COLUMBUS — The number Don Waddell has been negotiating around all fall is not the number that matters tonight. That number became someone else’s problem the moment Leo Carlsson signed an offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers for $18 million a year. Waddell’s number was always going to land somewhere close to it. The question tonight is whether the CBA deadline forces his hand before he’s ready to meet it.
Adam Fantilli has not been in camp. He and Columbus remain $2 to $3 million apart on annual average value, a gap that has been publicly documented since September and that both sides acknowledge without resolving. The Blue Jackets believe in Fantilli. Fantilli’s camp believes the Carlsson offer sheet established a market floor for elite 2023 draftees that Columbus has been slow to recognize. Tonight, with the eight-year extension window closing at midnight, the negotiation has acquired a structural deadline that the market dispute alone never had. The New Jersey Devils used that same window earlier tonight to lock up Luke Hughes as a franchise cornerstone. Columbus has not.
The new collective bargaining agreement, which takes effect Tuesday at midnight, limits same-team extensions to seven years. Contracts signed before then remain subject to the outgoing rules, under which eight-year extensions are still permitted.
For Don Waddell, that distinction cuts both ways. An eight-year deal at Adam Fantilli’s desired figure would create a longer commitment, but it would also provide a longer cap anchor for a contract covering Columbus’s competitive window, whenever that window opens.
Eight years is not necessarily worse than seven. Tonight is simply the final opportunity to choose it.
Fantilli scored 31 goals in 2025–26, matching Kirill Marchenko. They became only the second pair of Blue Jackets teammates in franchise history to score at least 30 goals each in the same season.
Columbus built something last year, and Fantilli was at its center. The holdout exists not because the organization doubts the player, but because the two sides remain $2 million to $3 million apart on what that center is worth. The Carlsson offer sheet has made Fantilli’s position easier to defend.
Connor Bedard and the Chicago Blackhawks arrived at this same deadline from the opposite end of the leverage spectrum: a player who had answered every developmental question and left Kyle Davidson with a contract architecture problem rather than a market dispute. Davidson knew exactly what he was pricing. Waddell knows what Fantilli did last year. He does not entirely know what Fantilli costs.
The offer-sheet dynamic complicated the math in ways Waddell had not controlled. Carlsson was 21 when the Flyers tendered the offer. Anaheim matched it, which meant the Ducks valued Carlsson at $18 million a year over five years more than they valued the draft picks they would have received for declining. That match established a data point that Fantilli’s agent used to anchor the ask. Waddell can argue the production profiles are different. The argument is harder to win when the player being compared reached comparable point totals in the same draft class.
Yahoo Sports documented Waddell’s public posture through the standoff: confident the deal would get done before training camp, a deadline that has already passed without resolution. No ultimatums. No indications of a trade request. No suggestion that the relationship between player and organization has fractured. The gap is a market gap, not a character gap. That is the reason the negotiation has continued without escalating.
The eight-year deadline creates a choice that the holdout itself did not. Waddell can meet Fantilli’s number tonight and lock in eight years. He can offer something between the two positions and see whether the deadline moves the player. He can let midnight pass and negotiate a seven-year deal once Fantilli returns to camp. All three paths lead to Fantilli in a Blue Jackets uniform eventually. The RFA system gives Columbus leverage that does not expire at midnight. What expires at midnight is the eighth year.
Whether that eighth year is worth bridging the AAV gap is the question only Waddell can answer. Thirty-one goals at 21 years old, in a season when Columbus made the case for its own rebuild, is a number Fantilli’s camp believes earns the price. The franchise that drafted him second overall in 2023 has not said they disagree.
They have said they disagree on what that price is.
At midnight, the frame for the negotiation changes. The market for Fantilli’s services will not.
