After another brutal season, what’s next for the Columbus Blue Jackets?

Frank Seravalli was joined by Carter Hutton to discuss the state of the Columbus Blue Jackets and what they should do to turn the boat around on the latest episode of Daily Faceoff Live.

Frank Seravalli: Let’s dig into a little post mortem as well with some teams that have been eliminated, we’re going to go one by one with the final 18 shows of the regular season and break down the 16 teams that have been eliminated and today up is the Columbus Blue Jackets. It kind of feels like they were eliminated back in late October, early November. They were never strong out of the gate and for a team that made so many significant changes last summer, bringing in Damon Severson and Ivan Provorov. The summer before that they spent a ton of money on Johnny Gaudreau, they re-signed Patrik Laine.

They’ve got some great prospects in their pipeline, Carter, but this has to be one of the most disappointing seasons in Columbus Blue Jackets history in a franchise history full of them as Aaron Portzline documented so well in The Athletic earlier this week. A story of basically someone who’s been there since day one chronicling it all. But when you look forward, aside from how big this next GM hiring is with Jarmo Kekalainen being fired, where do the Blue Jackets go from here, what’s their first priority if you were in the managers chair?

Carter Hutton: For me, the Johnny Gaudreau signing has fallen on its face as he just hasn’t reached form and I don’t know if it’s being there or if he got his big ticket and mailed it in and he’s never been a player that’s going to grind it out, he plays an outside game. And for me the other one that stands out this year is the Babcock situation when you hire a coach and it falls on it’s face.

Elvis Merzlikins coming out and talking about a trade, for me is a killer. I’ve been on teams where players have done that, playing in Buffalo when Evan Rodrigues asked for a trade and it was a running joke on the team that the next thing in the Google account was who is Evan Rodrigues, these are things that need to stay behind closed doors, it just needs to be managed within the team.

They have some prospects and I feel like the Russians they have upfront are pretty good but those are also guys that you need a culture to build around but in my experience sometimes those players can go on their own terms. So, having players like Boone Jenner or Werenski, these are guys that you can build a culture around but I think they need to move some pieces out especially with how Laine struggled on the ice and off it. It will be interesting to see how they attack this one this summer, Frank.

You can watch the rest of the episode here: