Kekalainen scouts as NHL still in limbo
Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekalainen is in Finland, which, for an NHL executive, is as good a place as any right now.
Kekalainen and his amateur scouting chief, Ville Siren, can put eyeballs on their first-round draft pick. Left winger Yegor Chinakhov is on national duty, playing for Russia in a junior tournament, the Karjala Cup, in Helsinki.
Chinakhov scored a goal in a 6-2 rout of host Finland on Saturday. Did Kekalainen, a former Finnish national player and GM, cheer?
Two other Jackets draft picks, defenseman Samuel Knazko and left winger Mikael Pyyhtia, are playing for a junior team in Turko. Jackets left winger Emil Bemstrom and goaltender prospect Veini Vehvilainen are on loan to teams in Sm-liiga (and Bemstrom is on a point-per-game pace). Jackets forward Alexandre Texier was on loan in Finland but has returned to his hometown of Grenoble, France, to play for his local team.
Of late, there has been some news in Columbus: Veteran forward Gus Nyquist underwent shoulder surgery — not unlike the procedure former Jacket Josh Anderson had done in January — and will be on the shelf five to six months. And second-pair defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov managed to get a second contract done with the team, signing a three-year extension on Thursday that carries an annual cap hit of $2.8 million.
As yet, there appears to be no movement in negotiations between the Jackets and their No. 1 center, PierreLuc Dubois, a restricted free agent.
Kekalainen sent this text Saturday morning: “(Gavrikov deal) is fair contract for both sides. ... Zero change on PLD. ... We are still monitoring the (free-agent) market (with) no change in strategy because of Nyquist.”
Really, there’s no need to jump at anything right now. The whole league is at anchor.
There are a number of unrestricted free-agent forwards who are still looking for a job. One such is left winger Mike Hoffman, 30, who had 65 goals and 129 points in his two seasons with the Florida Panthers. Another is Mikael Granlund, 28, who thrived playing on Mikko Koivu’s wing in Minnesota (before struggling over a season-plus
in Nashville). The Jackets signed Koivu, 37, to a one-year contract last month.
Hoffman and Granlund are just two of many UFAS looking for a new home. What is more, Kekalainen has the pieces and the cap space to swing a trade in a strange market that has developed amid the pandemic; a handful of teams have serious cap problems, which the Jackets can help resolve. Conceivably.
Yet, Kekalainen might just stand pat and hang on to his valuable cap space (currently projected by capfriendly.com to be $9.23 million — but remember, any Dubois deal will take a sizeable chunk of that). Kekalainen oft speaks of leaving roster room for his younger players to develop and he may do just that, and give former first-round pick Liam Foudy and Bemstrom a wider breadth of opportunity. It's cheaper that way. And right now, playing it cheap is probably smarter than being bold.
It's the second week of November
and we don't even know when training camps are going to open. It seems that the league and the NHL Players' Association doesn't know, either. The hope has been to open camps sometime in midDecember and start the season on or around Jan. 1. But those estimates re
main a matter of speculation.
Since the NHL came out of its Stanley Cup bubble at the end of September, the COVID-19 problem has only gotten worse — especially in the United States. It's a growing threat to the 2020-21 season.
There has been talk about playing intermittently in four hubs — one of which will probably be in Canada, because the border remains closed, and another of which might just be played in Columbus, which made a good pitch to be a bubble city prior to last summer's tournament. There also has been talk about restructuring the divisions, if only for a year, to make the hub system work.
Maybe Nationwide Arena plays host for all of its former Central Division brothers with, say, the Boston Bruins thrown in to fill out the Columbus field.
But if the league and the union have as yet little idea when training camps are going to open, it's nigh impossible to project a starting point for the regular season. Will it indeed be January? Would February be better? March?
Given the importance of revenues generated by the live gate, does everyone have to wait until an effective vaccine is available?
Saturday, there were cloudy skies in Helsinki. The high was 48 degrees. And they played hockey, and Kekalainen watched.
marace@dispatch.com