All teams suffer losing seasons. The Columbus Blue Jackets' futility is different (2024)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The room already was awkward and tense. There were two men seated on a dais in the bowels of Nationwide Arena for a news conference on Nov. 22, 2006, but only one of them was excited to be there.

Three days earlier, Columbus Blue Jackets president and general manager Doug MacLean publicly berated two local reporters for floating the name of veteran coach Ken Hitchco*ck as a candidate to take over midseason in Columbus, which had just fired MacLean’s longtime friend Gerard Gallant.

“You think I’d hire that (expletive) guy?” MacLean barked. “You think I’d turn my young players over to that guy?”

Now, MacLean was seated beside Hitchco*ck under the glare of spotlights and cameras, and it was hard to miss that a changing of the guard was taking place. As the public-relations boss started his introductions, Blue Jackets founder and majority owner John H. McConnell steered his electric wheelchair between the stage and the assembled media. The room fell quiet.

McConnell, a plain-spoken, self-made billionaire, pointed past MacLean and directly at Hitchco*ck and said: “This is the man we hope is going to save us.”

The Blue Jackets, an NHL expansion franchise in 2000, were barely six seasons into their existence before they needed saving.

Hitchco*ck did his part: The Blue Jackets made the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time just two seasons later (2008-09). But ultimately, the task of establishing Columbus as a competent, competitive franchise was too much for the Hockey Hall of Fame coach, who was fired the following February.

It’s proven to be too big a task for other hockey luminaries, too: coaches Dave King and John Tortorella, elite players like Rick Nash, Sergei Fedorov, Artemi Panarin and Ray Whitney, and a handful of highly regarded executives including Jarmo Kekäläinen, who was fired last month after 11 seasons as general manager. Which means the franchise is looking for a new “savior” after another losing season, the fourth straight and the 17th in 23 seasons that the Jackets have missed the playoffs.

To many, the franchise has always been synonymous with failure and futility. In their 23 seasons, the Blue Jackets have but one playoff series win, the sweep of Tampa Bay. (In Columbus, 2019 is referred to as the “glory year.”)

They’ve never finished above third in their division and, for more than half their existence, they’ve finished closer to the bottom than even the middle.

Of the 30 franchises that have been in the league since Columbus joined with the Minnesota Wild in 2000-01, the Jackets have the lowest points percentage (.484) of any franchise. They’ve won just 763 of 1,801 regular-season games, or 42.4 percent.

The Blue Jackets are the major-league franchise that parity forgot. The failures don’t follow a straight line.

They’ve been relatively stable at the highest reaches of the front office, with only one business president (Mike Priest), one hockey president (John Davidson) and three general managers.

They’ve had Hall of Fame-caliber coaches, but also first-time bench bosses who were in way over their heads. They’ve had star players, but too many who ended up alienated by the organization. They’ve had draft successes, but way too many misses, especially with 15 top-10 picks through the years. They spent (and missed) on several free agents.

There isn’t enough space (even on the internet) to list all of the mistakes, missteps and misdeeds through the years. The Jackets made the playoffs in four straight seasons (2017-20), but otherwise the franchise has known only struggle, with sporadic bursts of mediocrity.

McConnell, the founding owner who died in 2008, remains a legendary figure in central Ohio. Even with billions in the bank, this was a man who fancied flannel shirts, preferred lunch at a local Bob Evans, and loved reciting Dorothy Parker wisecracks, the bawdier the better.

The steel magnate was known for handshake deals, and he bit hard when the smooth-talking MacLean pitched his plans for an expansion franchise in 1998. MacLean was given full control of the organization, at one point serving as president, general manager and coach.

MacLean had led the Florida Panthers to an improbable run to the Stanley Cup in 1996, and he had extensive experience in pro hockey as a coach and a scout. But this was his first crack at being a GM, much less a GM with a franchise that, due to the expansion draft in those days, was destined to struggle for at least a couple of seasons.

The practical plan was to slowly grow a franchise, relying on draft picks and young players to eventually build a competitive organization. But MacLean was way too competitive — and way too impatient and impulsive.

Too many of the draft picks were duds, but the biggest example came in 2005, when MacLean’s top amateur scout, Don Boyd, wanted the Blue Jackets to take Slovenian center Anze Kopitar with the No. 6 overall pick.

Instead, MacLean went with his gut and drafted Gilbert Brule, who turned into a journeyman NHLer whose career ended with several seasons in Russia.

Kopitar, meanwhile, has become a legend with the Los Angeles Kings, and Blue Jackets fans have always been left to wonder if Nash and Kopitar together could have become one of the NHL’s top tandems.

Almost anywhere you looked in the organization back then, a ridiculous string of decisions could be found.

In 2003, MacLean opted to hold on to Whitney, a pending unrestricted free agent, past the trade deadline rather than trade him for a collection of picks and prospects. Whitney signed with Detroit the following summer and had another productive decade in the league.

With Whitney’s contract gone, they signed free agent Todd Marchant, a checking-line center. But even that ended on a sour note.

Two years later, MacLean swung a deal with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks for Sergei Fedorov, but it required Marchant to waive his no-trade clause. When he refused, MacLean found a workaround, putting Marchant on waivers and allowing Anaheim to claim him and complete the move.

That’s how “no-move clauses” were born in the NHL, and the situation angered NHL agents, the NHL players’ association and future NHL free agents.

As the losses mounted, MacLean’s temper flared. He would confront players in the dressing room after bad games. He complained to the NHL about officiating. He would snap at fans who dared to question the direction of the organization on his weekly call-in show.

When Hitchco*ck came aboard, McConnell and others at the top of the organization began to realize that MacLean had to go. He was fired shortly after the 2006-07 season, with the franchise in disarray.

Growing pains

Scott Howson, then the assistant GM with the Edmonton Oilers, was hired to replace MacLean. He was studious, soft-spoken and patient. And, for the most part, the opposite of MacLean.

Under Hitchco*ck, the Blue Jackets finally made the playoffs following the 2008-09 season. It was an incredible coaching job when you consider that Nash was the only bona fide goal-scorer and that the No. 1 defensive pair was Jan Hejda and Mike Commodore, neither of whom could be considered a top blueliner.

Even so, Hitchco*ck was fired in February of the following season, after barely four years on the job. Howson then hired first-time NHL coach Scott Arniel, and it was a disaster. Veteran players Vinny Prospal and Commodore had public feuds with the coach, and the young players stagnated. He was fired after exactly 1 1/2 seasons.

There were other nightmares, too.

At the 2008 draft, the Blue Jackets selected Nikita Filatov with the No. 6 overall pick. His NHL career amounted to 53 games and six goals. Once, when brought into a meeting with coaches to show him the benefits of following the puck to the net, Filatov stepped back, appearing confused before proclaiming: “Filly don’t do rebounds.” In drafting Filatov, Columbus passed on 11 first-round picks that year who have played at least 500 NHL games, including standout defenseman Erik Karlsson.

At the 2011 draft, the Blue Jackets traded winger Jake Voracek and their first-round pick to the Philadelphia Flyers for Jeff Carter, hoping that Carter — after years and years, and millions of dollars trying to find a fit with Nash — might be their No. 1 center.

Carter didn’t want to play in Columbus. He refused to take their phone calls after the trade, forcing the Blue Jackets to fly an envoy of representatives — Howson, Nash and others — to his offseason home on the East Coast to persuade him to come.

By the middle of the 2011-12 season, with the Jackets once again in the tank and Carter complaining to whomever would listen, the decision was made to sell Carter to the highest bidder at the upcoming trade deadline.

But that soon became a secondary story.

The Blue Jackets were having exploratory talks with several clubs about trading Nash. When Nash caught wind of this, he asked Howson for a trade, but he was blindsided later when Howson made his trade request public before the 2012 deadline.

The organization was thrown into disarray all over again. Through all the wins and losses, all the coaches and players who had come and gone, Nash was the one Blue Jackets constant, the one recognizable player outside of Columbus. It’s been more than a decade since he played for Columbus, but he’s still the franchise leader in goals, assists, points … virtually every meaningful offensive category.

Howson held fast to his demands for Nash, and eventually traded him after the 2011-12 season. He went to the Rangers for Brandon Dubinsky, Artem Anisimov, Tim Erixon and a first-round draft pick, which helped strengthen the roster at center.

The moves kept coming. Howson added veteran winger Nick Foligno and goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky in separate deals in the summer of 2012, leaving the franchise fairly well set up for its best run of play a few seasons later … even though Howson wouldn’t be around to see it.

Davidson’s arrival

In the summer of 2012, Howson went to management with a heads-up that St. Louis Blues president John Davidson may soon be leaving the Blues. Priest was intrigued enough to interview Davidson, and eventually hire him as president of hockey operations.

Months later, Howson was fired by the man he suggested for the job.

Davidson had passed over Kekäläinen, then the Blues assistant GM and head of scouting, for the GM job in St. Louis a year earlier. Kekäläinen had been so upset — he didn’t even get an interview — that he quit the Blues and returned home to Finland to serve as a GM there.

But the Blue Jackets needed a GM with an extensive history in scouting, and Kekäläinen was the only person interviewed for the job. He was hired in mid-February of the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season.

Davidson had one other person in mind when he hired Kekäläinen: prospect Nathan MacKinnon.

Far in advance of the 2013 draft, MacKinnon was the Blue Jackets’ dream, a generational talent. The Jackets were 5-12-4 two weeks’ into Kekäläinen’s tenure, and he was already out on the road scouting for the draft. They went 19-5-3 to end the season, finishing in a tie for the final playoff spot with Minnesota.

Here’s where the Blue Jackets’ chronic bad luck came into play: At the previous season’s NHL board of governors meeting, Howson proposed a rule change for the playoff tiebreakers, suggesting that regulation wins be the first tiebreaker.

It was Howson’s rule change that kept his former club out of the playoffs. So the Blue Jackets not only missed out on the playoffs but, with the No. 14 pick, they also missed out on MacKinnon, Aleksander Barkov and the other top talents in the 2013 draft.

But Davidson’s hiring bought the franchise time. The Jackets made the playoffs for a second time in 2013-14 (they were bounced in six games by Pittsburgh), but they mostly underperformed over the next two seasons.

And there were ugly contract negotiations with Bobrovsky, Ryan Johansen, Josh Anderson, Pierre-Luc Dubois and others that led to hurt feelings between the front office and the dressing room.

But early in 2015-16, with the Blue Jackets off to an 0-7-0 start, they hired John Tortorella, whose arrival was slightly louder and more combative, but otherwise mirrored Hitchco*ck’s a decade earlier. There was a demand for defensive structure and there were standards set.

Tortorella guided the Blue Jackets through their best days.

In 2016-17, the Blue Jackets won 16 games in a row, 50 games overall and finished with 108 points, all franchise records. They lost in the first round of the playoffs that season and the following season to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh (2017) and Washington (2018).

The breakthrough came at the 2019 trade deadline. Not only did Kekäläinen hold on to pending free agents Bobrovsky and Artemi Panarin, but he added center Matt duch*ene, defenseman Adam McQuaid and others. It seemed reckless, because the Blue Jackets were not assured of a playoff spot when the trade deadline arrived. But to many fans even today, it was worth it.

The Blue Jackets came back from a 3-0 deficit in the first period of Game 1 vs. Tampa Bay and won the opener 4-3. They went on to win the series in four games before losing to Boston in round two. But that sweep of Tampa Bay remains the high-water mark for the franchise.

It wasn’t long before the hangover hit. Panarin jumped to the Rangers and Bobrovsky to Florida in the offseason, sapping the roster of its two biggest stars.

The Blue Jackets made the playoffs again in 2020, and they won a qualifying round against Toronto. But they were beaten by Tampa Bay in the first round and haven’t made it back since.

They’ve tried to commit to rebuilding the roster — even if they wouldn’t call it that — but the signing of top free agent Johnny Gaudreau two summers ago is not the act of a rebuilding franchise. Neither is signing two veteran defensem*n (Ivan Provorov, Damon Severson) to contracts last summer.

There have been further embarrassments, too. Early in the 2020-21 season, Dubois essentially quit on the Blue Jackets, forcing his trade to Winnipeg a few days later.

This season, the Blue Jackets made the controversial decision to hire coach Mike Babco*ck, who was accused of verbal abuse by multiple players on his former clubs, Toronto and Detroit. Babco*ck was fired four days before training camp started after multiple Blue Jackets players said he scrolled through their cellphones to look at their photos and messages.

Assistant coach Pascal Vincent, who was passed over for the job twice in Columbus, was hired on short notice to replace Babco*ck. Now, with a new GM coming to Columbus, Vincent’s future seems murky at best.

When will it stop?

Fans have blamed ownership for the franchise’s futility, but executives for the club — from MacLean through Hitchco*ck and Howson and up to Kekäläinen and Davidson — have only raved about the way the McConnells (including current majority owner John P. McConnell, son of the founder) have operated their franchise. They hire “hockey” people and step to the side.

The Blue Jackets’ drafting, and their abhorrent luck in the NHL’s draft lottery through the years, has crippled the franchise. They’ll have another chance to reverse that history next month.

They’ve swung and missed on coaches and free agents, and they’ve been left by players who want to play in big markets (Artemi Panarin) or sunny locales (Jeff Carter) or for big paydays (Sergei Bobrovsky).

There’s not one reason — but hundreds of reasons — the Blue Jackets have become perhaps the most anonymous franchise in the most anonymous of the four major sports.

Will it ever turn around?

The new GM is likely to come from outside the building, Davidson has said. But it’s worth noting that the same executives whose “due diligence” led the franchise to hire Babco*ck last summer are leading the search for the new GM.

Under Kekäläinen, the Blue Jackets had undertaken a major roster overhaul starting at the end of the 2021-22 season. They have one of the youngest rosters in the NHL, with Adam Fantilli, Yegor Chinakhov and Dmitry Voronkov arriving this season, and one of the best prospect pools in the league, too.

But a new GM usually means a new direction. When Davidson hired Kekäläinen in 2013, he wanted a GM with a history of drafting success. This time, Davidson has mentioned wanting somebody who has held the job, or had a front-row seat to the job.

The Blue Jackets were at their best when Davidson and Kekäläinen focused on building the club from the back end forward. These days, the defensive end of the ice has proven to be the biggest challenge. The Blue Jackets have been one of the league’s worst defensive clubs the past two seasons.

They also have a penchant for heart-breaking losses: The Blue Jackets have lost 13 games this season when they’ve held a lead in the third period.

Much of that may be growing pains. But patience is in short supply in Columbus.

When the Blue Jackets arrived, they were the hottest ticket in town. Most of the games in Nationwide Arena in those first few seasons were sellouts. It has been said that the chronic losing has cost them a generation of fans, but Nationwide still draws better than most markets even when the Blue Jackets aren’t winning.

And that, sadly, has been most of their history.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic. Photo of John P. McConnell, Patrick McDermott / NHLI via Getty Images; other photos: Jamie Sabau / NHLI via Getty Images; Graham Stokes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Kirk Irwin / Getty Images; Jamie Sabau / NHLI via Getty Images )