With the way the Jackets are going right now, this is an odd question to ask. It was brought up last week by James Mirtle of the Athletic, in wake of the Ron Francis Carolina situation.
Mirtle mentions the Jackets poor play over the last few months and the team’s inability to score goals. Jarmo is under pressure to not only make the playoffs in consecutive seasons but take the Jackets to the uncharted territory of the second round.
Even if the Jackets were to miss the playoffs, it’s hard to see them letting Jarmo go. He's been the most successful GM the team has had, and the problems this season haven’t exactly been his fault. Sure he built the team, but I don’t think anyone foresaw so many players, veterans in particular, struggling like this.
To his credit he addressed the goal scoring problem at the deadline adding Thomas Vanek. You can argue enough wasn’t done this off-season to bring in depth to replace the loss of Sam Gagner and Scott Hartnell, but they had a plan in place to go with younger players. The Tyler Motte experiment didn’t work out and maybe they were a little too optimistic about Gabriel Carlsson, but again those needs were eventually addresses. Mark Letestu and Ian Cole were two low cost additions that improve the team’s depth.
The big thing here is that Jarmo and the Blue Jackets front office have a plan and a direction in place. You look at other GM’s who might be on the seat and they have no plan or an unclear direction. You look at teams like Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver it’s unclear what they are trying to do. Are they rebuilding? Are they trying to compete? Those GM’s have all made questionable decisions that could warrant the question are they on the hot seat.
With Jarmo you don’t have those same questions, as he hasn’t made those catastrophic bad decisions. He’s made really good moves, both small like the trade deadline, and large like the Artemi Panarin-Brandon Saad trade. Not every trade has worked, but it’s been much more good than bad and there hasn’t been a catastrophic Taylor Hall-Adam Larsson type trade in there.
His worst trade was easily the David Clarkson deal to Vegas. They gave up their first round pick to shed Clarkson’s contract and if that wasn’t bad enough part of the deal was that Vegas would take William Karlsson in the expansion draft, allowing the Jackets to protect players like Josh Anderson and Joonas Korpisalo. Karlsson has been unreal for Vegas, making this deal in hindsight look really bad. At the time this wasn’t universally considered that bad. No one thought Karlsson had this type of upside in him.
Jarmo has done a lot of things well but he still has his share of misses. He’s shown he's a really good negotiator with restricted free agents. He really digs his heels in and won’t give in to their demands. With unrestricted free agents it’s been a little different. The deals given out to Cam Atkinson, Brandon Dubinsky and Nick Foligno, were not considered wins at the time and look worse now with them underperforming.
His other large flaw has been his inability to bring in good defencemen to the organization. Since he took over he’s really only brought in three NHL defencemen; Seth Jones, Zach Werenski and Markus Nutivaara. Jones and Werenski are home runs but they were both obvious moves to make at the time. Nutivaara is the only clear drafted and development find. Jarmo and his scouts can find forwards no problem. You look at Oliver Bjorkstrand and Vitali Abramov in the third round. Picking Pierre-Luc Dubois over Jesse Puljujarvi, and going way back the Alexander Wennberg Marko Dano picks worked out great as well. They however cannot draft defencemen. Every year it’s another big body player who can skate but lacks offense.
If the team was losing and far out of the playoff race, you could definitely turn to those failures as reasons for Jarmo to be on the hot seat. The team is in the middle of the playoff race and the reasons they aren’t better really aren’t Jarmo’s fault. There is no way he’s on the hot seat right now.
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