When the Blue Jackets drop the puck on their 25th season of hockey Oct. 9 in Nashville, they’ll take the ice with a six-game winning streak.
The last time we saw the Union Blue, they were on a magical run but couldn't quite pull the final rabbit out of the hat. Needing to win out and get some help down the stretch to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Columbus held up its end of the bargain, sweeping through its final half dozen games. The Blue Jackets fell just short, though, as Montreal’s win in game 82 sent the Habs to the playoffs and the Jackets their separate ways.
As bitterly disappointing as the end was, head coach Dean Evason said last April that when the Blue Jackets reconvene for this training camp, he’d look back at how his team ended the year as a model for how he hopes they’ll play going forward. And speaking at CBJ media day Monday in advance of today's first on-ice practices of training camp presented by OhioHealth today, Evason reiterated that belief.
Sure, there will be almost six months between games, but why not pick up where you left off when you left off on such a high note?
“It’s funny because we just talked this morning as a staff,” Evason said Monday. “We put together our videos to show the guys where each coach has his department, and systematically we were just dialed in (those last six games). Maybe that’s because it was the end of the season. Maybe because we had a lot of the guys back in those six games.
“But yeah, we were all on the same page, and that’s what we’d like to continue here moving toward. They were all dialed in with the system, and they were working not only hard but working together and that’s what we need to continue here to move forward.”
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Rewind the tape and there was a lot to like about the way the Blue Jackets played at the end of the season. Columbus appeared all but dead in the water after losing back-to-back games on a road trip to Toronto and Ottawa, and the Blue Jackets would have been eliminated with a loss April 8 when the Senators returned to Columbus for the second half of the home-and-home series.
But the Blue Jackets started to find their game when they welcomed the Sens to Nationwide Arena, posting a 5-2 victory to keep what felt like the slimmest of playoff hopes alive. Buffalo came to Columbus two days later and the Blue Jackets rallied to their closest win of the six-game stretch, as a third-period comeback pushed Columbus to a 3-2 triumph.
Momentum was then fully on the Jackets’ side when they swept Metropolitan Division champs Washington in back-to-back games over the weekend, drubbing the Caps by a 7-0 score in a home Saturday matinee and then winning 4-1 a day later in DC. A 3-0 blanking of Philadelphia two days later kept the dream alive, but the Blue Jackets could do nothing but watch April 16 when Montreal’s victory over Carolina clinched the Canadiens’ spot.
The Blue Jackets had come too far to back off the gas, though, sending out the Nationwide Arena crowd on a high note in the season finale April 17 with a 6-1 victory over the New York Islanders, even though they took the ice knowing it was too little, too late to make a dent in the playoff race.
Add it up and it was six wins, all in regulation, by a combined score of 28-6. And as Evason started putting his clips together for this fall, he recognized it as the full-team, 200-foot game that he is striving for.
“We defended, we played well in the neutral zone, and obviously we did a lot of great things up the ice in scoring goals,” Evason said. “So yeah, we used those games as teaching points moving forward here. That’s how we have to play. That’s how the Columbus Blue Jackets play. We need to do that right away.”
The six-game span was highlighted by some massive individual efforts, including seven goals from Adam Fantilli, a team high-tying eight points apiece from Zach Werenski and Sean Monahan, and five wins during a remarkable run between the pipes from rookie goaltender Jet Greaves.
The good news? All of those names remain on the roster and are expected to be key players leading the way for the Jackets this time around. It’s all part of a roster that has grown together through highs and lows the past few seasons and now believes it’s built the intangibles to navigate a long season.
“The experience that they gained, the knowledge that we got from all of those games – and not only those, the season – it has to help us,” Evason said. “Regardless of if you’re young or old, to go through that together, we have a lot of guys come back. If you look at the roster at the end, basically it was our group.
“Do we hope that will set us up to move forward and give us that little edge of a little more experience to get that first step of making the playoffs? Yeah, for sure we do.”
Perhaps the most important thing gained through the stretch was confidence, forward Cole Sillinger said. The Blue Jackets got on the ice each night with the feeling that they were going to get the job done, and everything else followed from there.
“I think systematically we were just very sharp,” Sillinger said. “I just felt like there was no real hesitation within our game, and we just went into every game knowing we're going to win and that was the reality of it. We’re not so focused on the past (right now), but we know the expectation, we know the standard.”
