It's About Quality Not Quantity Of Shots

If you have kept up to date on the Columbus Blue Jackets season so far, Tuesday night’s performance was much of the same tune it has played all season falling short to the Minnesota Wild 4-2 despite posting a season high 45-shots on net.

The first period was all Columbus, which has been a rarity this season – It actually feels kind of nice to say. The defense played probably their best 20-minutes of hockey, keeping the Wild off the score sheet and holding them to only six shots in the period.

The first period was littered with penalties, five in total handed out to each team, including two 10-minute misconducts to Matt Calvert and Jared Boll for the Blue Jackets and both Cal Clutterbuck and Pierre-Marc Bouchard for the Wild. Antoine Vermette opened the scoring six minutes into the contest short-handed. Mark Latestu finished out the scoring for the Blue Jackets with his second since being acquired on the power-play.

The Blue Jackets finished the game with 45 shots on Wild net minder Niklas Backstrom, but could only muster out the two-goal first period. The Wild took advantage of poor shot selection and sloppiness when the Blue Jackets were on attack. Scoring two in the second period, Matt Cullen started the scoring on the power-play courtesy of a coach’s nightmare, the dreaded “Too Many Men” bench minor. It took only 20 seconds for the Wild to answer again as Mick Johnson jumps on a puck in front beating Steve Mason to even it at two.

Clutterbuck put the Wild ahead on a brief memory lapse during a 3-on-3. Allowed to trail behind the puck carrier Bouchard uncontested, Clutterbuck fired a slap-shot glove side on Mason less than 10-minutes into the third period. Devon Setoguchi added an empty-net goal for his fifth of the season.

If you can’t look past the outcome of this game, then you are in for another long season as a Blue Jacket fan. A lot of the issues that plagued the team at the start of the season are slowly working themselves out, like most problems do with hard work. With center Jeff Carter playing again, almost all of the summer acquisitions are off the shelf, exclude Radek Martinek because I am sure that he is locked in a dark room somewhere avoiding all forms of light. Nikita Nikitin has shown his strengths with and without the puck helping fill a void that has been in the Blue Jackets organization for some time, a D-man that can move the puck safely out of the defensive end. Nikitin logged the second highest time on ice behind James Wisniewski with 24:55 of action.

Mason pushed aside 20 of 23 shots faced in the loss moving his record to 3-12-1 with a .887 SV%

The Blue Jackets head out on a two-game road trip starting with the Boston Bruins on Thursday and division rival the Nashville Predators on Saturday.

Notes: Vermette ended a 21-game goalless draught with his short-handed marker. The goal was his 134 in his career (134G-165A in 557 games) leaving him one point below the 300 mark.