and Ehlers as vertical carrying and attacking threats.
Marchment and Voronkov are excellent with respect to small-space or off-wall playmaking, Garland has some specific attributes that work but is mostly self-centered in his creation, but the Blue Jackets don’t compare all that favorable when you consider the top forwards in each regard. Marchenko and Nichushkin are both versatile in terms of rush attacking and forechecking but both are better when they are carrying the puck. For now, that’s also true of Johnson, Garland, Sillinger and Fantilli.
Without offensive development, the Blue Jackets run the risk of being an exclusively checking or counterattacking team. These teams have found some success though none has been particularly sustainable. Based on what we saw last season, Bowness appears to be bending the Blue Jacket in the mold of the Vegas Golden Knights or Winnipeg Jets rather than the Eastern meta that Evason had them play toward.
While the player additions are good and development from any of Johnson, Fantilli, Marchenko, Sillinger or Voronkov could push the Blue Jackets in a very positive direction. The point of hope, in that regard, remains Don Granato. Frankly, I could not be happier with the yet-to-be-confirmed assistant coach hiring.
We don’t know how Trent Vogelhuber or Granato will affect the ultimate systems that Bowness deploys next season but all of the evidence coming from the assistants points to a positive.
Vogelhuber is charistmatic and his words on takeaways from his first hand experience with coaches like Jared Bednar and John Cooper sound great. Don Granato would have crossed paths with Zach Werenski at the USNTDP and coached Buffalo to some serious offensive success. We can hope, then, that the rush ideas and tactics that Mason Marchment displayed can be grafted onto this forward group who has a bit better defensive acumen.
The major improvements must be found on the penalty kill. Systems changes could help, Vogelhuber’s PK has above average in the AHL last season, but personnel adjustments appear to be necessary. Nichushkin should provide a big boost, incorporating Marchenko could go well and Severson can perhaps earn a bigger role at the same time.
Projecting Forward
LB-Hockey’s roster builder has the Blue Jackets as a 101 point projected team next season with the roster more-or-less as constructed. Steps forward from Mateychuk, Fantilli, Johnson and Marchenko could pump these totals even higher though there’s still the risk of steps down from Werenski, Severson and Coyle (or Nichushkin and Garland) at the same time. Monahan, provided health, should also be better next season.
While ordinarily I would say Marchenko has explosion potential, and we do know that Kent Johnson won’t be as bad as last season, I am not sure how the Bowness effect (his teams finish poorly and star players typically have their point totals suppressed) plays here. Considering they weren’t 90 point players before, and the finishing was quite poor, I think there’s still plenty of room for outright scoring improvement growth.
His conservative defensive system could also have implications on Zach Werenski (and Denton Mateychuk) at the same time. We saw how not having defense-go-forward structure could undermine the aggression of both defensemen late in the season and force them to rely on perfect decisionmaking or else expose the team to risk.
The Blue Jackets, unfortunately, cannot afford to be merely a playoff team. Without a series win or a deeper run, it’s difficult to see this team keeping the players who have upcoming expiring contracts. Nichushkin is a good addition, supposing he continues to perform outside of Colorado and in good health, but the Blue Jackets didn’t find a particularly impactful addition elsewhere and don’t necessarily look like they’re ready to beat Carolina or Florida.
Jason Robertson and Dylan Larkin still have movement potential, as does Connor Hellebuyck I suppose, so the possibility of continued reorganization remains. If this team is to jump into contendership, and thereby remain logical places for Werenski and Marchenko to sign long-term (from both a team and player perspective), it will be again on the backs of leaps forward from players like Adam Fantilli and Kent Johnson.