Columbus Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekalainen is, like any NHL GM worth his salt, no doubt itching to fix the situation currently ailing his team. The problem? That issue is mostly about injuries that are entirely beyond his control, which continue to mount and steal games and quality play from a number of his best players.
So, it's not surprising that when Columbus President John Davidson spoke to majority team owner John P. McConnell on Sunday, he didn't need to dissuade McConnell from the notion of making big moves to stem the bleeding.
"He understands the situation," Davidson said, according to Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet Canada. "When you're not winning, people want you to sacrifice things to put on a Band-Aid. This is a full-fledged open wound, a Band-Aid doesn't help."
Even more importantly, Davidson and Kekalainen apparently agree wholeheartedly when it comes to this idea.
Kekalainen, though he has been feverishly working the phones in recent weeks in the hopes of swinging a deal, he won't mortgage the future of the franchise in order to make a potentially season-saving trade now, according to TheFourthPeriod.com.
"There's nothing you can do," Davidson noted. "The analogy I use is it's like building a wall, one brick at a time. Now the wall is knocked over...is it doctors, trainers, conditioning, the coach? When you break down the injuries, none of these people are to blame. All of a sudden a tsunami hit us."
As Friedman noted, the Blue Jackets are currently on pace to lose an entirely absurd 550 man-games to injury.
"We're not in this position because we are a bad hockey club, but because everyone is hurt," said Davidson. "We've been kicked right in the teeth. We'll wait for them to heal, and then we'll eat again."
For the time being, it seems Columbus and Kekalainen will turn their attention to their in-house business, namely finding a way to keep both forward Nick Foligno and goalie Sergei Bobrovsky.
