10 Columbus Blue Jackets connections to the Stanley Cup Final
It’s that time of year again.
The Stanley Cup Final has arrived and the right to hoist the NHL’s most cherished prize will be decided between the Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights. Those following along locally have plenty of Blue Jackets connections to know on both teams.
Here are 10, including five from each team:
Florida Panthers connections to the Columbus Blue Jackets
Sergei Bobrovsky, goalie
Thus far, Bobrovsky has used this playoff run to erase the stigma he’d built in Columbus as an elite goalie who can’t handle the pressure of playoff hockey. He’s been dominant the past two rounds against the Toronto Maple Leafs and Carolina Hurricanes.
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Bobrovsky’s postseason redemption actually began with the Blue Jackets’ stunning upset sweep of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2019, but that effort stalled in the second round. This time, “Bob” is four wins from hoisting the Stanley Cup and, possibly, the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
Winning the Cup would justify the seven-year, $70 million contract he signed with Florida on July 1, 2019.
Bill Zito, general manager
Zito spent seven years with the Blue Jackets before taking the Panthers’ GM role in September 2020. Prior to working in Columbus, he’d started his own firm as a player agent. He joined the Blue Jackets as assistant GM and GM of the Cleveland Monsters and left with the title of Blue Jackets associate GM and alternate governor.
Zito coaxed multiple Blue Jackets hockey operations staffers to follow him and a number of them are still with the Panthers. The list includes Gregory Campbell, the team’s vice president of player personnel and development, Tom Bark, director of hockey operations/player evaluations and former Blue Jackets defenseman Dalton Prout, a pro scout.
Anthony Duclair, forward
The Panthers’ ties to the Blue Jackets under Zito don’t stop in the executive suite. The former Columbus executive has sprinkled former Blue Jackets players onto his rosters, including two in this installment. Duclair, who played the bulk of one season in Columbus, is one of them.
Duclair signed with Columbus as a free agent in July 2018 and became a lineup regular despite an issue with turning the puck over that frustrated former Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella. He was traded to the Ottawa Senators along with two second-round draft picks at the deadline for Ryan Dzingel and a seventh-round pick.
Dzingel was a malcontent in Columbus who wasn’t re-signed and Duclair, who’d made a lot of friends on the Blue Jackets, blossomed as an offensive force for the Senators and then Panthers. He plays right wing on the Panthers’ top line.
Zac Dalpe, forward
Dalpe is a great story of perseverance after toggling between the NHL and AHL levels nearly his entire professional career. The former Ohio State forward has played for six NHL teams, but logged just 168 regular season games in his 12-year career.
He played 25 games for the Blue Jackets while also becoming a fan favorite in Cleveland while playing five AHL seasons for the Monsters. Dalpe is also a talented musician with a great sense of humor who’s a dedicated family man with a solid fan following from all of his stops, including Ohio.
Sylvain Lefebvre, assistant coach
Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen hired Lefebvre in 2021 as the second assistant for Brad Larsen, who’d been promoted from assistant to head coach. Before he even got to Columbus, Lefebrve was fired a week before training camp for his refusal to get a COVID-19 immunization shot required by the NHL for all coaches and staff members prior to the 2021-22 season.
Zito hired him for this season after hiring veteran head coach Paul Maurice to run the Panthers’ bench. Lefebvre’s refusal to get immunized put the Blue Jackets in a tough spot that close to the start of Larsen’s first season and forced Kekalainen to promote AHL assistant Steve McCarthy to the NHL staff.
Vegas Golden Knights connections to the Columbus Blue Jackets
William Karlsson, center
Karlsson was acquired at the trade deadline in 2015 from the Anaheim Ducks and played in three seasons for the Blue Jackets. He was left unprotected in the 2017 NHL expansion draft that formed the Golden Knights’ first roster and was an instant hit.
Karlsson went from centering Tortorella’s third line in Columbus to anchoring the top line for then-coach Gerard Gallant in Las Vegas, scoring a career-high 43 goals and helping the Golden Knights advance to the 2018 Stanley Cup Final.
Kekalainen didn’t have enough protection spots available in the expansion draft, so he made a tough choice. Not only was Karlsson left unprotected, but the Blue Jackets also worked out a trade in which the Golden Knights agreed to take Karlsson instead of other unprotected players.
Keegan Kolesar, forward
Kekalainen selected Kolesar in the third round of the 2015 draft and then traded his rights to Vegas two years later to get a second-round pick at the 2017 draft in Chicago. That pick was used to select French forward Alexandre Texier 45th overall.
Texier, 23, has played 123 games over four seasons for Columbus and spent last season playing in Switzerland. He’s expected to return to the NHL for the Blue Jackets in 2023-24. Kolesar, meanwhile, has carved out a fourth-line role for himself with the Golden Knights. He’s played 196 games over three-plus seasons, adding size and grit to a lineup that has a lot of skill in it.
Jonathan Marchessault, forward
Marchessault was signed by the Blue Jackets in July 2012, an AHL free-agent acquisition by former GM Scott Howson, and the undersized forward made his NHL debut by playing two games in 2012-13 for Columbus.
Conditioning issues prompted a trade to the Tampa Bay Lightning two years later and he was then traded to the Panthers in 2016. The Golden Knights scooped him up in the 2017 expansion draft. Marchessault scored 30 goals in his lone season for the Panthers, putting up a scoring line of 30-21-51 in 75 games, but was still left unprotected for Vegas.
He’s been a top-six forward for the Golden Knights since his debut in Vegas, logging 432 games over the past six seasons and scoring 150-198-348 while skating at right wing on the top line.
Misha Donskov, assistant coach
Donskov, 46, is a son of Paul Donskov, who moved his family to Columbus in 1990 from Toronto and began an effort to grow the sport of hockey in Central Ohio. Donskov died in April 2020 at age 76, but his Donskov Hockey Development program lives on through his family in Columbus.
Misha Donskov’s professional career began with the Blue Jackets as a youth instructor for the team’s youth hockey program, where he spent three seasons in that capacity.
Donskov eventually entered the coaching ranks at the Canadian collegiate level, shifted into major junior hockey in the Ontario Hockey League and made the jump to the NHL in 2016-17 as the Golden Knights’ director of hockey operations.
He became an assistant coach in 2020 and has held that role ever since.
Ryan Craig, assistant coach
Craig, 41, played 14 professional seasons that included parts of eight years in the NHL. His last five were spent as part of the Blue Jackets’ organization, spending the vast majority of those seasons in the AHL as the Monsters’ captain.
Craig wore the ‘C’ on his jersey when the Monsters won the AHL’s Calder Cup in 2016 and spent one more season as a player before jumping straight into coaching at the NHL level with the Golden Knights. He’s in his sixth season as a Vegas assistant and is already coaching in the Stanley Cup Final for a second time.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 10 Columbus Blue Jackets ties to the Stanley Cup finalists
