So you know when a player or a coach or a color guy or whatever is talking about the NHL regular season, and the grind of it, and how this or that really shows up on those “Thursday’s in January in Columbus”, or whatever? It’s always <random weeknight> in <midseason month> in <random non-Original Six/NBC darling city>. Well this game is that game. This is the dregs of the NHL season. As the wonderful @307x stated in our BSH Slack during the game “this is a dog’s breakfast of a game.” There were somehow 60 shots on goal in this game, only two went in, yet it wasn’t like Mike Condon stole this game for the Senators. Oh yeah, the Sens beat the Jackets 2-0 tonight in Columbus.
The game sucked, the Jackets were pretty meh, while still managing to out-shoot Ottawa 42-28, and crush them to the tune of 58.33 CF%. Some players were fine, others were okay, no one was really brutal or anything but also no one was great (maybe Zach Werenski, but probably closer to good than great). This game is over now, and the CBJ now alternate wins and losses (hat tip to @CBJDuck), so they are probably going to win next game.
The Good: Bob’s Arm Strength
Bob made a couple nice stops tonight, and really played well enough for the CBJ to win had some other things gone their way. The Zack Smith breakaway stop was a beaut, but the one that really impressed me most was Bob fending off Bobby Ryan from pushing the puck into the net near the end of the 2nd period. He was sprawled out on the ice, with nothing to dig in against, and somehow manages to keep his arm (and the puck) out of the net.
The Bad: Bounces
All the breaks that were going the Jackets way for much of the season did not in this game. I hate PDO and all the yammering about it more than most, but there really is a luck element in hockey. There were two prime examples of bounces just not going the CBJ way on that late-game powerplay. The Seth Jones blast off the post could have very easily rattled around behind Condon, and ended up as a goal for Cam Atkinson or Nick Foligno. Then a short while later Cam put the puck through Condon, but he got enough for it to roll wide. It takes a slightly different path through Condon, and it’s a goal. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second.
The Ugly: Passing
The Jackets win streak was highlighted by the absurd ability their defense showed to quickly move the puck up the ice. Like clockwork, they would get it, make one pass up-ice, and the play would be heading the other direction. We are going on a couple weeks now of that aspect not being nearly as crisp as it had been. The lowlight was the brutal pass by Ryan Murray to setup the aforementioned Zack Smith breakaway.
[protected-iframe id=”e1d86107dd2d4caa3fc804bb54cf2ed2-114320562-108054817″ info=”https://www.nhl.com/video/embed/bobrovskys-nice-shoulder-stop/t-283286736/c-48549703?autostart=false” width=”540″ height=”360″]Quote of the Night: John Tortorella
“The first period was disjointed, a lot of faceoffs. I don’t think we played at the level we need to play at in our building. I don’t think we were awful, but I think when you’re in your building I think we need to be harder. We just weren’t dead on, but we weren’t terrible.”
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