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Game 33 Recap: Sinking Ship

It seems every game we’ve played in the last 4 weeks “we haven’t found our legs”. Every team has more legs than us. What gives? Do our players have legs? Are they so poorly conditioned that they can’t keep up with most teams? Is our roster slow? Do other teams simply want it more? Nashville beat us decisively tonight 5-3. It wasn’t that close

Nashville beats up because they are always skating. Their forwards are hungry and their defensemen are skilled. The top 3 defenders on Nashville would immediately be the best defensemen in Blue Jackets history. That’s a major difference. Our ineptitude in our backend hints that there needs to be a shake up there. Our players do no generate speed through the neutral zone and break out passes aren’t made. We don’t have defenders join a rush in a meaningful way.

The play of our defensemen is in my opinion the single biggest reason we are in the place we are right now. Commodore is much much worse than the physical, positionally strong defender of last year. Jan Hejda looks like he wants every in the league to forget his name again. Tyutin has been puck clumsy. Methot hasn’t taken a step. This team must be missing Christian Backman. Barf. This is by far the weakest part of our roster. A good defense beats a good offense.

Who on our defense is a scoring threat from the backend? Ignoring Russell’s 3 week streak… the answer is simply nobody. That really sucks when your defense isn’t shutting anyone down either. What are they good at?

Defensive turnovers (Mark Methot) lead to the first two goals. If I recall on the second two goals they were the result of terrible positioning of Mike Commodore.

What happened to our 5 on 5 hunger from last year? We overmatched most teams in 5 on 5 play last year. This year we can’t put together two decent shifts.

Who played welll tonight?

Steve Sullivan is what is wrong with our team. He constantly is playing. He’s always looking for a way to make a defense miserable. It doesn’t matter how old or injured he is. He’s a hungry guy, a guy that has built a career out of it.

I can’t point out a single blue shirt that played a good game, maybe Umberger. I think it is time for some intervention. I’d hope we would have already pulled out the players only meeting at this point. The leaders of this team need to seriously step it up.

Doghouse: Hitch. Big Papi makes a lot of money.

While it feels like we are in a terrible spot…. we are in about the same place as last year. We simply have to stop this slide. We have to win games. We need to break out and put together a great stretch of hockey.

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