Alexandre Texier

In the Eastern Conference, the playoff picture has looked set in stone for quite some time. Even now, with the Columbus Blue Jackets on an 8-2 run in their last ten, they’re still nine points behind the Boston Bruins for the last wild card position. That’s an impressive feat after struggling to find any consistency through the first half but it still might end up in a missed postseason, regardless of what they do in the coming weeks.

You can understand then, why teams may be calling the Blue Jackets to inquire about some of their players. Today, Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff reports that the team has been taking calls on Alexandre Texier for the last little while, though the asking price is still quite high. Seravalli notes that to pry Texier out of Columbus, it would take a first-round pick and a roster player.

Selected 45th overall in 2017, Texier is something of an enigma. After lighting up the Finnish league as a teenager, the French forward made the jump to North America and quickly forced his way into the Blue Jackets lineup. In 2019, he played in eight of the team’s ten playoff games at age-19, including the entire four-game sweep of the powerhouse Tampa Bay Lightning. In that deciding game four, Texier opened the scoring on the powerplay and added an empty-net goal to help seal it. He was still 19 at the time.

Since then, things haven’t gone quite as smoothly. Since the start of the 2019-20 season, Texier has ended up on injured reserve three times and has just 48 points in 121 games. There is so much obvious skill in his 6’1″ frame, but his play has been inconsistent even when he’s healthy enough to contribute.

This season, he has doubled his career goal total with 11 tallies in 36 games, but once again finds himself on the shelf due to injury. He has been out since January 26 with a broken finger, and even before that had been held scoreless in his last five games.

The key to any team’s interest in Texier–to go along with oodles of potential–is that he’s also signed for next season at a very reasonable $1.525MM cap hit. If you could add him to a talented lineup and keep him healthy, there’s a very good chance that the 22-year-old vastly outperforms that number. After this contract is finished, Texier will still be an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent, meaning it’s not anywhere near the kind of trade that will see rentals swap teams at the deadline.

Again though, the Blue Jackets are in no rush here. Just as they don’t have to make a decision about Patrik Laine until the offseason–the star sniper is a restricted free agent just one year away from the open market–they also won’t be pressured into a deal for the even-younger Texier. If the asking price is actually as high as Seravalli reports, Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekalainen is making it very clear that he isn’t desperate to move the young forward.

The Columbus Blue Jackets will be without young forward Alexandre Texier for the next month, as he suffered a fractured finger in last night’s game. He is expected to miss approximately four weeks, keeping him out through most of February.

Texier, 22, has turned things around since a disappointing 2020-21 campaign, and now sits with 11 goals and 20 points in 36 games. Both of those numbers are career highs, though he still hasn’t found a lot of consistency even with the increased production. Playing almost exclusively on the wing, the second-round pick is averaging fewer than 15 minutes a night and hasn’t scored a goal since the beginning of the month.

He’ll now face a long period out of the lineup and likely miss upwards of ten games. The Blue Jackets will have to find someone else to find those minutes and hope to help pull them out of their recent skid. Columbus now sits 18-21-1 on the season and 3-7 in their last ten, well behind the Washington Capitals for fourth place in the Metropolitan Division.

The Columbus Blue Jackets re-signed young forward Alexandre Texier today, the team announced. It’s a two-year deal paying a total of $3.05MM, meaning it’s got an average annual value of $1.52MM. Texier was a restricted free agent but did not have arbitration rights.

It was a little over two years ago when Texier made his debut in the NHL, bursting onto the scene after dominating the Finnish league as a teenager. He scored three points in eight games for the Blue Jackets in the 2019 playoffs and hopes were high that he would step directly into a top-six role despite his young age. Instead, Texier averaged fewer than 13 minutes in the 36 games he did get into during the 2019-20 season, moving in and out of the lineup as a fringe roster player. He finished the year with six goals and 13 points, not exactly the rookie campaign that was expected.

Unfortunately, his sophomore year didn’t go much better. The 21-year-old had just four goals and 15 points in 49 games this season for the Blue Jackets despite additional minutes and responsibility. His offensive game hasn’t translated at all, though he did get a chance to play center—rather infrequently—under head coach John Tortorella, who is notorious for not trusting young players in the middle of the ice.

Now as the team heads into a new chapter under head coach Brad Larsen and without several key veterans, it will be up to young players like Texier to take the next step in Columbus. A $1.52MM cap hit isn’t insignificant and should mean he’s in the lineup every night, but it also doesn’t guarantee much else. He’ll have to prove he can contribute more regularly at the offensive end of the rink if he wants more ice time and a bigger contract in 2023.