Marchenko Scores on His Columbus Return After Fantilli Called Keeping Him a Nightmare

Adam Fantilli did not reach for the usual line about turning the page. Asked at Tuesday’s morning skate about Kirill Marchenko’s return with the Maple Leafs, the Blue Jackets centre answered as the player who centred Marchenko’s line last season and expected to do it again this year. “Happy we got guys who want to be here,” he said, in comments Sportsnet and theScore both carried from the morning skate. “It would have been a nightmare having a guy that didn’t want to be here all year. I’m glad we got that trade done when we did.” Hours later, Marchenko scored on his first game back in Columbus and Toronto won 6-2.

What did Fantilli say on the morning of the game?

The full version has a personal edge the headline quote leaves out. Sportsnet’s account adds that Fantilli found it tough not to take the move personally, because he would have been playing with Marchenko all year and Marchenko did not want to be part of that. The Columbus Dispatch reported that the two have not spoken since a brief conversation just before Marchenko left. This was not a veteran grading a stranger. It was a 22-year-old grading the winger he played beside, on the morning of the first game between the two clubs since the trade, in words nobody in the room has contradicted.

What exactly did Columbus trade away, and what came back?

The deal was finished on the eve of the regular season, after Marchenko had spent camp declining to commit to Columbus and after a summer of reports that he would not sign an extension there. General manager Don Waddell sent Marchenko, goaltender Elvis Merzlikins and forward Miles Wood to Toronto. Columbus received winger Matthew Knies, forward Steven Lorentz, defenseman Emil Andrae and a conditional second-round pick in 2027, as Daily Faceoff set out in its account of the morning. Marchenko, who was a pending restricted free agent, signed a six-year extension with Toronto once the trade was done. He left Columbus with 218 points in 302 games, production the club drafted in the second round in 2018 and developed over four seasons. Players with that record do not usually leave on the eve of a season. They leave then only when the alternative, a season of an unhappy star on an expiring deal, looks worse to the club than the trade does. Fantilli’s comments on Tuesday were the dressing room’s version of the same calculation.

How has the trade worked out for each side so far?

Eleven games in, Toronto holds the better of it on the ice. Marchenko has five goals and 11 points, third on the Leafs in scoring, and his hat trick against Buffalo last week, in the game this site covered for the McKenna benching story, was the loudest single night either winger has had this season. Columbus has had the quieter return. Knies started fast, with four points in his first two games, and has not scored a point in the six games since. The Blue Jackets fell to 3-5-0 on Tuesday, last in the Metropolitan Division, which sharpens every word Fantilli said: a team in that spot can grade a trade on chemistry if it wants, but the standings grade it on points. There is a long season left for the balance to change, and Knies is 24 with a record of production that predates this month. But Tuesday’s exchange happened with the early scoreboard visible to everyone in the room, and Fantilli said what he said anyway.

What did Knies say about being the other half of the trade?

Knies had his own Tuesday availability, and his account of the same deal is about timing rather than grievance. He had nearly been traded at last season’s deadline, and his name stayed in trade rumors through the summer, so the move itself was not the shock. The shock, he told reporters, was that it landed on the eve of the season, after a full training camp and preseason in Toronto, with the subject surfacing again and again until it felt like something the club needed to do. Put the two availabilities side by side and the trade has a clean shape. In Columbus, the player who stayed says the room is better off. The player who arrived says the exit itself was handled about as abruptly as a trade can be. Neither player criticised the other’s club. Both criticised the situation the request created, from opposite ends of it. Tuesday night gave Knies the obvious stage to answer, against his former team, and he was held scoreless again.

Why did Fantilli’s wording land harder in Columbus than it would elsewhere?

Because Marchenko was the second Blue Jacket to ask out this year, and the only one who left. Zach Werenski, the club’s best defenseman, also requested a trade during the summer, then withdrew the request and committed to staying. Fantilli’s line about guys who want to be here draws a boundary that includes Werenski, who tested the exit and chose the room, and excludes Marchenko, who chose the exit. Columbus is also managing the ordinary kind of dressing-room strain this week, the same league-wide pattern visible in Ottawa’s Chabot and Tkachuk situation. Columbus’s strain has a name and a new jersey, and on Tuesday it skated out at Nationwide Arena wearing number 86 for the visitors.

What happened when Marchenko came back on Tuesday night?

The crowd gave him the reception his former teammates predicted. The Dispatch reports he was booed every time he touched the puck or appeared on the video board during the first period. It did not slow him down. Jake Christiansen put Columbus ahead 2:38 in, and at 8:16 of the first period Marchenko tied the game on the power play, when Auston Matthews crashed the net and the puck went in off Marchenko’s skate blade, Reuters reports. Fantilli landed a body check on him in the first period, one of the few Columbus highlights of the night. Toronto then scored four unanswered goals in the second period, by William Nylander, Matthews, Easton Cowan and former Blue Jacket Jack Roslovic, and Jet Greaves was pulled after allowing five goals on 19 shots. By the time the teams left the ice, the boos were aimed at the home team. Charlie Coyle and Marshall Rifai traded third-period goals for the 6-2 final. The player who was supposed to be greeted rudely and sent home rethinking his decision left, in the Dispatch’s words, reassured that he made the right one.

How does this compare with the league’s other trade requests?

Columbus is the only one of the three live cases that has reached its ending. In Winnipeg, Connor Hellebuyck’s unpaid suspension ends on Friday, and the Jets still have to find out whether their goaltender reports, and on what terms; captain Adam Lowry said on Saturday that conversations would be needed and the team would move forward with whoever is in the room. This site’s Hellebuyck holdout coverage tracks that one through its Friday deadline. In Detroit, Dylan Larkin lost the captaincy and kept playing, with his trade request still standing; the Larkin story this site covered on his return shows the other way a room absorbs a request that never becomes a trade. Sportsnet drew the same three-way comparison in its report. A request can end in a trade, a withdrawal or a stalemate. Columbus got the trade, and Tuesday night was the first time the club had to look at what it received and what it gave up in the same game. On the early evidence, the grading Fantilli offered in the morning is not the grading the scoreboard offered at night.