You all thought it was going to be a boring trade deadline. No. The Columbus Blue Jackets have fired their general manager, Jarmo Kechalinen. We're going to go in-depth on that. But first, this video is brought to you by MCAL. Visit emcal. Ca/sdpn because I asked you to. Especially if you have a business that has IT issues, which is every business. And you go, I don't know how to fix that. Mcal does. Security, backup requirements, stuff you need for work from home. Maybe you have a big business, a small business, a business that fires their general manager three weeks before the trade deadline. Whatever the size of your business, MCAL can take care of your IT issues for you. Time is money, and you typically get your support request done in under an hour. And it's Canadian. Hooray for Canadian things. Mcal is vendor neutral, so they're not going to try to upsell you on everything. It'll get between you and your main vendor so you maintain control. It helps you plan your budget. If you want an extra month of free services, and why wouldn't you visit emcal. Ca/sdpn and use the promo code Dangle.

Emcal. Ca/sdpn. Now, Once again, the Columbus Blue Jackets have relieved Jarmo Kekeleinen of his duties, which is the term that they always use when they gas someone. Blue Jackets fans, I got to be honest with you, this isn't me picking on the team. This is me feeling sorry for the fan base. This is so painfully Columbus Blue Jackets. Dude, we've known Jarmo Kekeleinen as getting fired since the Babcock stuff. That was months and months and months ago. It was before the season began. I've been making jokes on the podcast for months that you just see old people sitting outside the Columbus Blue Jackets arena feeding all the lame ducks. He's been a lame duck GM for months. It's been obvious that Kechalayanin is going to get fired for months, especially when the Blue Jackets started poorly and then continued to do poorly and then continued, and now it's February. So when the Babcock stuff happened, and if you need some catching up, basically the Columbus Blue Jackets hired Mike Babcock to be their head coach. He was a jerk basically immediately, and then they mutually parted ways. Which sounds an awful lot like, Hey, you've never even coached a game for us, but let's pay you to go away before your job has even begun.

From that moment on, it seemed like, All right, well, Jarmo Kechalina is getting fired. At very least Jarmo Kechalina, if not John Davidson. Then he didn't get fired, and we all said, Oh, okay. Well, if they do poorly, then he's going to get fired at the end of the season. Then they did poorly, so we're all like, All right, he's going to get fired at the end of the season. And what do they do instead? They fire him three weeks before the NHL Trade Deadline thereabouts, and Kekalina's replacement is Kekalina's boss. In doing research for this video, I found this article from the Columbus Blue Jackets website, and this perfectly describes all their problems. Here's the headline, Columbus Blue Jackets announced return of John Davidson as President of Hockey Operations, GM Jarmo Kekalina also signed to an extension through the 24-25 season. For those of you keeping track, the 24-25 season is next season, so they're going to be paying Jarmo all through the rest of this season and next to not work for them. Unless he goes somewhere else for more money, which is possible, but I doubt it. But I mean, the first paragraph is where optimism goes to die.

The Columbus Blue Jackets have named John Davidson President of Hockey Operations, an alternate governor, and signed general manager and alternate governor, Jarmo Kekelein, into a contract extension through the 24-25 National Hockey League season. Club President, an alternate governor, Mike priest announced today. Davidson agreed to a five-year contract and returns to the role he held with the club from 2012 to 2019. You want to know where the Blue Jackets finished during those seasons? Fourth in the Central, fourth in the Metro, fifth in the Metro, eighth in the Metro, third in the Metro, fourth in the Metro, fifth in the Metro. Thank you, Wikipedia. Want to know how they did in the playoffs? Did not qualify, lost in the first round of the Penguins, did not qualify, did not qualify, lost in the first round of the Penguins, lost in the first round of the Capitals. One first round against the Lightning. Lost in the second round of the Bruins. Since then, they followed that up with, They won the qualifying round against the Leifs, got beaten in five games by the Lightning once the playoffs actually began. And that's the last playoff action they've gotten since, Did not qualify, did not qualify, did not qualify.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, This this season, they will not qualify. Oh, and for the sake of putting it all together in the regular season, sixth in the Metro, eighth in the Central, sixth in the Metro, eighth in the Metro. And this season, I mean, it's not going to be good. Listen, a lot of time is going to get wasted on Jarmo Kekeleinen's draft record and his trade record. At the end of the day, from what I've just shown you, they didn't win. They didn't win. It doesn't matter how well he did in trades. It doesn't matter how well he drafted. At the end of the day, it resulted in a net negative for the Columbus Blue Jackets. No matter how good of a trade deadline he had, no matter how good of a summer he had, it resulted in a bad team on the ice. Is some of it luck? Sure, some of it's luck. For example, you do a great job drafting a player like Zack Warenzky. He's great. You sign him to, let's be honest, maybe a little too much money, but he's still a great player, constantly hurt.

That's bad luck. Okay, you need to make Columbus a place where players will sign. You need to show that you're willing to spend. You go out and you give Johnny Goudreau the sun and the moon, and meh. You draft a player like Pierre-Luc Dubois. Everyone looks at you sideways and goes, Why did you do that? He actually turns out pretty well, and then he pouts and winds his way out of town, and you got to trade him. Which is working out great for the Kings now, by the way. It's not all bleak. You look at some of the young players that the Blue Jackets have, Adam Fantilly, Jogher Chenikow, which is another player who the Blue Jackets drafted. Everyone went, Are you sure? And then he takes the ice and he's fantastic. I think Greg Wyshinski of ESPN puts it great. Man, I think that Columbus job would be a desirable one for a smart GM. Good young players. The bar is set at limbo levels. The market will for a winner. He's right. The good thing with the Columbus Blue Jackets and their rebuild is they're not really starting from the bottom. When you're starting from the bottom, you have a team, you strip it bare, and then you start accumulating assets.

The Blue Jackets already have some of that. For us to sit here and say from top to bottom, Jarmo Kekealina did a terrible job is just not true. He's done a good job to some levels. He has not done a good enough job to continue to keep his role beyond this point. He's been their GM forever, and it's resulted in basically no success at the regular season level. And even when they have some at the regular season level, no success in the playoffs, except for one historic upset over the Tampa Bay Lightning. They have a first-round victory and a qualifying-round victory to their resume. That's not good enough. And before I get chirped for the leaves in the comments, yeah, they've had a lot of turnover, man. Honestly, they probably haven't had enough. So that's why it's concerning that Kekalinen was made work this long, and then his replacement, at least on an interim level, is the guy who oversaw basically all of this mediocrity. Part of the reason for this mediocrity is how notoriously inactive and uninvolved Columbus Blue Jackets ownership is. Except for when the Blue Jackets Mike Babcock story happened, they released a statement and they were very upset.

But I'm extrapolating from CapFriendly here. I think this is the price of mediocrity. This tweet is unbelievable. Once again, this is from CapFriendly. In his 11 years as GM of the Columbus Blue Jackets, he was the GM for 11 years, over a decade. Kekalina made 79 trades. That's a lot of trades. Seventy-four players drafted. That's a lot of players drafted. This is the big one. Two hundred and fifty-one contracts signed for 1 billion with a B. 176,8,900 dollars in total value. For the amount of contracts that Jarmo Kekeleinen has signed and accomplished nothing with, you could have bought the Ottawa senators and had $300 million left over. Instead of spending all that money on a bad hockey team for over a decade, you could have bought another NHL team from scratch and still been fabulously rich. Do you understand, is Columba a bad hockey market with bad fans that don't cheer for a team when they win? No. So this is essentially 1.2 billion of money arson. And it illustrates that, A, the Columbus Blue Jackets have not done a very good job over the last decade plus. And two, this is extraordinarily overdue. There's reason to be optimistic.

Adam Fantilli David Yurichek, Yigur Chinnikov, Dmitri Varonkov, Ent Johnston, Cole Sillinger. These guys, they have guys. It's worth mentioning that at least one of them has been vocally unhappy with how things have gone. They've tried to surround their young guys with veterans and leadership guys. Dude, it hasn't worked at all. It's time for a new set of eyes. I don't know if John Davidson is going to be the guy going forward. I don't think he probably should be. I guess what I'm getting at is if a clever hockey mind, someone who's going to do a good job as this team's GM and or President, if they get a hold of this team, of this core of young players. They could do really special things with them. They could make them into a good regular season team, and it might even lead to playoff success. It shouldn't be that hard. A lot of rebuilding teams do not have have the base, the foundation that the Columbus Blue Jackets have. That's, to me, where the optimism comes from. Right now, man, this was long overdue. What do you think? Leave a comment in the comment box down below.

But for now, that is it for this one. Thank you very much for watching. Click like if you like this video. Click subscribe to Sdpn, gosh, darn it, and subscribe to SdpVip. Tell all your friends to subscribe to SdpVip. That was smooth. Steve, good job.