CBJ Today: A goalie goal? Elvis was trying

Each weekday this season, BlueJackets.com will post CBJ Today, a look at news, notes, analysis and fun stuff from around the Blue Jackets world. It's everything you need to know if you're a fan going into the day.

Elvis Goes for Goal

When Elvis Merzlikins came out to the media Zoom to discuss the Blue Jackets' Wednesday night win over Nashville, it didn't seem like anything particularly newsworthy would come out of it.
Sure, he had saved 30 of 32 shots on the way to the win, but it wasn't a particularly noteworthy effort from him. Merzlikins had been very good, of course, as he has been down the entire stretch run, but it wasn't like he had stood on his head and made a number of Hasek-ian saves.
Yet when I asked him about whether he enjoyed the pressure of protecting a one-goal lead down the stretch, he had an answer no one quite expected.
"I was just thinking to score, to be honest," Merzlikins said. "It's the end of the season, so it would be fun to score."
Wait, what? I mean, we know the last few games of the regular season don't mean a ton in the standings, but was he focused on scoring a goal as much as getting the win? And did he really take this to head coach John Tortorella?
Well, yes. You have to appreciate the moxie and the confidence.
"I just was really honest with him," Merzlikins said. "I told him to not freak out if I am going to mess up, because there was a bigger chance I was going to mess up, but I didn't really care. I told him, 'I am going to try to score.' I just gave him a heads up that even if I messed up, that if they tied it up and then we lost the game, to not be mad at me. That was the only focus I had was to score the goal. I cleared all the snow on the ice in front of me. I was just waiting for the moment.
"He was laughing, so then I was more calm. But he said, 'Go ahead, try.'"
This, of course, meant having to ask Tortorella about the situation. And honestly, he cut the question off before it was even over.
"I told him, 'I don't give an eff what you do, just don't eff it up,'" Tortorella said. "Did you see him race to me? It's the fastest I've seen him skate since he's been here. He was ready to go."
Well then. I mean, you can't be mad about a team finding something fun down the stretch. And I have said since Merzlikins arrived in the NHL that he will score a goal at this level one day. He has the skill and the chutzpah to do it.
The opportunity didn't present itself Wednesday night, but it will one day. When it does, I think he's gonna do it.

A tale of the tape

I couldn't help myself Wednesday morning, so I bit the bullet and did it.
I asked for Alexandre Texier to do an interview over Zoom, and the whole point of it was to ask about stick tape.
I didn't know at the time he'd be out with a lower-body injury Wednesday night, but I was curious about a number of different stick tape setups he had been using in recent games. Sometimes, he was going with a thin white stripe across the bottom of the stick. Other times he had tape on the end of his stick; others, he did not.

The stick is the essential tool of any hockey player, the one thing that connects players to the puck. For as much as we all write about all the different things going on with a player and a team, we rarely seem to ask about the most important piece of equipment a player uses (see Patrik Laine, who used a new stick to break a goalless drought a few weeks ago).
So I did on Wednesday. It turns out, with Texier having not scored a goal since January, he's been trying different tape setups to see if he could find one that would put a puck in the net.
"Just trying something different, you know?" he said. "That's what I do usually when things are not working, I try to change. I think it's just in my head. It doesn't change anything, I just like it. New things. I like to change my sticks as well. It's just in my head."
I do remember a year ago when Texier was a rookie that he plays with the team's purple Hockey Fights Cancer sticks because he had a good game the first time he used it, so maybe it's no shock he's a little bit superstitious.
"I just like to change," he said. "I come into the game and maybe I'll play with a different stick or a different tape job or a different color. It just depends how I felt before the game. Sometimes I feel good, so I am not changing anything, so sometimes I feel I need to change."