The Columbus Blue Jackets have landed a top prospect, inking Kirill Marchenko to a two-year entry-level contract. Marchenko has spent the last several seasons in the KHL while the Blue Jackets waited patiently for an opportunity to sign him.
Marchenko, 21, was selected 49th overall in 2018, falling to the second round despite an obvious size and skill combination that projected well in professional hockey. He had already made his KHL debut at that point, but was quickly snapped up by the powerhouse SKA St. Petersburg program in 2018 and has been there for the years since.
This season, he scored 12 goals and 20 points in 39 games, before going back down to the VHL for their minor league playoff run. He scored six goals in 12 postseason games with the lower level club, a demotion that suggested his days in Russia could be numbered. Marchenko’s ice time this season was severely reduced from the year prior, when he had scored 15 goals and 28 points in 41 games, often a tactic taken by KHL clubs when a player is heading to North America in the near future.
In Columbus, Marchenko will join a young up-and-coming roster that already has another 21-year-old Russian winger in Yegor Chinakhov. While he might not necessarily jump directly into the NHL, there is plenty of reason to believe that Marchenko will make it there quickly and add another option for the team moving forward. Nearly half the Columbus forward group were on entry-level contracts by the end of the year, suggesting that the team is only going to improve in the years to come. Where he shakes out in the depth chart will be determined by how quickly his game translates to North America, and the moves that general manager Jarmo Kekalainen makes this offseason.