Want to hear a stat? Everyone loves a good (or not so good) stat, right? The 9 players currently out of the Blue Jackets lineup due to injury equates to $32 million worth of salary. This isn’t a string of bad luck. Bad luck is having your starting goalie get injured and having to rely on your backup for a few weeks. What is currently happening to the Blue Jackets is detrimental, and is beyond anything that I have witnessed in my 20 years of being a hockey fan.
#CBJ projected 23-man lineup would have salary (not cap) of $59 million. By end of Tuesday's game, $32 million worth of players was missing.
— Aaron Portzline (@Aportzline) October 29, 2014
Oct 17, 2014; Columbus, OH, USA; Columbus Blue Jackets left wing Nick Foligno (71) against the Calgary Flames at Nationwide Arena. The Blue Jackets won 3-2. Mandatory Credit: Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
For those of you keeping score at home, those 9 injured players are Sergei Bobrovsky, James Wisniewski, Nathan Horton, Mark Letestu, Brandon Dubinsky, Artem Anisimov, Boone Jenner, Matt Calvert and Nick Foligno. Do those names sound familiar? They should. (For more specific information on each players injury, see this story by Julia Lawrence)
Tough times call for tough measures. For the coaches, it is time to be creative, and at the same time, see just how much depth this hockey club actually has. For management, it is time to get to work.
Jarmo and company are headed to Springfield to scout a game and see who they will be bringing back with them to help patch 4 lines back together. For the guys that are getting to play at the NHL level because of all this madness, it is time to show what you’re worth. I have a feeling that many of them just might do that, while one or two fall flat.
For the fans…where to I begin? Fear, anger, optimism, ship-abandoning, disbelief, sadness and coping are just a few things that you shall experience over the next 2-4 weeks.
On a lighter note, Mark from the CBJ Reddit page posted this:
For the rest of you on social media, seriously, calm down. If chickens with their heads cut off could type, they’d all be on Twitter, and they would all be posting using #CBJ. We are only 9 games in, and people are running away screaming. Spin it around, you know that you’ve always wondered how Anton Forsberg would fare up against the worlds best hockey clubs, right? Yeesh.