Columbus Blue Jackets Fans Frustrated with Season; Hope for Turn Around

“He got things out of me I didn’t know I had”, Dubinsky said. His teams have qualified for the postseason eight times.

The Blue Jackets started to play a more forceful game in the second, but Halak was there and the Isles defenders found pucks before their opponents.

Moments later, as he actually responded to a question, a cell phone began ringing in the middle of his answer.

This story has been corrected that Blue Jackets have made playoffs twice.

So what’s this all mean for the Flyers now? Columbus will be better with Tortorella than they were with Richards through the first two weeks-regression guarantees it-and Bobrovsky will be better too, and simplistic analysis will attribute the relative success to Tortorella whether he deserves it or not. If the preseason assumption was that NYI, NYR, WAS, PIT and CBJ were the clear top five, that’s on its head now.

The unfortunate thing for Richards is that it’s far easier to make a change behind the bench than it is to make a trade to try to alter the lineup. Remember his Vancouver misadventure?

He learned from his coaching colleagues in the hockey community, from general managers, scouts and other trusted people in the game. Has he learned, or is he still stuck in his old ways as a coach? Columbus isn’t almost as bad as their winless mark indicates but to me they were always an over hyped team and now they are paying for it as they were once considered Metro contenders but now could be out of the playoff race by Halloween. It’s not unfair to say that coach Mike Johnston is on the hot seat out there. There’s expectations (now) that weren’t there previous year with this club. Blue Jackets C Alexander Wennberg returned to the lineup after five games with a concussion. “I’m really interested. I think this is the third-youngest team, they have a few pieces, and it’s real exciting to be part of it because you’re going to be teaching, developing kids and teaching them to be pros”. That was the smart assumption before the season started, and it’s the same today.

Richards brought the Jackets to the playoffs just one time, a first round exit where they were arguably the better team against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Many fans are hoping his replacement, John Tortorella, will have an even swifter turnaround for the struggling hockey franchise. Many of us viewed this season as a building block year with a new coach and a lot of dead weight remaining on the roster – and in many ways it is still that.

Capitals 6, Flames 2: Nicklas Backstrom scored twice and Alex Ovechkin added a goal and an assist for Washington in its first road game of the season. No matter your thoughts of him and his personality, he makes the league a lot more interesting when he’s in it. But he comes into a situation where drastic change was needed.