Columbus Blue Jackets: 3 Things We’ve Learned Through 3 Games
With a 2-1 overtime victory over the Carolina Hurricanes on Tuesday, the Columbus Blue Jackets finished their third game of the 2017-18 regular season.
Nearly four percent of the Columbus Blue Jackets’ regular season has passed. The club has played three of their 82 scheduled regular season games and it’s gone fairly well.
Starting off with a 5-0 win over the Islanders in the season opener was a great way to kick off the campaign, but a 5-1 loss to the Blackhawks was not. Despite the bad road loss, the CBJ got things straightened out to win 2-1 over the Hurricanes to start 2-1-0 on the season.
Record aside, what have really learned from the first few games? Well, that’s a great question, stranger. I’ll tell you!
Bob is Still Good
After a Vezina Trophy-winning regular season in 2016-17, Sergei Bobrovksy had a meltdown in the postseason. The whole team did in the five-game series against the eventual champs, the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Bob was by and far the goaltender of the year in the regular season, posting a 41-17-5 record, .931 save percentage, 2.06 goals against average and a career-high seven shutouts.
But when it came time for the playoffs, our beloved goalie failed to keep up his lights-out play. In his five starts, Bob only came away with one victory and ended with the playoffs with .882 save percentage and 3.88 goals against average.
Despite that awful end to last season, he has not allowed it to carry over to this season. In his first two starts, Bobrovsky is 2-0-0 and has only allowed one goal–and even that shouldn’t have happened, but did due to a CBJ turnover.
Facing 67 shots so far, Bob has stopped 66 for a .985 save percentage and 0.48 goals against average. Obviously, he’ll keep that up for the rest of the season. No more goals against Bob this year.
Sonny Milano Has Arrived
The biggest surprise of the young 2017-18 season is the play of young 21-year-old Sonny Milano.
Sonny is the talk of the town, and it’s well-deserved. His four goals not only leads the team, but he currently has scored more than the rest of the team combined.
One minute and seven seconds into the season, Sonny simultaneously scored the first goal of the season for the team and scored the first goal of his NHL career. Only playing in seven NHL games prior to the opener, Milano had only recorded one assist.
Since that first goal, Sonny scored the only CBJ goal of the game against the Chicago Blackhawks and scored both of the CBJ’s goals against Carolina, including the overtime game-winning breakaway one. That one was real nice.
https://twitter.com/BlueJacketsNHL/status/917943176366669824
John Tortorella Isn’t Afraid to Shake Things Up
I think we pretty much already knew this, but it’s never too early to be reminded of how fickle and quick and coach John Tortorella can be sometimes when it comes to lineups, starters and life in general.
His readiness to shake things up were evident after team’s embarrassing loss in Chicago. Torts, always wanting the best out of his team, announced some major line mixing before Tuesday’s collision with Carolina.
Instead of continuing with the top line of Alexander Wennberg, Artemi Panarin and Cam Atkinson, both the Breadman and Cam were put on the second line while Oliver Bjorkstrand was brought up with Pierre-Luc Dubois. Milano, who had been on the second line with Bjorkstrand and captain Nick Foligno previously, was put on the fourth line.
The lines didn’t stay the same at all as the game went on in Raleigh, but I wouldn’t put it past Tortorella to do more of the same mixing in Friday or Saturday’s game to find the best combination of talent using his young core.
Three games is a really–like really, really–small sample size. Unfortunately, Bob isn’t going to go 70-0 or whatever record he’d have if he won every start. He’ll have some tough games through the season, as all goaltenders and teams do.
I expect him to be in the Vezina Trophy discussion at the end of the season, but it’s hard to predict whether he’ll be the no-brainer winner like he was in 2016-17.
As far as Sonny goes, he’ll slow down. Four goals in three games by a guy that most weren’t sure on whether he made the roster is nuts. But it’s not sustainable. That’s a word that got used a lot when talking about the Columbus Blue Jackets last season, but in this case, it’s true. Hate to break it to everyone, but Sonny’s not scoring 109 goals like he’s on pace for. Maybe 108, though.
And Torts. I trust him. He’s a great coach. Crazy for sure, but he’s got to this level of coaching because he knows what the hell he’s doing.
I love that he’s giving the young guys chances to shine. He’s letting this team form their own style and not destroying their rhythm for the sake of his own strategies. Of course, he’s not going to let the players do whatever they want whenever they want, but he’s not going to shackle them to his thinking all the time.
Believe in this team. We will need some trades to be done by Jarmo to really get us to Cup level, but I don’t think we’re that far away. We’ve baked the cake. It’s all about adding the toppings now.