For many fans, it can be difficult at just a glance to determine how good and how bad many hockey players are when they take the ice. The points totals count quite a bit when it comes to forwards, but it's especially difficult for defenseman, who mostly aren't counted on to generate offense in the same way as most forwards are.
In my humble opinion, it wasn't difficult to see even with the basic eye test how brutal last year was for Dante Fabbro.
Fabbro had a disastrous season right from the beginning for the Columbus Blue Jackets. He immediately seemed to show a lack of poise, confidence, and trust in both his teammates and his game.
He struggled with puck battles, giveaways, and was seemingly out of position at the absolute worst times in breakdowns that seemed to cost the hockey club every single time. For a defenseman that I touted last summer as possibly being the savior of the defensive corps for the CBJ to fall into the bottom pair and show such inconsistency in his play, it was less than encouraging to witness.
Fabbro finished the 2025-2026 campaign with a catastrophic 5-6-11 line in 74 games played while posting 33 penalty minutes and an awful -16 rating over the length of the season. He averaged just 16:34 minutes a night after posting 21:39 a season ago, and really didn't get much better even after the coaching change between Dean Evason and Rick Bowness in Columbus.
Per MoneyPuck, the Jake Christiansen-Fabbro pairing (the most common third pairing for the Jackets after the Erik Gudbranson injury) was 14th to last in the NHL among 245 pairings who played at least 150 minutes together in xGF%.
Reality was even worse. Christiansen-Fabbro was dead last in the NHL in Goals For per 60 minutes, and Fabbro-Gudbranson was sixth to last (minimum 100 minutes played).
Simply put: Dante Fabbro must be better for the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Fabbro is entering his third season in Columbus, and the second season of his four-year, $4.125m AAV contract he signed last offseason. He's paid like a fourth defenseman following a season in which he played like a 7th D-man.
The Jackets need him to get back to doing what he does best: playing an intelligent, positional-based two-way game that lets him thrive on a second penalty kill and a few minutes of power play time when necessary.
If he doesn't find a role early on this season, there's a very possible case the Jackets may look to move him as players like Guillaume Richard, Corson Cuelemans and Luca Marelli look at NHL promotions in the near future.
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