The Columbus Blue Jackets need to give their kids more stability

Despite a dominant 9-4 win over the Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday night, the Columbus Blue Jackets continued to create drama by making one of their top young guns in David Jiricek a healthy scratch. It’s one of a plethora of instances of their mismanagement of their young players, and for a team that’s not exactly in the playoff race, it makes no sense.

Luke Gazdic joined Tyler Yaremchuk and Colby Cohen to talk about the Blue Jackets and how they’re messing up the development of their young guns.

Luke Gazdic: They do have a couple good vets there that I know are doing their best, but every time I hear about this Jackets team in the news, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

I understand what you’re saying in the sense that young players have to earn it, but there’s situations like this where you know a teams in a rebuild that, look at me saying, they should just be giving it. And you should be just allowing these guys to play in every opportunity and every situation and whether it was Babcock going through young guys phones, or Adam Fantilli going down to the fourth lineor Kent Johnson going down to Cleveland. Enough, like enough with this!

Every time I hear about this team, it just makes me shake my head and I know they went on a bit of a tear last night, 9-4 over the Sabres who are struggling, but I just don’t love the way that this organization has chosen to develop some of these young players.

Colby Cohen: Well and it’s also bizarre when you’re trading for Ivan Provorov, you’re signing Johnny Gaudreau. To me, it just seems rudderless there. What are you doing?

I’m with you, for a guy like you who had to earn everything, every inch, and a guy like me who got handed maybe one opportunity and then I had to earn the rest, and didn’t earn it and didn’t get it. So it’s really interesting to hear your perspective on that now, and I totally agree with you.

You can watch the full episode here…