When the Blue Jackets reached an agreement on a trade with the Dallas Stars, the idea of a trade became a real possibility. Waddell said Werenski declined it quickly.<\/p>\n
That says something. The Stars have made the playoffs seven times in the past eight seasons, advancing to the third round four times and the Stanley Cup Final once in that span.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t Dallas,\u201d Waddell said. \u201cHe just didn\u2019t want to be traded. Obviously, him and his family have been talking about it and thinking about it, and now you get to a point where you have to make a decision. If they hadn\u2019t thought about it, it might have been over the night, through the night and the next day, but I got the answer back. It had to be right around an hour that, no, he wants to be a Blue Jacket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Werenski met with Waddell and Blue Jackets director of player personnel Rick Nash on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t say enough good things about how the conversation went,\u201d Waddell said. \u201cZach led the conversation and made it real clear he\u2019s committed here. He wants to win here. He wants to play here. So, from that end, it was outstanding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Werenski released a statement that said \u201ceverything got blown out of proportion.”<\/p>\n
“I want to win and I want to do that in Columbus,\u201d he said in the statement. “As I\u2019ve thought about things and discussed everything with my wife and family, we want to be in Columbus. It has been my one for the past 10 years and I have always been proud to be a Blue Jacket.”<\/p>\n
Waddell said the Blue Jackets will do everything they can to keep him if he wants to stay after next season.<\/p>\n
Is the clock ticking? In a sense, yes.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s always ticking, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all want to win, and winning solves a lot of things,\u201d Waddell said. \u201cI don\u2019t look at it as a ticking clock as much as I do that our goal here is to get in the playoffs. The ultimate goal is always to win the Stanley Cup, but the first step is, you\u2019ve got to get in to win the Stanley Cup, so that\u2019s our focus right now. The contracts, they all come in time when they\u2019re due up. We\u2019re just going to be ready to roll come September.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Blue Jackets reached an agreement on a trade with the Dallas Stars, the idea of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":776671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-776670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}