Laine will apparently be a healthy scratch tonight...
I guess if anyone wants to see what an organization that is a culture dumpsterfire looks like it's them.
My track record of being right about NHL-related stuff is pretty great overall, but predicting that Columbus would go nowhere with Kekäläinen at the helm has been one of the best positions I have taken. Especially as a Finn, that hasn't exactly been a popular take here.
I've "wanted" Jarmo gone with utmost certainty for almost four years now. The first, definite red flag moment was going all in at the 2019 deadline, only to lose half his team for free just months later. After that, they have struggled with finding a direction and sticking to it - one moment, they rebuild and tank, the next, they're acquiring veterans like no tomorrow. I'm often frustrated with Chevy not playing his cards anywhere near the ideal way, but Jarmo's ping-pong style of GMing is something even worse.
He has his strengths - he robs RFAs for a living in negotiations, he drafts extremely well, and his trades have mostly worked fine. But the total inability to come up with a long-term plan and stick to it blows my mind. All that talent should amount to a lot of good in a hard cap league, yet all he has to show for it is
one series win in 10 years. In most markets, that gets a GM fired within five years at most.
Nobody else in the entire league has had as much leeway as him - this is particularly noteworthy, as his tenure has included multiple "fireable blow-ups" that have been directly on him, such as:
- 2019: going all-in at the TDL, only to lose the acquired players + Panarin and Bobrovsky for nothing.
- 2021: the Dubois debacle (which was dealt with somewhat successfully, TBF), followed up with a bottom-5 finish.
- 2022: dumping Bjorkstrand to keep Laine and to add Gudbranson in the summer, followed up by a total catastrophe of a season, ending with a bottom-3 finish.
- 2023: whatever the Babcock fiasco was.
I'm not sure how Jarmo has gone through all four events as the guy in charge and lived to tell the tale. Well, maybe some of these strokes of luck helped him:
- 2019: sweeping that f***ing playoff series against Tampa. There is an alternate universe where Columbus loses, fires Jarmo, and saves themselves a lot of headache down the line.
- 2021: absolutely crushing the Jones trade from a very bad position. It helped that Chicago fell off a cliff and Jones couldn't help them at all, but the return was still more than fine.
- 2022: signing Gaudreau out of the blue. It doesn't look good right now, but it basically addressed many of the concerns that people were having about Columbus at the time.
- 2023: lucking into Fantilli at the draft, despite winning their way out of the 32nd place right at the season's end in 22-23. He might already be the best centerman in franchise history, and that is not that big of an exaggeration.
The team is in shambles, and obviously they didn't help themselves by locking up a lot of basically dead cap space on stuff they don't even need (Provorov, Severson, Gudbranson in 12 months with a stacked prospect pool at D - why?!). And the offense... my god. If neither of your two star forwards can generate offense on their own, you're doing something terribly wrong as a GM (that kind of applies to us too, but at least the rest of our significant forwards do it pretty admirably). Fantilli is just about the only semi-realistic franchise cornerstone that they can build around, but otherwise, it is looking
bleak. As I predicted, that 2022 f***-up of letting Bjorkstrand go was so, so much worse than anybody seemed to think at the time - they need more players like him, not less.
Finally, it has been quite comical to see the most popular and vocal talking heads of the Finnish hockey media going to bat for Jarmo, claiming that "it isn't understood well enough how respected Kekäläinen is in NA". How does this respect show, and more importantly, how does it convert itself into wins and success? Based on evidence, all of that implied respect seems unwarranted. I've seen the problems for years, and as long as Jarmo is there, I don't see a way out of the mess they are in.
