The Blue Jackets have re-signed restricted free agent defencmen Seth Jones to a six year deal worth $5.4 million per season.
This is right in line with what people were expecting for Jones. Morgan Rielly was the best comp and he just signed a six year deal at $5M per season. Jones gets the extra $400K likely due to the offer sheet threat.
Jones was excellent in his first half season as a Blue Jacket. He stepped into a top pair role for the first time in his NHL career and did well. He scored 20 points in 41 games as a Jacket, which finished third among defencemen. If you include the 11 points he scored in Nashville he led all Blue Jacket defencemen in scoring.
Jones is also a very strong player from an analytical perspective. Per
Corsica Hockey in 81 games between Nashville and Columbus, Jones had a 49.51% Corsi which ranked second on the Jackets behind Fedor Tyutin. He took on the toughest matchups and stared more of his shifts in the defensive than the offensive zone. He and Ryan Murray built some great chemistry together, and with further time to develop could become one of the best pairs in the league. Jeremy Crowe (
@307x) wrote a great piece on the two defencmen back in February which you can check out
here.
This is a great deal for the Jackets as they got Jones signed to a deal they liked, as opposed to matching an offer sheet. Jarmo Kekalainen had said yesterday he doesn’t care what it would cost he was matching an offer sheet.
An offer sheet could have been detrimental to the Jackets. According to
General Fanager the Jackets currently have just $42,858 of cap space left. That’s it. Yes that does include David Clarkson who is a potential LTIR candidate but still; this is not a good situation for any team let alone one that was near the bottom of the league. A buyout or trade has to coming at some point.
Let’s not worry about the cap right now though. Let’s enjoy having the team’s top defencemen back on a very reasonable long-term deal.
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In other news the Blue Jackets also signed third overall pick Pierre-Luc Dubois to an Entry Level Contract.
It sounds like the team wants to give Dubois a shot to make the team out of camp, so this was something that was going to happen sooner rather than later. I think it would be best for Dubois to get a nine game trail and then go back down to the QMJHL, light it up for a year and continue to learn to play centre. The team clearly views him as a centre and rushing him to NHL is only going to hurt his development.
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