Working in the Metropolitan Division with the Carolina Hurricanes, Don Waddell knew what the Blue Jackets were building.
As his tenure with the Hurricanes drew to a close last summer and Waddell was looking around the NHL landscape, he had observed firsthand that the Blue Jackets were young, talented and on the rise.
And when he eventually took the job as the Blue Jackets’ president of hockey operations and general manager last May, he was excited about the building blocks he would be working with.
“I knew the team pretty well playing against them, playing in the same division,” Waddell said. “Certainly, the ownership and (president Mike Priest) said, ‘We want to try to take that next step forward, and as quickly as you can.’ At this point, I wasn’t looking to go through a rebuild situation. That was appealing to me.”
As the Blue Jackets get ready for the latest edition of the NHL draft – set for next Friday and Saturday – Waddell has two first-round picks that could add to a talented pipeline that’s already starting to pay dividends at the NHL level.
Six of the top eight point producers on the Blue Jackets in 2024-25 were drafted by the franchise – including three age 22 or younger. Considering the team made a 23-point jump into playoff contention this past season, it’s fair to say Columbus has one of the best and most exciting collections of young talent in the entire league.
Captain Boone Jenner and Norris Trophy runner-up Zach Werenski have been lifelong Blue Jackets, each drafted more than a decade ago before becoming players the team has built around for years. Not just leaders, they’re high-level NHL players who have been through the ups and downs and have dedicated themselves to trying to take the Blue Jackets to the next level on a consistent basis.
But it’s the more recent additions that have joined the mix in the past few seasons that have the team poised for a long run of success.
The Blue Jackets took a risk on a highly skilled but raw forward in the second round of the 2018 draft when they selected Kirill Marchenko at 49th overall. They had to wait four more seasons as he played out his contract in Russia, but all Marchenko has done since arriving stateside is become the first CBJ player to start his NHL career with three straight 20-goal campaigns. His 31-43-74 line this past season made him just the second CBJ player ever to top 30 goals and 40 assists in the same campaign.
A year later, Marchenko got a running mate in countryman and friend Dmitri Voronkov, whom the Blue Jackets took in the fourth round of the 2019 draft thanks to his size and scoring ability. Voronkov topped 20 goals for the first time in 2024-25 with 23 tallies and appears to have just scratched the surface of his potential as a talented but skilled power forward in the NHL.
Then, a run of seasons outside of the playoffs afforded the Blue Jackets six first-round picks in a three-year span from 2021-23, and a number of those players have started to make a major impact at the NHL level.
The 2011 draft was particularly fruitful, as both Kent Johnson (fifth overall pick) and Cole Sillinger (12th overall) finished in the top eight in scoring for the squad this year. Johnson is coming off of a breakout campaign in which he scored 24 goals – many of them highlight-reel tallies – among 57 points, while Sillinger’s fourth season saw him post 33 points in 66 games as a dependable two-way center.
And then there’s perhaps the biggest piece of the puzzle in Adam Fantilli, a potential superstar center who was the youngest player in the NHL to top the 30-goal mark this season. Coming off an injury-shortened rookie season, Fantilli was fantastic as a sophomore, playing in all 82 games and scoring 31 times while fulfilling the promise that allowed him to go third overall in the stacked 2023 draft.
Those players led the way this year in scoring, but other CBJ draft picks were key pieces of the puzzle as well.
2022 first-round pick Denton Mateychuk made the NHL’s all-rookie team at age 20, debuting at midseason and posting a 4-9-13 line in 45 games with a plus-4 rating. Goalie Elvis Merzlikins, a 2014 third-round pick, led the team with 26 wins this season, while 2020 first-round pick Yegor Chinakhov has been plagued by injuries but has shown plenty of potential.
The Jackets also have some standouts on the way, a list that includes 2024 first-round pick Cayden Lindstrom, a power forward taken fourth overall who has stood out in junior hockey, and 2022 second-round pick Luca Del Bel Belluz, who impressed at the AHL and NHL levels this season.
“I knew we had the Fantillis and Johnsons and these guys, Sillinger, Voronkov,” Waddell said. “Now being here a year and watching them take that next big step, it was an important year for a lot of those guys.”
So what are the Blue Jackets hoping to build? If you look around the NHL landscape, most of the league’s most successful teams are anchored by cores they drafted just like the Blue Jackets. It’s an exciting sign that Columbus may well be one of those teams in the near future.
Consider:
- While the two-time Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers have added such key pieces as Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart, Carter Verhaeghe, Brad Marchand and Sergei Bobrovsky through trades or free agency, homegrown talent is a key part of the group. Aleksander Barkov and Aaron Ekblad were drafted by the Panthers and have been there for more than a decade, while recent draft picks Anton Lundell and Mackie Samoskevich have become key pieces in the team’s lineup in recent years.
- Their foil in each of the last two Stanley Cup Finals in Edmonton has been built around drafted superstars Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, and three of their next four top scorers this season – forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and defensemen Evan Bouchard and Darnell Nurse – are also first-round picks by the team.
- The 2022 Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche were largely homegrown, as their top four playoff scorers that year – Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen, Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog – were Avs draft picks.
- The Tampa Bay Lightning dynasty that culminated in Stanley Cups in 2020 and ‘21 was built around a core that featured Bolts draftees Steven Stamkos, Viktor Hedman, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
- Such dominant teams of the 2010s like Chicago (Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Niklas Hjalmarsson), Pittsburgh (Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Jake Guentzel), Los Angeles (Anze Kopitar, Jonathan Quick, Drew Doughty, Dustin Brown) and Boston (Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, David Pastrnak) were all led by team-drafted players.
It all goes to show that in the cap era, it takes some combination of home-grown players and shrewd moves to get to the top. With the current crop of players and a GM in Waddell who’s not afraid to make things happen, could the Blue Jackets be the next to join that list?
