The Blue Jackets Are Not Good Enough, and We Deserve Better

The Columbus Blue Jackets dropped their sixth game in a row on Tuesday night, a disheartening 5-3 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins at home. It’s time to discuss the elephant in the room: the Blue Jackets are not good enough.

If you’ve read the story of this game before, allow me to apologize in advance for repeating it. The Blue Jackets traded punches with the Pittsburgh Penguins quite a bit last night, with momentum swinging in either team’s direction for solid stretches of time. But the Jackets went 0-4 on the power-play and couldn’t muster up a go-ahead goal late. The Penguins struck right after the final Jacket man advantage, with Sidney Crosby scoring the eventual game winner.

Just for fun, he added an empty netter as well, giving him the hat-trick and a four point night at Nationwide. Worse, the team saw hats thrown all over their home ice to a chorus of “Lets Go Pens”. The embarrassing loss spoiled another strong outing for goaltender Elvis Merzlikins, in yet another game that saw the team play inspired hockey for parts of it – before collapsing in the third period. Again. This is a concerning trend with this team, a storyline that has seen them win just four of their first sixteen games on the season. Of no consolation, the standard responses were given to the media:

My main take-away from that interview is that Pascal Vincent, just sixteen games into his NHL head coaching career, already looks to be defeated. One look at his body language will tell you that this is a guy who is not feeling good about his team, or the direction they’re heading. I won’t say he’s out of answers, but there’s nothing here that inspires me to think this team is ready to bounce back ahead of their next game – which is again at home, tomorrow night.

There are no excuses for this team to be in this situation right now. They don’t have any key injuries to the core of the lineup. Sure, Jack Roslovic just hit IR; but last night was his first game out. They’ve lost 10 of their last 11 games, in spite of holding leads in many of them.

This is a team that went out in the off-season and acquired two big ticket top-four defensemen, who were supposed to come in here and make an immediate difference. Why, then, are Ivan Provorov and Damon Severson consistently at the bottom of the team’s scorecard every night? The point I’m trying to make here is this: we shouldn’t be waiting any longer. This isn’t a team that is looking to land more high draft picks. This group, as assembled, is supposed to be winning some hockey games. So, why isn’t that happening? Let’s hit some bullet points on the next page.