We have spent most of the offseason talking about how important it is for the Blue Jackets to take a large step forward in their 2026-27 campaign. Today, we'll explore what needs to go right in order for them to do just that.
While last season's finish was very disappointing, in the grand scheme of things: this team was right there. In a typical NHL season, getting 92 points would have you right on the playoff bubble. The year prior, they would have had a spot.
But the 2025-26 season was a bit of an anomaly. It took 99 points to get in. There were too many teams in the race, and a lackadaisical stretch run ultimately doomed the Blue Jackets to another missed postseason. Which leads me right into the first key for the upcoming season.
All 84 games matter.
I'm sure that this is being preached from the top of the organization down. There is no avoiding the facts here. This team stumbled through training camp and was slow out of the gate last season.
Their month of October wasn't terrible from an overall standpoint, but the issues were obvious from the very first drop of the puck. There were still a lot of issues in their defensive zone. And, they did not look like the same confident group that outscored those issues in the season prior.
Through November and December, the holes in their game showed up in the most maddening ways we could imagine. Some nights, the team would get skated out of the building. Worse, on many nights, they would storm out and look capable of beating any other team in the league-only to squander those leads late and lose points in the standings.
A blind man could have seen that these lost points were going to be costly by season's end, and that's exactly what happened. By the time Don Waddell axed the team's head coach, along with their long-standing defense coach, it was too late.
Despite a wild run after putting Rick Bowness in place, the Jackets could not gain enough ground back to make up for those heartbreaking losses earlier in the season. The message this year has to be clear: every single game on the calendar matters.
If you can win one or two more games every month, it's pretty easy to see the ultimate result. Six more wins last year would have given this team 104 points, which would have been good enough for home ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
Finding more points early in the season is key, but they also need to avoid taking any steps back later in the year. This leads me to another key, which I'll explore on the next slide.
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