Three years ago, Seth Jones was one of the best defensemen in the world on the verge of winning multiple Norris Trophies over what was sure to be a storied career. Two years ago, he was an elite two-way defenseman that every team wished they had. One year ago, he was a bona fide No. 1 defenseman who still had a super-high ceiling.
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This year, he’s a bum. Comically overpaid. Completely washed at the decrepit age of 26.
It says it right there on all the dismissive tweets Amy Jones sends her son. Seth isn’t online all that much, but Amy does enough searching for his name for the both of them.
“She’s got her enemies, my mom does,” Jones said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Ma, I really don’t care, but thank you. Thank you for that. Just trying to eat dinner right now.’”
i don’t see one
— dom at the athletic (@domluszczyszyn) September 17, 2021
No, Jones doesn’t go seeking out the criticisms — the tweets tagging him from fans split over the acquisition, the columns about the potentially catastrophic contract extension the Blackhawks gave him, the analytical takedowns that say the Blue Jackets would have had 1.1 more wins and 5.9 more goals with a replacement-level player than with Jones last season, the worst GAR and WAR of his career.
But he sure as hell knows about them. And they sure as hell fuel him.
“You can’t control what people say about you, and you can read it if you want — it just gives you motivation,” he said. “I definitely take motivation from that. I know I didn’t have the greatest season last year. It is what it is. I can’t do anything about it now except come into the next season ready to go. That’s my full intention.”
He’d better.
After all, the Blackhawks gave Columbus defenseman Adam Boqvist, a first-round pick and a second-round pick (and moved back 20 spots in the first round this summer) for Jones. They then promptly gave Jones an eight-year, $76 million extension. They even gave him Niklas Hjalmarsson’s No. 4, because No. 3 hangs in the rafters at the United Center in honor of Keith Magnuson and Pierre Pilote.
So Jones had better be something along the lines of Hjalmarsson in his own end. Oh, and he better be a perfect hybrid of Duncan Keith’s skating and Brent Seabrook’s shot in the offensive zone. Wouldn’t hurt if he could rack up points like Doug Wilson did, for that matter. And he’d better do all that right away. Like, on opening night.
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Because when a team invests that much draft capital, a potentially elite homegrown talent, and all that money and term in you, you don’t get much of a grace period. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt. You don’t get time to ease into a new system in a new city on a new team.
You’re a new face of the franchise. The physical embodiment of the end of a rebuild and the start of a win-now era. Maybe even the captain by the time these nine years are up. You’d better be great.
And that’s exactly what Jones hopes to do. He’s just not going to overreact to one bad season and change everything about his game to do it.
“There’s always pressure,” he said. “I put pressure on myself to be the best I can be. But when it comes to (feeling the weight of the contract), not really. I’ve just got to go out there and play my game, and hopefully, that can take care of itself. I still have room to grow in my game. Of course, I want to be better offensively this year. But at the same time, I’m not going to go force things all the time and get out of my comfort zone and away from what makes me a good player.”
So what is it that made Jones — at his best — such a good player? The kind of player who finished fourth in the Norris voting in 2018 after putting up 16 goals and 41 assists in 78 games while eating up an average of 24:36 of ice time per game? The kind of player who makes scouts and general managers do anything possible to get him on their team?
He’s 6-foot-4, yes. He’s a terrific skater for a player that size, sure. He can run a power play with precision and menace, absolutely. Hockey Men love all that, and for good reason. But the more analytically inclined see the precipitous drop in his metrics and cast a wary eye at Jones getting more money than, say, Cale Makar, regardless of the free-agent status of the two. Also for good reason.
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But for what it’s worth, those who’ve played with and against him still rate him very highly.
“He’s an elite, two-way defenseman,” said Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy. “You can tell the skill level he has defensively, whether it’s his active stick or body position, he’s very, very stout defending. He’s a great defenseman. Offensively, he’s dynamic as well. He can produce, he can get up in the play, he’s a gifted skater. He’s just awesome.”
Roman Josi was part of a cadre of young rising stars with Jones in Nashville and played with him for three seasons. He was then reacquainted with Jones — well, on the ice, at least, as the two remain good friends to this day — when Columbus was temporarily relocated to the Central Division for the pandemic-shortened 2021 season.
Josi didn’t hesitate when asked about Jones’ potential impact in Chicago.
“He’s going to be great,” Josi said. “Especially on that team, playing with guys like (Patrick) Kane, (Jonathan) Toews and (Alex) DeBrincat, he’s going to be really good. I played with him for (three) years and even back then when he was a lot younger, he was an unbelievable player and you could tell how good he’s going to be. It’s not good for us (in Nashville) that we’re playing him that much.”
Perhaps no player in the league spends as much time watching and studying and learning about other players’ games than Kane. And while he’s obviously biased now that Jones is a teammate, he sees Jones as a panacea for many of the Blackhawks’ most persistent ills — their lack of depth, their poor breakouts, their inability to sustain offensive pressure, their inconsistent power play and their ineffective penalty kill.
“I think Jones is going to make a big difference,” Kane said. “He’ll eat up a lot of ice time, help us get out of our end, and make our power play and special teams better. We’re excited to have him.”
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Jones also gets rave reviews as a teammate, his laid-back persona allowing him to fit in well with just about any social circle. Jones arrived in Chicago last Sunday and started participating in informal workouts at Fifth Third Arena, getting in three sessions before hitting the NHL’s Player Media Tour on Thursday and Friday, chatting with reporters and suits alike, and donning his new Blackhawks uniform for hype videos and meme-able GIFs.
It was oddly easier the last time he got traded, from Nashville to Columbus, in January 2016. There was no time to sit and stew, no time to worry about finding a place to live, learning all the little cliques in the dressing room and adjusting from “they” to “we” when referring to his new team in interviews. He got traded during the day, hopped on a plane that night, and logged more than 22 minutes for Columbus in Carolina the next evening.
When Blackhawks training camp opens on Thursday, he’ll have had two months process the trade. So once things get rolling and everyone’s on the ice, he’s confident he’ll feel like just one of the gang, even if his contract separates and elevates him from most of his teammates. The NHL’s near-99-percent vaccination rate should allow for a more normal NHL experience this season, and Jones expects to take advantage of those social opportunities away from the rink.
“That was the big thing last year,” he said. “It was hard to really get tight as a group. You couldn’t go to dinner, couldn’t do anything away from the rink. Or they didn’t want you to, at least. This year it’ll be a lot easier when you have road dinners, dinners at home, you can hang out with the guys as a group away from the rink. I’m really looking forward to that. That’s when you get a lot tighter as a group, you start hanging out off the ice and really figuring out each other’s personalities and funny things about each other.”
So who is Seth Jones? Or more pressingly, what is Seth Jones? Is he an elite No. 1 defenseman? Or is he an overpaid shell of his old self as he approaches his 27th birthday in a couple weeks? Is he the victim of circumstance, his numbers dragged down by an awful Blue Jackets team last season, primed to rebound on a Blackhawks team loaded with high-end offensive talent? Or is he an overrated “just OK” player who couldn’t drag that awful Blue Jackets team into contention? Is he the man to bring the Blackhawks back to prominence? Or is he just the latest albatross of a contract hanging around their necks?
Time will tell, of course. The Blackhawks have nine years to figure that out.
But we do know this much: Seth Jones is a motivated man. Motivated to put his name back among the league’s best. Motivated to put a sock in the mouth of all his critics. Motivated to get his mom to stop forwarding him mean tweets by rendering the mean tweets moot.
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He knows it won’t be easy to shut out all the noise and win over the skeptics in Chicago and around the league. He knows Step 1 begins at 10 a.m. on Thursday at Fifth Third Arena.
And he knows that there’s no time to waste.
“It is hard,” he said. “I definitely want to have a great start to the season, like any other season. I don’t want to be the guy who doesn’t have a great start and wasn’t ready. … I’m very excited. Extremely excited. I love being out there with the guys. Seems like a tight group and we have a nice mix between veterans and young guys. Hopefully, we can all come together.”
Well, if he doesn’t, you can be sure he’ll hear about it.
Advanced stats via Evolving Hockey.
(Top photo: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images)
