The Columbus Blue Jackets now have firm deadlines on their two remaining arbitration cases: goaltender Jet Greaves will go to a hearing on July 23 and center Cole Sillinger on July 27, both in Toronto, per the league-wide docket published by PuckPedia. The club has already made its posture on restricted free agents plain — GM Don Waddell said this month Columbus would match any offer sheet — and the arbitration filings themselves reinforced it, since a player who files can no longer sign one.
Both players elected arbitration before the July 5 deadline. Because they filed, Columbus chooses the term of any awarded contract, and Union and Blue reports the club would request one-year rulings in both cases. That is standard leverage play more than a statement of intent: teams routinely keep the short-award option open while negotiating something longer on the side, and most filed cases around the league settle before anyone sits down in front of an arbitrator. The Flyers, Rangers and Penguins have all had Metropolitan Division cases on this same docket, and New York already settled its lone case Monday.
The negotiating math favors a deal here. PuckPedia lists Columbus with roughly $21.5 million in projected cap space, so this is not a team that needs an arbitrator to protect it from its own payroll. Greaves is the more consequential file — he finished last season as the club’s No. 1 goaltender, and goalie arbitration cases are notoriously hard to argue because the comparable-contract pool is thin. Sillinger, a middle-six center the organization has developed since drafting him 12th overall in 2021, is the kind of case that typically resolves in a bridge deal. Either way, the sides can negotiate right up to the morning of each hearing.
What to watch over the next nine days: a multi-year Greaves deal would say Columbus believes the crease is solved internally, while a one-year award — requested or ruled — would leave both sides doing this again next summer.
For fantasy purposes, Greaves is the name that matters: whatever the contract looks like, he enters next season as Columbus’s projected starter, and a settled deal removes the last bit of noise around his workload — draft him as a mid-tier No. 2 with volume upside. Sillinger stays a deep-league and dynasty stash whose value hinges on deployment, not dollars.
