Game of the Month: Blue Jackets captured January opener in 2013

Each month during our 20th anniversary celebration, BlueJackets.com will look back at a memorable moment in franchise history from that month with our Game of the Month feature. The series continues today with the team's Jan. 19, 2013, victory to begin the season against. Nashville.
"Here we go again."
The Blue Jackets -- and their fans -- had to be thinking it.

When Nashville's Martin Erat scored just 39 seconds into the 2013 opener, a team and a fan base that had waited patiently for the NHL season could be excused if it thought the worst.
They had waited through a work stoppage, a summer trade of a franchise icon and more years of bad hockey than either cared to admit, only for the excitement of hockey's return to last … 39 seconds.
Or so it appeared.
Yes, Erat scored that goal, but the 2013 season -- and that opener against the rival Predators -- turned out to be a harbinger of good things to come.
Columbus would come back to win that Jan. 19, 2013, game in a shootout, kicking off a 48-game sprint of an NHL season that nearly ended with a miracle run to the postseason. A year later, powered by many of the names that would become franchise icons, the Blue Jackets would play Stanley Cup Playoffs hockey, starting the turnaround of a woebegone franchise into a consistent winner.
And it all started with Nick Foligno.

Rebuilding a franchise

OK, that's a bit of an oversimplification. When Foligno scored a power-play goal 16:08 into the first period of that game to tie it at 1, he wasn't the captain of the franchise or the Columbus icon that he'd become. And that goal didn't seem like a turning point in franchise history, just the first tally of a season that had been anticipated for a variety of reasons.
But looking back, there certainly is some symbolism behind the whole thing. There hasn't quite been another offseason like the one the Blue Jackets -- and the entire NHL -- went through from the June close of the 2012 campaign to the delayed start of the 2013 season.
The NHL went into that offseason under a dark cloud as everyone knew the collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players had expired, and the specter of another work stoppage hung over the sport.
As bad as that was for the sport, things felt even worse in Columbus. The Blue Jackets were coming off perhaps the most disappointing season in franchise history, as a team that had made big moves for the 2011-12 season instead watched everything go wrong. Coach Scott Arniel was fired, summer trade acquisition Jeff Carter never embraced Columbus and was dealt again at the deadline, and the team finished 30th of the 30 NHL teams in the standings.
"There was nothing right about the whole season," forward RJ Umberger told the Columbus Dispatch at the time. "I've tried to think about one thing that went right, and I've got nothing. It was the worst season I've ever been through, the worst season I could even imagine."
Even more notably, general manager Scott Howson acknowledged in February 2012 that captain and franchise player Rick Nash had requested a trade. With the franchise looking to turn the page on what had been a disappointing stretch of seasons, it made sense to move Nash for future assets, but the admission still sent shockwaves through the league, organization and fanbase.
Unlike Carter, who was sent to Los Angeles for a first-round pick and defenseman Jack Johnson, Nash stayed with the team through the trade deadline, but when Howson looked to remake the franchise in the summer, a deal seemed all but inevitable.
Howson still had some other moves to make, though, and started at the NHL draft in late June. There, looking to address the goaltending situation after three straight up-and-down seasons for starter Steve Mason, the CBJ general manager sent three draft picks to Philadelphia for a talented young goalie named Sergei Bobrovsky. Then on July 1, defenseman Marc Methot was traded to Ottawa for Foligno, a young, physical and skilled forward who came to Columbus looking to establish himself in a new situation.
"This is a player (Foligno) we've had our eye on for some time now, a player we think has already established himself as a very good NHL player and is still emerging, and a player who has a chance to really help out our team," Howson said at the time of the then-24-year-old. "He's versatile. He's competitive. It's just a really good fit for us."
That same day, Howson signed defenseman Adrian Aucoin to add veteran leadership, but the big move was coming. Howson pulled the trigger on July 23, sending Nash to the New York Rangers for a package that would include NHL centers Brandon Dubinsky and Artem Anisimov, defenseman prospect Tim Erixon and a 2013 first-round pick.
The changes didn't stop there. While the work stoppage did eventually come to pass, leading to the postponement of the start of the season, Columbus stayed busy. In late October, the franchise announced the hiring of John Davidson as president of hockey operations, trusting the man who had built the St. Louis Blues into a perennial power to do the same in the capital city.
Finally, in January, the Blue Jackets would get a chance to see the impact all the moves would have on the ice, as the lockout ended and a 48-game regular season was scheduled from mid-January to late April.
It was certainly a new-look squad predicated on defense first. Foligno, Dubinsky and Anisimov added size and feistiness to a forward group that returned Umberger, Vinny Prospal, Derick Brassard and Mark Letestu, while youngsters Ryan Johansen, Cam Atkinson and Matt Calvert were counted on to jump from prospects to players. Johnson and Aucoin were expected to solidify a defensive group anchored by Fedor Tyutin and James Wisniewski, while Bobrovsky and Mason were to be counted on to fight for minutes.
But the message from head coach Todd Richards was clear: This team would win by playing as a unit.
"What we want to do is plain and simple -- keep the puck out of the net -- and we need more committed guys to do it," Richards told reporters at the time. "So the emphasis from day one is to just become a better checking team."

A feel-good start

So you can imagine how people felt when Erat's shot deflected past a screened Bobrovsky just 39 seconds into the season, setting off the all-too-familiar strains of Tim McGraw's "I Like It, I Love It" in Bridgestone Arena.
Here we go again had to be rattling between the ears of the returning players. Oh no thought fans who had watched Columbus win just one of its previous 24 trips to Nashville. So this is Columbus had to be on the minds of the new players just settling into their CBJ careers.
But these new-look Blue Jackets didn't bow. Erat took a slashing penalty with the score still 1-0, and Columbus took advantage, as Foligno got to the front of the net and deflected a slap shot by Tyutin past Pekka Rinne to tie things up with 3:52 to go in the first.
"I scored the first goal if I'm not mistaken," Foligno said recently when asked about the game. "I'm pretty sure Fedor Tyutin shot it from the point and it deflected in off of me. If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't anything off my stick. That's pretty much where I score my goals (from in front). It was kind of neat just to be able to contribute right away."
The tie score didn't last long as Nashville tallied its own power-play goal a few minutes later when Ryan Ellis scored in a scramble with 2:05 left in the period, but Columbus would again battle back. The Blue Jackets tied it at 2 with 7:55 left in the second when Anisimov got behind the Nashville defense, took a breakout pass from Tyutin, fought off defender Paul Gaustad and roofed a backhander over Rinne to score on a fantastic individual effort.
It stayed tied for the remainder of regulation and overtime despite a Nashville push, and Bobrovsky -- who got the start over Mason because he had stayed fresh during the lockout, starring for SKA St. Petersburg in his native Russia -- finished with 32 saves on 34 shots in his CBJ debut.
There was still a matter of a shootout to settle things, but it wouldn't be easy. The skills competition stretched all the way into a sixth round, where Brassard deked and fired a forehand past Rinne, while Bobrovsky stopped Craig Smith to seal the victory and make the Blue Jackets 1-0.
"It was a big deal because from the team (members) I had talked to before, anytime they went into Nashville, it was usually a (butt) kicking," Foligno says now. "That was kind of nice to be able to join the team and have that success early on. I remember how excited a lot of the guys were that had been here to beat that team because it wasn't the easiest thing to do."
It was a good start to the season, but an even better finish was in the cards. The Blue Jackets returned for the home opener two days later and took Detroit to a shootout before dropping a 4-3 final. Columbus then lost its next three, and the familiar pattern of what appeared to be a lost season returned, with the Blue Jackets falling to 5-12-4 with an overtime loss at Chicago on March 1. In the midst of the struggles, Davidson made a big move, replacing Howson with the league's first European general manager, Jarmo Kekalainen, in mid-February.
But after that loss to begin March, Columbus returned home to play nine of the next 10 at Nationwide Arena, capturing the first game in overtime vs. Chicago. A shootout win vs. Edmonton and an overtime victory against Vancouver followed, then the Blue Jackets blanked Detroit on a Saturday afternoon, with Prospal pointing to the scoreboard showing the CBJ lead in the midst of a late-game kerfuffle with a Red Wings opponent.
Suddenly, there was a swagger on the team, and by the end of that 10-game stretch, Columbus was on an 8-0-2 run to pull itself back into the race. It set up a wild finish, with the Blue Jackets catching fire down the stretch, including an 8-1-0 record in the last nine games. In front of a rocking Nationwide Arena in the season finale April 27, the Blue Jackets rallied to beat Nashville again by a 3-1 score with three tallies in the last 10 minutes, concluding the season 24-17-7 -- including a 19-5-3 finishing kick.
In the end, though, it wasn't enough to earn the franchise's second playoff berth, as Minnesota won on the season's final day to tie the Blue Jackets in the standings and earn the tiebreaker for the last spot in the postseason. That reward would have to wait a year, as a similar cast of characters again caught fire down the stretch during the 2013-14 season to clinch a playoff berth.
"It was a fresh start for me -- everybody really," Foligno says now as he looks at the team's development. "We had Brandon Dubinsky coming in, we had Sergei Bobrovsky coming in. We had a bunch of misfits in a lot of ways trying to figure out where exactly we fit on the team. We had older players, Adrian Aucoin, Vinny Prospal, and it was just so cool to see us come together as a team.
"At first, it was a bunch of, not individuals, but guys trying to find their way, and then by the end of the season, we were one of the better teams in the league and should have made the playoffs that year. It was really neat to go through that. I think that really springboarded us as an organization to have the success we had the following year, and I loved it."
What was a ragtag group of youngsters, journeymen and wily veterans at the start of the 2012-13 season would become the core of the franchise's rise, as names like Kekalainen, Foligno, Atkinson, Dubinsky, Calvert, Johnson, Bobrovsky and David Savard would anchor multiple playoff berths and bring about a culture of success that continues to this day.
"I think it just set the stage," Foligno said. "It was a year in flux, and then all the stability happened. It set the stage for us to become the team that we are now. We got our stability at the top, and then it was really fun to see our group come together."