Blue Jackets youth movement

       The Blue Jackets had a busy week as they continued there youth movement.  In the past week Potts has made 10 sinificant moves. " We made the moves so that we could focus around the group of young players and not run into free agency problems in the near future" Potts added. In possibly the biggest move of the week Potts traded away superstar forward Ilya Kovalchuk for a trio of prospects. " These are prospects that we targeted because we beilieve they have a great future in the league , they have a great mixture of offensive and defensive upside." Potts said. Moving Ilya was not a easy decision but at the end of the day he was a free agent and we could have chanced resigning the super star ,But on the other side of the coin Potts also had to worry about Justin Williams walking away from the club and he has had a great bounce back year and is showing the promise that we knew he had, and now shift our attention to resigning him as one of our core players.

      Potts then dealt away Mike Ribero to the New York Rangers, The Rangers were gearing up for a playoff run and we were looking for some cap space so the deal worked out great for both teams. We acquired Paul Gaustad who has a great contract and a 1st round pick in the deal . We also gained another first round pick and dumped a contract by dealing Karlis Skrastins to the L.A Kings .We then dealt away Alex Semin to the Vancouver Canucks. We were not shopping Semin but the opportunity arose to land Zach Parise so we jumped on it. Zach was a player that we have targeted to build our team around and will be the Captain of the Blue Jackets for years to come. We then saw the opportunity to dump 10 million dollars in cap space by trading veteran wingers Ray Whitey and Andrew Brunette. Getting the 2 years of 10 mil contracts off the books is really going to allow us some flexibility and opens up many options come free agency. However we also gained prosepect Geordie Wudrick and Tyler Bunz along with 2 3rd round picks in this years draft. Geordie and Tyler have both had break out years in the WHL and we are very pleased to be able to add them to our growing depth on the prospect pool. Along with the prospects and picks the Jackets also pocketed 4 million dollars in cash in the deals. We then lost some more salary by shipping off the often injured Andrei Markov to the Rangers. We were able to get a very good shut down defencemen with a great contract in Hall Gill. As well we recieved prospects Anton Lander and Evgeny Dadonov as well as 2 5th round picks .The Jackets were not done there with tinkering with there prospects. Potts was able to add a Prospect that he feels will take a big step this year in Nazem Kadri . Nazem is the youngest major peice to the puzzel we have the will step into our lineup next year. The final move of the day was the one Potts was not eager to pull the trigger on. We had been chasing after a goalie all year long and have been unable to find a goalie that we could count on now and for the future. We acquired Ilya Bryzgalov from the Bruins . The downside is we had to part ways with 2 very good young peices that we were very high on. We gave up P.K Subban and Curtis Hamilton . We felt we have a fantastic group of prospects which allowed us to give up Hamilton but P.K will be hard to replace, but at the end of the day we adressed a area where we felt we needed to the most.