The Snowball Game

The title of this post is misleading, I know that. Unfortunately this post isn’t about making giant piles of snowballs, hiding in snowforts and pelting your friends with the aforementioned nuggets of ice. Instead, it’s about how the accumulation of a lot of little things can lead a team in one direction or another over the course of a game. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger, until there is no stopping it.

Clearly, this is about the crapfest in Edmonton. But here’s the thing about that game: the Jackets didn’t start off playing terribly. The opening part of the game was controlled by the Blue Jackets. If we could measure possession by the actual amount of time the puck was on a team’s stick, I would hazard a guess that Columbus would top Edmonton handily over the first half of the first period. All that possession was in the neutral zone, but still. 

That the Jackets couldn’t get any shots or chances out of that possession is where the snowball starts. There were countless turnovers at the blueline, dump-ins that went a little too far, or not far enough, and became easy break outs for Edmonton. There were missed passes galore. All of this means quick breakouts, and quick counterattacks. Which is hell when playing a skilled, speedy team like the Oilers.

The snowball kept getting bigger as it became clear the Sergei Bobrovsky was going to be fighting the puck all night. It seemed every shot caught him off guard, every rebound went somewhere that surprised him, if he even actually saw where it went. Now at this point, we are at the end of the first. The Jackets have been crushed in every conceivable category, any shot against looks like it could be a goal, and the team is already in a three to zip hole.

This is the point of the game where Todd Richards needs to come in with a steady hand. I wasn’t in the dressing room, so I don’t know what was said. But I would NOT have gone in screaming and yelling about effort. I don’t know for a fact this is what happened, but given that Jared Boll immediately went out and scrapped to “fire up the team”, I’m guessing that is how the conversation went. However, this was a game where the opposite approach was necessary.

The play with the puck in the first period, continued into the second. Instead of getting the puck deep and getting after it, the Jackets kept trying to make the perfect play. This was a team-wide effort in “stick squeezing”, the phenomenon where a player in a goal scoring slump tries TOO hard to score, trying to snipe the perfect shot, and missing the net or hitting the post instead. Every pass, every dangle, every everything was trying too much against the Oilers. The Jackets just aren’t built to play that way. Most goal scoring slumps aren’t broken by a bar down snipe, they are broken by a puck off the shinpads while screening the goalie, or jamming in a rebound, or any other unglamorous type of goal.

That is what the Jackets needed to do to break up the snowball, and it just didn’t happen. The snowball continued to roll, and at some point in the second period, it became clear there was no way in hell the Jackets were getting back into the game. This is when you get players just trying to get through the game. If you are Jack Johnson, what is your motivation here? When faced with the decision to block a shot or not, what extrinsic motivation is there? You aren’t going to win the game so a single blocked shot means jack from a stats perspective. Best case scenario you take it perfectly off the shinpads and go on with your day. Worst case scenario, you take it off your foot and miss a month or two. Or super worse case, you get Trent McCleary’d.

So guys check out. They just play to get the game over with. As much as you hate to see that, sometimes it’s better that way. You want the players to have the inner drive of a guy like Brandon Dubinsky, who is going to play hard every time he’s on the ice no matter what. But what good did it do him or the team against Edmonton? He missed the Calgary game, and will miss who knows how many more. The really disappointing thing is seeing depth guys slacking off. Someone like Michael Chaput should be busting his ass in the third period, not coasting on the backcheck (look for him in the long view of the Schultz goal).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not letting the team or the coaches off the hook here. They came out flat to start the second period, with a handful of guys already deciding to take the rest of the game off. The gameplan was terrible, as the Jackets seemed confused by Edmonton’s play at the Oilers blueline, and caught off guard by their counterattacking style. The Blue Jackets have a team tailor-made to beat the Oilers (get it deep, punish them down low, keep their skill on the perimeter) but decided to play right into the Oilers hands. That part is on the coaching staff.

Look, that game was a pile of crap and I’m pissed I had to watch it. But on the road, first night of a back-to-back, I’d rather see them pack it in, lose 7-0 and rebound with their win over the Flames, than battle back and lose 5-2, then have dead legs in Calgary. Sometimes you just gotta let that snowball roll.