Blue Jackets open development camp with top recent draft picks

The Blue Jackets opened their four-day prospects camp with 34 players at the OhioHealth Ice Haus, and the roster said plenty about the traits Columbus still prizes from its pipeline: pace, structure, two-way responsibility and enough physical maturity to handle pro habits early. That showed up most clearly in Evan Jardine, the Youngstown Phantoms forward who turned a 27-goal, 34-assist season into a fourth-round draft call and an immediate look inside the organization’s development track.

The camp ran from Monday, June 29 through Thursday, July 2, ending with a Prospect Game at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday. The first day included medicals and off-ice testing, then the group moved into on-ice work under development coaches Tommy Cross, Anthony Donskov and Matthew Donskov, goaltending coach Niklas Backstrom, Cleveland Monsters goaltending coach Brad Thiessen and skating consultant Lee Harris. Paul Russell of Trinity College, a member of the NHLCA BIPOC Coaches Program, also served as a guest coach. Columbus presented the camp through G&J Pepsi and used the week to fold the newest draft class into the same teaching environment as the club’s recent first-round picks.

That mix mattered because Columbus brought in four first-rounders, including 2024 fourth overall pick Cayden Lindstrom, 2025 14th overall pick Jackson Smith, 2025 20th overall pick Pyotr Andreyanov and 2026 14th overall pick Oscar Hemming. Lindstrom was attending his third development camp, Smith and Andreyanov their second, and Hemming was making his debut. The Blue Jackets also said every member of the club’s seven-player 2026 draft class was scheduled to attend, giving the staff a broad look at players at different points in the same pipeline.

For USHL followers, Jardine was the clearest example of how that pathway is supposed to work. Columbus selected him 121st overall after he helped Youngstown reach the playoffs and averaged better than a point per game in 53 games. He now arrives committed to Ohio State, which places him in Columbus sooner than many prospects and gives the Blue Jackets a direct line from junior production to college development to NHL evaluation.

Smith offered another benchmark for how the organization is measuring readiness. After his 11-15-26 freshman season at Penn State, he finished fourth among NCAA defensemen in goals and tied for first among freshman blueliners in points. Hemming, described by the club as a big-bodied forward who will continue to develop, came in as a different kind of project after a contract dispute sent him to Boston College for a full season. Columbus has used this late-June, early-July window before, including at OhioHealth Chiller North in 2023 and back at the Ice Haus in 2024, and the camp has become the place where the Blue Jackets sort recent draft capital into the next stage of the plan.