Identification Please!

Identity is a word that seems to pop-up in a lot of Blue Jacket conversations these days. What is the team’s identity, is an identity forming, does management have an identity that it is trying to build? Yesterday Dark Blue Jacket ran a piece on identity, and the lack thereof. The piece was sparked by an Elliotte Friedman conversation with an unknown player and the player’s statement that his struggling team lacks an identity and needs to find one. The player ended with a statement that his team needed to be more like the Red Wings, winning one-on-one battles and ignoring the ticky-tacky stuff.

It is easy to think that the unidentified player (Ha!) was from the Jackets, but he could have been from any number of teams. Still, for the sake of this exercise let’s believe that it was a CBJ player. It’s not hard to do; nobody has any clear idea what the team’s identity is. Ask anybody around the league and you are not going to get a consensus feeling of what you face when you line up against the Jackets.

The question then is what is the identity supposed to be? Look at the roster GM Scott Howson has put together, there is on-paper offensive talent a plenty. Even the big name defenseman brought in this summer is known for his offensive side. The AHL team has plenty of young guns who can bring the scoring. The conclusion is the team is supposed to be high tempo, play in the offensive zone, quick transition out of their own end.

Preventing that identity has been sloppy passing, mistake addled defense and a number one goaltender with at best shaky confidence. Head Coach Scott Arniel was brought into impose just the type of identity that the opening night roster should have allowed. A slow start coupled with the all of the new pieces still learning who was on the team with them led to a panic and abandonment of any planned identity. We have seen flashes of the identity that should have been: the home win against Detroit, the recent Nashville game prior to epic collapse, and last night in Dallas. Sustained offensive pressure for a full sixty minutes wins games for this team.

The lack of consistency is what is killing this team right now. Consistent decent play, like we just saw in Dallas, might not have been enough to win every game but the hole they dug would not be so big. The GM has been consistent in providing a roster capable of this play, but the Coach has failed over and over at bringing out this type of play. At this point Arniel’s job is clearly safe for the rest of at least this season. He needs to take that job security and run with it, push the players into the system that he was brought onboard to teach. If last night is an example and he can turn into consistent play, then we might be seeing an identity develop.