Better luck next year: Some overdue change is finally coming for the Columbus Blue Jackets
This team has been a mess, but there is some hope ahead.
Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Columbus Blue Jackets.
I will say this about Jarmo Kekäläinen run as general manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets — it was never boring.
At least from a roster movement standpoint.
In a league full of risk-averse general managers, Kekäläinen was one of the few that was willing to step into the batter’s box and take a wild swing for the fences without a care in the world of where it ended up landing. Maybe he’d miss. Maybe he’d hit a home run. Maybe he’d fall down and completely embarrass himself. It didn’t matter. He was taking his cuts. The 2018-19 trade deadline when he bought every big rental on the market and didn’t trade his own pending UFA’s despite being out of a playoff spot, the Patrik Laine trade, the Johnny Gaudreau signing a year ago, and then all of the wild shit he did this offseason made for one of the most unpredictable front offices in the league.
You never really knew what these guys were going to do, and it produced some very mixed results.
The 2018-19 trade deadline ended up earning them a playoff spot and one of the biggest playoff upsets of the salary cap era, and they deserve credit for that. I will also add that sometimes the key to building a winning team is just actually TRYING to build a winning team. In some weird way I think Kekäläinen was consistently trying to do that.
The problem was he didn’t always seem to have the best ideas for doing it, and there never seemed to be an actual plan involved with it. It seemed more haphazard and directionless than a calculated effort to actually building a good team. By the time this offseason rolled around it seemed to be more designed around trying to squeeze out a playoff berth to save his job for another year or two.
He seemed to operate like a GM whose team was just one or two players away from serious Stanley Cup contention instead of a GM whose team needed pretty much everything.
That does not even get into the embarrassment that came from the whole Mike Babcock saga that resulted in him getting hired, and then fired, before he ever made it to training camp all because he could not stop acting like Mike Babcock.
The result of it all was Kekäläinen getting fired in-season, the Blue Jackets missing the playoffs for a fourth consecutive season, finishing near the bottom of the league standings for a second consecutive season, and a roster that is full of some truly awful contracts and needs all over it.
The good news: Change is coming, and there is at least a promising prospect pool in place that could become something if they get the next general manager hire right.
So let’s talk about this season and where they go from here.
Everything that went wrong
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