The Columbus Blue Jackets got a tongue lashing from head coach John Tortorella on Sunday - though the salacious words Torts uttered weren't published until Monday - mere hours before the Blue Jackets went out and added another tally to their loss column, keeping the meter pegged at a steady 29 points and ensuring they retained their firm grasp on their spot in the NHL's basement. Torts' comments, calling out the team for a lack of leadership and mental toughness, were not unwarranted, surprising though they may have been. The Jackets are bad - of this, there can be no dispute. They're bad, not because they lack talent, but precisely because they are a talented team and yet they continue to play poorly and lose.
Yes, Auston Matthews may be on the other side of this puke green rainbow, but he also very well may not. What's more important, especially for a predominantly young team like Columbus, is to instill a winning culture, to teach the young guns on the roster how to play the right way and that playing the right way will, in time, yield the right results.
Those results have not come and it seems Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen, the architect of this underachieving juggernaut, grows more desperate by the day. But that desperation has yet to yield results and with the way things are going in the NHL, it may very well stay that way.
"No GM has tried harder to make a deal this year than Jarmo Kekalainen. He has really tried since they started badly to get something done and it's just not happening," Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman said Monday, while appearing on Calgary's Sportsnet 960, per Today's Slap Shot's transcription.
"So I think it's another situation that shows you how hard it is to make a deal here this year. He's been trying and he can't get it done, so I think the answer to your question is yes, they'd love to do something - even more than Anaheim - but... they've got a lot of guys with term. A lot of tough contracts."
Kekalainen, pushed to desperation by the abysmal outcome of last season and the gut-wrenching start to 2015-16, is said to be considering just about anything at this point. Yes, that means No. 1 Columbus center Ryan Johansen.
Reports earlier in the season suggested that Kekalainen was "testing" Johansen's trade value, and that was before the team made him a healthy scratch following a particularly atrocious outing against the Dallas Stars this month. Torts has continually said it will be "a process" for Johansen, but there seems no guarantee that process will play itself out in Columbus.
In the end, as Friedman notes, there are plenty of players who could be dealt by Kekalainen, but few who would seem desirable to other NHL teams beyond Johansen. Saad, Brandon Dubinsky, Nick Foligno and David Clarkson all have expensive long-term deals. The 33-year-old Scott Hartnell costs $4.75 million through 2018-19 and even Cam Atkinson will carry a $3.5 million hit through 2017-18.
Maybe Alexander Wennberg, the team's third-line center and a guy Torts singled out as playing well recently, would draw trade interest, though the return on the deal would likely be minimal.
And the defense is mostly mediocre and, even with the rest of the league hard on the trail of blueline upgrades, likely doesn't provide much in the way of enticement beyond perhaps Ryan Murray, although the former first-round pick was a minus-3 against the Panthers on Sunday. Jack Johnson remains as overrated as ever and Fedor Tyutin is both older, 32, and expensive, $4.5 million cap hit through 2017-18.
In short, options for upgrade seem limited for Kekalainen and if he's really "desperate" to alter the makeup of his team as Friedman suggests, the veteran NHL personnel man may have no choice but to take a loss on any deal he enacts, even one involving the talented, if inconsistent Johansen.
