The Columbus Blue Jackets got shut out on Thursday night, despite putting up 43 shots against Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilveskiy. The power play struggled once again, now mired in a 1-for-19 drought. Here's what John Tortorella, Brandon Dubinsky, Jack Johnson and Josh Anderson had to say after the game.
John Tortorella
They’re a lot faster of a team than Winnipeg. We did a lot of watching through most of that [first] period. I thought Bob gave us a chance to stay in that game. I thought we had a really good second period, we just couldn’t solve their goalie. Didn’t give them a whole bunch, but then third period they tried to clamp down on it. When we did have opportunities, their goalie made some saves.
I thought we skated with them… We have a fast team when we’re ready to play. I don’t think we were thinking quick, I don’t think we played quick (in the first), I think we had a really good second period.
Our power play has to give us a goal somewhere along the way to spark us. We’ve got some things to do. We just have to keep working at it, hopefully some good things happen. I think the scheme is good, I think we have some really good players, we just haven’t gotten out of the gate with our power play. I thought tonight was the game we really felt it… we needed our power play tonight, just to give us some juice, and it worked against us today.
Brandon Dubinsky:
I thought we had a lot of chances. [Vasilevskiy] played really well, you have to give credit.
We’ll just turn the page. We have to learn from the way we came out in this game… we were a little bit slow, they were making it tough on us, rather than us being able to get in on the forecheck, we spent a lot of time turning around and having to defend again.
I thought we played a good second and third period, but you can’t play 40 minutes in this league and expect to win.
They’re a good team, and they got us on this one, but we’ll have another crack at them. We just have to focus and get ready for Saturday.
Jack Johnson:
Their goalie played great. Sometimes you throw everything at them and you run into a hot goalie, that happens. At the end of the day, they only needed one to beat us. They were all over us in the first period, but we regrouped and played better in the second and third. You can always take positives out of it, but the good news is [we] get to play again on Saturday.
Josh Anderson:
We knew that they were going to come out and play hard and start the right way, I think that they beat us in the first period with the speed and puck battles… We talk about our starts all the time, tonight we weren’t there.
I thought we had a couple quality chances there. It was a goalie match tonight, I thought we stepped it up in the second and third period, putting pressure on them, but obviously their goalie played really well. We just couldn’t beat him tonight.
