Remember when the Blue Jackets were flying high as one of the NHL’s best teams and a dark horse pick to win the Stanley Cup?
That was two weeks, eight games and seven losses ago that prompted a 24-minute postgame meeting April 4 to air a few grievances following a suffocating 2-1 loss to the Winnipeg Jets witnessed by another mostly disappointed sellout crowd of 18,272 at Nationwide Arena.
It was the sixth straight loss for the Blue Jackets (38-27-12), a season-long skid, and they dropped to 1-6-1 since defeating the Seattle Kraken on March 31 to extend a season-high 12-game points streak.
They were willing physically this time, starting strong on Ivan Provorov’s goal 1:17 into the game, but their minds couldn’t keep pace.
“All our issues right now are just related to terrible puck management,” coach Rick Bowness said. “Terrible. Making very poor percentage plays. We create the most chances on the forecheck in the entire league, yet we want to be getting inside the blue line and making cute little plays against good teams that are not working, and they’re not working, so I have to get after them. They’ve got to change their mindset.”
In a nutshell, the Jets did to the Blue Jackets (38-27-12) what the Carolina Hurricanes and Boston Bruins did to them, collectively, in the previous three games.
Once comfortable enough to deploy all five skaters inside the Jackets’ blue line as a forechecking force, they completely took over the game and severely tilted the ice. As a result, the Jackets became disjointed, spread out and panicky, struggling to get pucks out of their zone just to exit long shifts with barely enough time for their replacements to come over the boards for the same experience.
It’s exhausting just watching it.
It went like that most of the night, rinse and repeat, until goalie Jet Greaves was finally beaten twice by Jets star forward Kyle Connor. It’s been like that for five games, all losses, as the Jets, Hurricanes, Bruins and San Jose Sharks combined to outshoot the Blue Jackets by a combined 154-100 margin while outscoring them 18-9.
“I think the effort’s there,” Blue Jackets star defenseman Zach Werenski said. “Guys are working, but I think it’s just that un-predictablictability. We’re just not all on the same page right now, and I feel like when we were rolling, we were all on the same page. We were predictable for each other, all five guys on the ice as a unit for breakouts, neutral zone, frustrating teams offensively. We stuck to our game plan for 60 minutes.”
Not so much now.
Bowness, who’s sounding more like Dean Evason than ever now, is saying all the same stuff the guy he replaced said before he and former assistant Steve McCarthy were fired Jan. 12 in a mid-season coaching shakeup. It worked, too.
Bowness went 17-2-4 in his first 23 games and the Blue Jackets clawed their way from the bottom of the Eastern Conference into a playoff spot before many of the same issues that got Evason and McCarthy fired came roaring back.
Too many turnovers. Inexplicable decisions with the puck. Not enough possession time, especially in the offensive zone. Poor special teams play. Blown leads in third periods. It’s all come flooding back in the past eight games along with key injuries to defenseman Damon Severson, power forward Mathieu Olivier and power forward Dmitri Voronkov.
Evason sounded the same alarms Bowness is now frantically pulling, much like his predecessor, Pascal Vincent, who’d sounded like his predecessor, Brad Larsen, who was fired after just two seasons as John Tortorella’s replacement.
Had former coach Mike Babcock lasted more than 78 days in the summer of 2023 and not violated players’ privacy by allegedly doom scrolling through their cellphones, he would’ve said the same stuff.
The teams that got Larsen and Vincent fired were too young and afflicted with injuries to even dream about the playoffs, but Evason’s Blue Jackets came within two points a year ago and Bowness now has them on the cusp. They’re still one point out of third in the Metropolitan Division while tied at 88 points with three other teams vying for the East’s second playoff wild card.
The Washington Capitals have also joined the mix at 87 points.
“We’re not eliminated,” Werenski said. “We’re still in it. I believe in this group. I believe we can get it done, and it’s just doing it. I mean, we did it for two months. The last two weeks obviously haven’t gone our way, but it’s in the room and it’s on us to just pull it out and get it done.”
Their next opportunity arrives April 7 in Detroit in a huge game at Little Caesar’s Arena against the Red Wings, one of the teams they’re tied with in points. Detrimental injuries have again thrown tacks into the path of the Jackets’ tires at the worst possible time, but their bigger issue is the all stuff Bowness and previous coaches have lamented.
The issues hindering these Blue Jackets now are the same that have kept them out of the playoffs since 2020. They’ve gotten a new president/general manager in Don Waddell, who has overturned much of the roster, but not all of it.
The Jackets had a similar swoon late last season, forcing them to put together a remarkable five-game winning streak at the end that fell just short, and what’s happening now feels like Deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra famously put it.
“We’re a (go north), hard-skating, pressure team,” Bowness said. “If you turn the puck over as much as we did (against the Jets), you’re on your heels all the time.”
That’s no way to go through life in the NHL, as the Blue Jackets know, and now there’s only five games left to change it.
Blue Jackets reporter Brian Hedger can be reached at bhedger@dispatch.com and @BrianHedger.bsky.social
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Blue Jackets shut down by Winnipeg Jets in familiar ways
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