It's time to have an uncomfortable conversation about the General Manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets, Don Waddell. Building a team takes time, but now in his third year on the job, the team looks to be in a worse place than it was when he took over.
Waddell came to Columbus with a lot of hope and promise. He was at the helm for the Carolina Hurricanes, spending six seasons as their GM and helping turn them into a team that competed for the Stanley Cup every year.
At the time, it felt like he would be the one that got away. He was thought of as one of the best front office people in hockey, and it came as a bit of a surprise that he left a successful organization to take over the lowly Blue Jackets.
In hindsight, however, it's pretty hard to ignore a sneaking suspicion: maybe he was being held up by those around him. Because what we've seen in Columbus so far, is the exact opposite of success. And there isn't much hope for a brighter future any longer.
Waddell traded young and promising for old and deteriorating.
Lets talk about the roster he inherited. Waddell was hired on May 24, 2024; taking the team over just after a season where they finished at the bottom of the Eastern Conference-10 points behind the next closest team. They held the #4 overall pick at the draft, which was just a month away. We'll talk about his drafting in a later article.
Despite the awful finish in the standings, there was hope around this organization. They had finally drafted their long-coveted franchise center the summer prior, picking Adam Fantilli third overall. They had one of the top prospect pools in the league, and some promising youngsters already on the NHL roster.
That team was led in scoring by Johnny Gaudreau, who would tragically pass away before the next season. It goes without saying that this isn't an easy thing to overcome. Truth be told, I thought Waddell did a nice job patching together a competitive team that year, given the circumstances. To this point, however, he hasn't built upon that. Not even close.
Also on that roster were some important names to talk about here, for other reasons. Kirill Marchenko scored 23 goals and finished third on the team with 42 points. Dmitri Voronkov scored 18 goals and finished 5th on the team with 34 points.
The roster also featured Fantilli, Cole Sillinger, Alexandre Texier, Egor Chinakhov, Kent Johnson, and David Jiricek all in the mix. All of these players were under-25, and many of them were the prizes this team plucked from the draft bin after bottoming out in their rebuild.
There were other prospects coming along, too, such as Denton Mateychuk, Gavin Brindley, and others. The #1 goal and focus of any incoming GM should have been getting the absolute most out of these assets. Whether that meant developing them into future stars, or cashing them in for top-end talent.
Of that list of 10 names that I just listed, only 5 remain. And one of them (Voronkov) is obviously in the doghouse and on his way out the door. Which is funny, because he has been arguably the most consistently productive player of the bunch in Waddell's time here.
So, what did this promising young roster turn into? Surely, we got a high end goal scorer, or a top pairing shutdown defenseman in return for all of these magic beans, right? Eh... lets talk about it on the next slide.
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