The best offense is a good defense, or so the adage goes.
Tonight, though, the best offense for the Columbus Blue Jackets came from its defense, namely from Seth Jones and David Savard, who each tallied huge goals tonight in the club's 4-3 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Blue Jackets certainly looked shaky in the first period and found themselves in a 3-0 hole going into the game's first intermission. Nick Foligno's breakaway goal in the second got the Blue Jackets on the board, and the third period was the Savard and Jones show.
Savard – typically a stay-at-home defenseman – absolutely dog-walked Victor Hedman, the reigning Norris Trophy winner before sniping one past Andrei Vasilevskiy, the presumptive Vezina Trophy favorite. Talk about a high degree of difficulty – and he made it look effortless.
That's right – the sentence "David Savard dog-walked Victor Hedman before sniping one past Andrei Vasilevskiy" is an accurate statement about a real thing that actually happened. What a world!
But Savard wasn't done there. Here's Josh Anderson's shorthanded goal minutes later to tie the game Watch Savard – again, typically a stay-at-home defenseman – jump up into the rush and lead the guy who's checking him to create a screen on Vasilevskiy, giving Anderson a great look that led to the goal.
Jones, meanwhile, has made a name for himself in crunch time by becoming the franchise's all-time overtime goals leader, but he didn't have to wait quite that long to light the lamp tonight. Thanks to a great effort by Cam Atkinson and Matt Duchene to keep the puck in the offensive zone and an absolutely wicked one-touch pass from Artemi Panarin, Jones found himself in the high slot with a chance to put Tampa to bed.
He didn't miss.
