Don Waddell had exactly one job on July 2: shut down the Kirill Marchenko trade rumors. What he actually said was that Marchenko is “going to be a Blue Jacket when the season starts,” a promise about one specific date, wrapped around a volunteered admission that he’s had agent conversations he then refused to describe.
Blue Jackets insider Jeff Svoboda caught the full answer in real time:
https://twitter.com/JacketsInsider/status/2072713738172424202
Notice what that sentence doesn’t do. It doesn’t say Marchenko isn’t getting traded. It doesn’t say the Columbus Blue Jackets aren’t shopping him. It guarantees one window, opening night.
It also drops in an admission that talks with Marchenko’s agent happened at all. Nobody asked Waddell to bring that up. He did it anyway, then closed the door on it in the same breath. That’s Columbus’s non-denial denial, in one sentence.
Marchenko’s agent, Dan Milstein, has had plenty to say since. None of it has been a denial either. “Incredible reporting. Truly. The confidence here is doing a lot of heavy lifting, shame it’s not attached to anything real,” he wrote in late July, going after the accounts pushing the rumor instead of the rumor itself.
He followed it with, “Go back to your vacation, man the mystery forward is doing more work than your ‘sources’ right now.” Per Yahoo Sports, Pro Football Network, and NHLRumors.com, he’s also waved the whole cycle off as “10% true or 0% true.”
I read those on a lakefront run Monday morning and had to stop mid-stride, because Milstein is out here embarrassing reporters with real specificity and still hasn’t typed the six words that would kill this outright: he’s not going to get traded.
The teams attached haven’t gone anywhere. The Montreal Canadiens remain the primary suitor, the Utah Mammoth have surfaced as a secondary option, and the Edmonton Oilers, Boston Bruins, and Chicago Blackhawks all got floated earlier in the broader rumor cycle. Independent reporting from Aaron Portzline, Mark Scheig, and Marco D’Amico says there are no active negotiations as of July 27, though Montreal stays interested “if things pick up.” A viral report claiming the Canadiens had already secured permission to negotiate an extension got debunked days later, which tells you how fast this cycle moves without anyone confirming a thing. Real interest, no signed paper, and just enough silence from both sides to keep every account with a following guessing out loud.
It’s one thread in the trade frenzy that already reshaped this offseason, sitting right next to the rest of this summer’s free agency chaos. The Marchenko trade rumors won’t die, and the two people best positioned to kill them keep choosing not to.
Put Waddell and Milstein side by side and the shape of this gets obvious. Waddell answered a direct question with an admission he refuses to detail. Milstein answered nothing directly and spent his energy dismantling the people asking. A GM who over-explains and an agent who won’t engage are running the same play from two different angles, and it’s the same play every time a trade rumor is actually true: talk around it, never through it.
Neither man has said the six words that would end this.
