Jackets Sign Riley Nash

The Columbus Blue Jackets added a player named Nash, but it wasn't the one that maybe everyone was expecting.  Riley Nash signed on with the club on Sunday, inking a 3-year, $8.25 million deal, moving over from Boston.

With the Bruins last season, Nash posted 15 goals and 41 points in 76 games, sneaking up the ranks to 143rd among all forwards and establishing himself as a solid offensive contributor.

The Blue Jackets needed to add some more help up front in this off-season and Nash is a pretty good start.  They will still need to look after re-signing a couple of key restricted free agents in Oliver Bjorkstrand and Boone Jenner, but they should still be in the market for some reasonably priced depth as well.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Artemi Panarin	6.000	Seth Jones	5.400	Sergei Bobrovsky	7.425
Brandon Dubinsky	5.850	David Savard	4.250	Joonas Korpisalo	0.900
Cam Atkinson	5.750	Markus Nutivaara	2.700
Nick Foligno	5.500	Zach Werenski	0.925
Alexander Wennberg	4.900	Gabriel Carlsson	0.894
Riley Nash	2.750	Dean Kukan	0.725
Josh Anderson	1.800	Scott Harrington	0.675
Pierre-Luc Dubois	0.894
Sonny Milano	0.863
Lukas Sedlak	0.825
Zac Dalpe	0.725
Nathan Gerbe	0.675
Markus Hannikainen	0.675

If the Jackets are indeed going to go shopping, they will do so with quite a bit of cap space to work with.  They are still rocking over $13.9 million in space, underneath the $79.5 million cap ceiling and that should provide them plenty of money to go out and accomplish a couple more key signings, including their own free agents in-house.