Blue Jackets sign top-four piece to four-year extension

The Blue Jackets have signed defenseman Dante Fabbro to a four-year, $16.5M extension to keep him from becoming a free agent on Tuesday, the team announced. The deal will carry a cap hit of $4.125M. Fabbro receives a no-trade clause for 2025-26 as part of the deal, Aaron Portzline of The Athletic reports. His deal is paid entirely in base salary aside from a $1M up-front signing bonus, per PuckPedia. His full no-trade clause drops to a 10-team NTC for 2026-27 and 2027-28 and again to a five-time NTC in 2028-29.

It’s a major bit of business for Columbus, and the expected outcome after FanDuel Sports Network’s Andy Strickland reported earlier this month that a long-term deal was on the horizon. Fabbro was one of two top-four defenders for them who could have hit the open market alongside Ivan Provorov. He was the No. 16 UFA on our Top 50 board and the third-highest-ranked right-shot defenseman behind Aaron Ekblad and Brent Burns.

While Provorov’s future remains uncertain, the Jackets will at least keep their top pairing intact heading into next season. It’s also a remarkable turnaround for Fabbro, who goes from waiver claim to a well-compensated top-four piece in a matter of months. The first-round pick of the Predators in 2016 had fallen out of a regular spot in their lineup at the beginning of this past season, going pointless in six games before landing on the wire in early November.

Columbus picked him up as a replacement for veteran d-man Erik Gudbranson, who needed early-season shoulder surgery and was going to miss most of the campaign. They experimented with Fabbro in top-pairing duties alongside star Zach Werenski and never looked back. Fabbro remained stapled to Werenski’s side for the remainder of the year, posting a career-high 26 points and +23 rating in 62 games for the Jackets while averaging 21:39 per game.

The Blue Jackets, already armed with plenty of spending flexibility, now have their top pairing locked in for the next three seasons, the remaining term on Werenski’s deal, for a quite reasonable $13.71M combined cap hit. There’s no reason to believe Fabbro will get separated from Werenski anytime soon — he excelled in a support role, and only five pairings in the league spent more time together than they did (1,009 minutes) despite Fabbro spending the first few weeks of the year in Nashville.

Columbus GM Don Waddell called Fabbro’s extension a “priority” in the team’s announcement. The 27-year-old will now spend his peak years in Columbus on a deal that he could have likely beaten to some degree on the open market, and he’ll have the opportunity to be compensated again at age 31 in 2029. Their attention now turns to either re-upping Provorov or finding a replacement, either on the open market or via trade, to serve as their No. 2 lefty behind Werenski. They could also look to elevate 2022 first-rounder Denton Mateychuk into that role — he already spent a lot of time with Provorov in 2024-25.

The Jackets still have $28.53M in cap space after signing Fabbro, according to PuckPedia. They still need new deals for pending RFAs Dmitri Voronkov and Jordan Harris, although the latter could be a non-tender candidate.

Darren Dreger of TSN was first to report Fabbro’s extension.