The roller coaster ride that is being a Blue Jackets fan can be trying. Over the course of the team history, a number of rosters have shown the fans great heart, effort, and tenacity for the majority of the season. Other years, it got tough to watch games, as the players checked in and out of interest throughout games and often found themselves in long stretches of irrelevance. Some would lean towards these players being ‘overpaid’ or ‘overrated’ while others would come to believe they were just having an off year.
The NHL comparisons are pretty stark. Certain teams each year seem to find that ‘gear’ that other teams simply cannot elevate to match their speed, skill, and chemistry. Sure, players vary in talent throughout the league, and in some situations there are rosters built to dominate, but the salary cap is the same for each franchise. Players rising to the occasion as a collective make all the difference, and I tend to believe that pride plays a major role (you’d think professionalism would play a big role in this as well, but that’s more of a rant rather than constructive thought).
At 5-10-0, Columbus as an NHL team appears to be lacking some pride right now. During the last couple of games, some of the younger players (Jenner pre-injury, Murray, Johansen, Atkinson, and – just because I want him in this group of effort – Dubinsky) have been the difference makers, despite the team deep in the losing hole. The rest of the team seem to ebb and flow between caring and floating around the perimeter, taking shots that make the game look close on paper, yet on the ice give the zamboni a good excuse to ignore the slot when flooding the ice. All successful NHL teams score in the dirty areas of the ice, and for some reason, Columbus is content to rely on talent (that appears to have been replaced by sloppy passing) and shots from the perimeter to win games.
I had a great conversation with a friend regarding the concept of NHL, NFL, and NBA drafting. He was born in Argentina, lived for quite a bit of his life in Italy, and now resides in Ohio (and has lived here for well over a decade). As a big soccer fan, the concept of ‘drafting’ seems silly to him, and his reasonings are valid (while we related it to the NBA, I’ll adjust for hockey). He pondered why it would make sense for a prospect to grow up adoring Montreal Canadiens hockey, only to get drafted first overall to the lowly Toronto Maple Leafs, arch rivals of the Habs. Not only are you rewarding bad hockey (by giving out the first selection and arguably most talented player available), you’re forcing this die-hard Canadiens fan to start caring/playing for Toronto.
Parity is the obvious response. For a team like Columbus, it is tough to think of how unimpressive this roster would be in comparison to the hockey hotbeds like most Canadian teams, as well as locales like Minnesota and Detroit, if the NHL were based on growing the talent locally. But the idea of manufactured pride, especially after the last couple games, really has me pondering.
Can you convince someone to ‘care’ about a city? With one hundred years of history, I imagine it’s not terribly difficult to talk someone into buying into the Montreal Canadiens program, but what about an expansion team that needs history to be written now? Jack Johnson came to Columbus optimistic and eager to be in on a team where he was wanted, despite playing for Michigan throughout his college years, rivals of the Ohio State Buckeyes. With Los Angeles very much in the rearview mirror, does that sense of ‘need’ dissipate? Johnson has not had the same jump on the puck this year, and while he maintains possession often as a defensemen moving the play forward, his overall demeanor when handling the puck seems overly casual.
RJ Umberger is a great example of a player who should get a keen sense of pride out of playing for Columbus. Despite growing up in Pittsburgh, he played his college hockey for Ohio State during the first three seasons of the Blue Jackets existence. I’m not sure if there were RUSH CBJ tickets back then, but I have to think he followed along with the team during his time here. At age 31, it would appear his best hockey is now three years behind him, and his energy levels on the ice along with his decision making to get into the harder areas of the ice seem limited. A couple years ago, I would have proclaimed his captaincy as a welcome change to Nash, yet if you were to ask me today, I’d tell you the inmates would start to run the asylum the moment RJ applied the “C.” Where is the pride? On pace for 11 goals this season, and currently firing at just over six percent shooting accuracy, you would think a player of his size and skill level would take full advantage of scoring mainly from the harder to earn areas of the ice, but 6.1% suggests he is not. Does this make RJ simply horribly overpaid at 4.6 million on the cap, or should he find some heart? Some pride for this team. Some passion for the game.
If you take a look at some of the best teams of the past decade, you see workhorses. Rarely do you see youth enter the lineup and outplay the top lines. Rather, you see a player come in and ‘learn the ropes’ trying to impress with solid hard nosed hockey. You see guys come in and get mentored by the stars of the team, shown how to compete at the NHL level, and had the idea that losing is not an option hammered into the skull.
Has Ryan Johansen ever been forced to do that? Remarkably, Johansen has found his own path and is currently outplaying the majority of the offensive roster. A handful of games into his NHL career, Ryan Murray is already being toted as ‘the most consistent defenseman’ by Richards. I want to take this post game interview of Brandon Dubinsky, one of the few players who goes out of his way to play with pride. He was honest despite all of his teammates offering the stock responses to the hard questions, and he is a small piece of what could be a culture of pride and effort for this team.
Where is the sense of pride? Does it really need to be manufactured in Columbus? Did Johnson, Wisniewski, Nikitin, Tyutin not take in that Murray byte and get furious? Can Umberger, Foligno, Anisimov, Gaborik sit back and watch guys like Dubinsky, Johansen, and Atkinson out-skate them and go to areas they won’t without feeling some embarrassment? Is it really possible this core of players can’t show up every night for sixty minutes of hard hockey, or should Kekalainen get the phones going? At the end of the day, finishing 24th in a 30 team league does nothing for me anymore. If they are going to lose, they may as well lose big and get a superstar first overall who can be the catalyst in a real culture of ‘refuse to lose’ hockey in Columbus.
Until then, we’re just spinning the same set of used tires, aren’t we?
Carry the Flag.
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