"But we're going to keep looking, too. Every day we're coming here with our management group with the goal to improvement our club, and we still have a lot of time before the season starts."
DRAFT COVERAGE: CBJ Draft Central | Draft live blog with player information
Perhaps the biggest news of the day was Domi's contract, which was
agreed to just one day
after he was acquired from Montreal along with a third-round pick in exchange for winger Josh Anderson. The center, who is coming off a 44-point season after a career-best 28-goal, 72-point campaign in 2018-19, inked a two-year deal that will net him $10.6 million over the next two seasons.
Kekalainen said he and the Domi camp, including agent Darren Ferris, discussed contracts of different lengths but came to an agreement that works best for both sides. The deal buys out the last two years of restricted free agency for Domi, and the dollar amount is based off projections of what Domi he would be due in arbitration.
"I think it gives both sides a good opportunity to get to know each other, and we can be back at the table one year from now," Kekalainen said. "I think it's perfect, especially in this world where we know the cap is going to be flat and there's a lot of uncertainty. We're able to get some cost certainty this way and fit him in."
When it comes to the draft, Columbus followed up Tuesday night's
first-round selection
of Russian winger Yegor Chinakhov with four more picks, three of them defensemen. The Blue Jackets took a pair of teammates with TPS in Finland in the third and fourth rounds, first taking Slovak defenseman Samuel Knazko before selecting Finnish winger Mikael Pyyhtia.
The team then turned its attention to a pair of defenseman, selecting Norwegian blueliner Ole Julian Bjorgvik-Holm in the fifth round and Swedish rearguard Samuel Johannesson in the sixth, before trading its seventh-round pick to Anaheim for a conditional seventh-round pick in the 2021 or '22 drafts.
READ MORE: CBJ draft bios
"I know a little bit about the city and about the team, so it's pretty good," Knazko said. "I know they have a quality team and a very good coach, so I'm very happy to be a part of the organization and I'm looking toward the future."
If there was any connective tissue between the players, it was that all possess good skating and playmaking abilities.
"Time will tell, as always," Kekalainen said of his read on the draft. "Everybody says after the draft that, 'I can't believe he was there, I can't believe he slid all the way to that round,' and so forth. I'm not going to get into those clichés. We believe in our scouting staff. We believe in the work they do. They've done a good job for us in the past, and time will tell how we did in this year's draft but we believe that we did well."
Kekalainen added that there was a focus on adding depth to the pipeline on the defensive side but stressed that didn't come at the expense of quality.
"Yeah, but it also has to do with the way we construct our list," the general manager said. "After the top rounds, we go by player type, and you can jump the order of the main list by jumping in the columns. We have them in the size-strength defenseman, finesse defenseman, size-strength forwards, finesse forwards, and then we have a special column for goalies. You can jump the master a little bit by going from player type to player type, but not by much.
"We don't have a lot of defensemen on our depth chart, so we had to fill that area a little bit, but again, we would still go on with the order of the master list."
Next up, the Blue Jackets will attack the opening of free agency on Friday while continuing to work to sign the team's own remaining RFAs, a list that includes Pierre-Luc Dubois and Vladislav Gavrikov.
Kekalainen has previously said the Blue Jackets generally don't plan to make a big splash on the open market unless it's on the right player at the right contract, but this could be an interesting year given player movement around the league.
"We're going to keep looking," Kekalainen said. "There's going to be some opportunities. You've seen in the last couple of days, there are guys that didn't get qualified just because of the flat cap or uncertainty (around the cap), players that have played in the NHL. There's been more buyouts than normal because of that. With the cap situation, there's going to be some unique opportunities. Some teams might have to move money because of their situation, there could be an opportunity there.
"So we're going to be here working and looking at all those opportunities. We start with our pro scouting staff tomorrow morning once this draft is done now and move forward with the next goal in mind."
