After CBJ wins, we'll give three takeaways about what stood out or what we'll remember from the Blue Jackets' victory.
1. The Blue Jackets turned in a full team effort to end Buffalo’s 10-game winning streak.
The visitors walked into Nationwide Arena on Saturday afternoon as the hottest team in the NHL, but the home team wasn’t playing too shabby, either.
The Blue Jackets had won three of their last four, and it would have been a four-game winning streak had Columbus not handed over their New Year’s Eve game to New Jersey with a two-minute blip of mistakes that led to three goals by the Devils.
So for head coach Dean Evason, the message wasn’t so much about what the Sabres were doing but about the Blue Jackets getting back to their game and playing the way they largely had over the previous stretch.
“We might have mentioned (their streak) obviously in the pregame, but it was more about us and how we were playing,” Evason said. “Again, besides five minutes the last game, we thought that we’ve played a lot of good hockey here in the last five games, so we wanted to build off of that and remember what we didn’t do in that third period or five minutes.”
That meant a defense-first focus, especially against a Sabres team that had been filling up the net in recent games. It also meant a team effort, and the Blue Jackets got that in the win.
Jet Greaves was named the No. 1 star after making 32 saves, but Columbus got contributions from up and down the lineup. Ten different players got on the scoresheet and five – in order, Denton Mateychuk, Brendan Gaunce, Dmitri Voronkov, Mathieu Olivier and Cole Sillinger – scored, while Mateychuk, Zach Werenski and Damon Severson had two-point nights. The penalty kill did its job, killing all five Buffalo power plays and getting a shorthanded goal from Gaunce.
And most importantly, the Blue Jackets stuck to their structure and never really let the Sabres get going.
“We just talked about, it was a bit of a boring game, which is wonderful for us to score five goals and be boring,” Evason said. “That’s what we want to do.”
2. Werenski seamlessly stepped back into the lineup, and it sure is good to have him back.
By a few measures, it was a bit of a ho-hum performance by one of the best defensemen in the NHL. After missing four games with a lower body injury suffered when he blocked a shot Dec. 20 at Anaheim, Werenski skated 23:12 – more than three minutes less than his average – while posting a pair of secondary assists and putting five shots on goal.
OK, that’s a pretty big night for most defensemen, but Werenski isn’t most defensemen. He’s one of the best in the NHL, one who still tallied his fourth consecutive multipoint effort and now has points in 13 consecutive games he’s played in Nationwide Arena.
But it also wasn’t quite the dynamic, Roy Kent-esque (he’s here, he’s there, he’s every-blanking-where) effort we’ve seen at times from Werenski, and that was by design.
“I just wanted to be good defensively, try not to give up too much,” Werenski said. “I haven’t played in a long time, and I only had one practice since before the break so I’m definitely shaking some rust out. I didn’t want to be too aggressive offensively, just try to take what was given. At the end of the day, just trying to help the team. I felt good about it, and I’m hoping each game I get better and better.”
Considering the Blue Jackets seemingly have found some keys to keeping opponents off the board – Columbus has now allowed just eight goals in the last five games – that was a sound strategy. But still, let’s be honest – Werenski is Werenski, and the U.S. Olympian’s elite talent was still obvious throughout the game.
“He looked real good,” Evason said. “He didn’t look like he was favoring anything. Maybe at the start of practice, we thought he was a little bit yesterday, but today he looked like he was fully good to go.”
3. It might get a little lost in the shuffle, but Gaunce’s shorthanded goal was a game changer.
The Blue Jackets scored five and pulled away to one of their few stress-free victories of the season, but it was Gaunce’s first-period tally that went down as the third game-winner of his 205-game NHL career.
Buffalo was on the power play late in the first with a chance to break a 1-1 tie, but instead the Blue Jackets struck a major change of momentum with Gaunce’s unassisted goal. Sabres star forward Tage Thompson – who was named to the U.S. Olympic team a day before – tried to turn to keep a puck in at the blue line but instead caught an edge and dramatically tumbled to the ice.
From there, Gaunce pounced, taking the puck and avoiding Thompson’s attempted stick check to skate free along the right side. He had nothing but fresh air in front of him, curling to the center of the ice and firing through goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen’s legs with a forehand shot when he hit the top of the circles.
