[Dramatic music plays]
What if I told you...
[Dramatic pause]
That despite a great start...
[Pause again]
The Columbus Blue Jackets could be playing even better?
[Why so much pausing?]
You'd probably be like, "Well, yeah, that makes sense. The season's five games old, you nitwit. Of course there are things on the ice they could be doing better."
Touché.
So, yes, despite the fact the Blue Jackets are 4-1-0, tied atop the Metropolitan Division and have eight points in their first five games for just the second time in franchise history, there are a few areas of focus for the team to clean up.
In this piece, we take a look at a couple of places the Blue Jackets can get better in a busy week of three games that starts tonight at Winnipeg before a return home for games Thursday vs. Tampa Bay and Saturday vs. Los Angeles.
The Power Play
This might be the most obvious place to start. After scoring on a delayed penalty and then their first power-play chance of the year in the opener vs. the New York Islanders, Columbus has exactly zero power-play goals in the next 12 chances, good for a total mark of 7.7 percent that's 27th in the league.
This is a continuation of last year's struggles, when Columbus finished the season with just seven power-play goals in the last 36 games of the season. The addition of Artemi Panarin to the unit was supposed to give the team a wicked shot to add to the already impressive skills of Zach Werenski at the point, but so far the skill on the unit hasn't meshed.
"Our power play is too cute," head coach John Tortorella said after Saturday's game at Minnesota. "We're overpassing. I don't think it's a lack of effort. I just think we need to be simple."
Cam Atkinson, who is also on the top unit with Panarin, Werenski, Alexander Wennberg and Nick Foligno, agrees.
"I think (we just have to) shoot it more," he said. "That's when we break down the penalty kill instead of trying to make such a nice pass or find the backdoor tap-in. We have a very skilled group out there, but we have to keep it simple. I think we're just overdoing it right now."
There's reason to believe the Jackets will turn it around. Atkinson and Foligno combined for 21 power-play goals last season, while Panarin had a combined 17 the past two years as well.
Slow Starts
It's funny to write this after Columbus had a 5-0 lead in its opener just after the halfway point vs. the Islanders. But since then, the numbers show a team that hasn't been able to get its goal-scoring mojo going early.
The Blue Jackets have just a single first-period goal in the four games since then, and the team went more than 50 minutes into its win last Tuesday vs. Carolina without a goal. In the last four games, Columbus has scored first just once and needed comebacks to win each weekend game vs. the New York Rangers and Minnesota Wild.
The comeback wins so early in the season have been nice to see simply because they could be helping the team develop a never-say-die mentality, but it's also not the kind of thing you can depend on night in and night out.
"It's great that we find a way to come back and win, but we need to figure out the first two periods," Atkinson said. "Teams are going to start realizing that, and they're not going to let us crawl back in the game like that. We have to figure out a way to start on time and be ready to go."
Faceoffs
Faceoffs are in no way a harbinger of who wins games in the NHL on a macro sense. In a micro sense, it's nice to have a guy who can win a draw in front of your goalie when you're up a goal and 35 seconds are on the clock, but possession and wins are generally not tied to who wins the battle of the faceoff dot.
For example, a year ago, the second best team in the league in the faceoff circle won 53.6 percent of its draws. Pretty good, right? That team, though, was the Colorado Avalanche, which had one of the worst seasons in recent NHL memory.
At the same time, having the puck is better than not having the puck, and Columbus has been pretty bad this year at draws. The Blue Jackets have won just 45.0 percent of faceoffs thus far, good for 29th in the league – ironically, one spot below a Colorado team that seemingly has lost the magic.
The two biggest offenders thus far have been Wennberg and Lukas Sedlak, with the former at just 38.4 percent (33-53) and Sedlak at 41.5 (17-24). Through five games, Dubinsky is exactly even with 51 wins and losses. And the best center so far at the dot? The guy who moved from wing, Nick Foligno, who has won 38 and lost 35 (52.1 percent).
Again, there's plenty of scholarship out there that shows winning faceoffs has very little correlation to winning games, so this one really is nitpicking. But anything that makes things a little easier on you in a league as close to the margins as the NHL is a good thing, and winning a few more draws could do just that.
