Sunday, January 28, 2024 – 9:00 PM EST
Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle, WA
TV: Bally Sports Ohio; Radio: 97.1 FM
Columbus Blue Jackets (15-23-10, 40 points, 8th Metro, 15th East)
at
Seattle Kraken (20-18-10, 50 points, 5th Pacific, 10th West)
I have no nice words for this team right now.
Aaron Portzline in The Athletic today wrote about the Jiricek situation. I encourage you to read it. For those of you who don’t have a subscription, the short of it is that the young defenseman is not happy. He has noticed, as players do, that there are guys objectively worse than him playing over him. He laments about not getting power play time and not getting as many opportunities and minutes as others in his draft class, like Korchinski and Nemec. Apparently, there was concern Jiricek would decline to report to Cleveland.
He was told that he needed to be better. This comes on the back of similar comments about Elvis, even though he was playing better than both Tarasov and Martin.
This is another upset player in a long line of burned bridges by this front office. It would be different if other defensemen were outplaying Jiricek, but it’s ridiculous to pretend that Jiricek isn’t a massive upgrade from Peeke, who’s seen a lot of games recently.
If that weren’t enough, it was also announced today that Laine has entered the player assistance program for an undisclosed reason. He missed time with a broken clavicle and was said to be close to returning, but he reportedly returned to Columbus yesterday. He will be out indefinitely. All the best to Patrik – I hope he gets all of the help he needs.
There’s a game today, but honestly, that feels secondary to everything else going on. Over the existence of this team, there have been worse products on the ice. There have also been times when a bad team was accompanied by an empty prospect cupboard. But has there ever been back-to-back drama and bad news at this scale? The last four months have seen nothing but bad press for this team.
Don’t expect any lineup changes unless Boqvist is able to return. Tarasov will likely get the start.