The Columbus Blue Jackets have dropped five consecutive games heading into a crucial road clash with the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday.
However, as the Blue Jackets (31-28-9, 71 points) look to return to winning ways, they sit three points back of the Montreal Canadiens in the chase for the Eastern Conference’s second wild-card spot. More important, they hit the ice believing their fortunes are about to change after a strong outing at home against the Florida Panthers in a 1-0 overtime loss on Thursday.
“Are we trending in the right direction? 100 percent,” Columbus coach Dean Evason said. “We’re not happy in that dressing room. There’s no like, ‘Oh, good, we played great against the Stanley Cup champions.’ We’re (upset). But did we do the right things to obviously get a point? Did we catch a bad break trying to do the right thing? Yeah. So we’re real positive after we’re (upset).”
Columbus forward Kirill Marchenko received a delay-of-game penalty late in regulation time for sending the puck over the glass in the defensive zone, and the Panthers capitalized 29 seconds into OT.
That said, the Blue Jackets dearly need to find their offense, having scored a total of one goal in their past four outings.
“We played a great 60 minutes,” Columbus captain Boone Jenner said. “Right from the start, we were ready to go, playing our style, and just didn’t get rewarded. We’re getting there, getting those chances.
“… We’ll move past this because we have a big game (Friday). We’ll take the good from it, we played good hockey, and hopefully the breaks start going our way starting (in Pittsburgh).”
The Penguins (28-32-10, 66 points) need a successful Hail Mary to make the playoffs, sitting eight points out with 12 games remaining and needing to vault over six teams, but they have not completely given up.
The Penguins had a four-game winning streak snapped with a 4-2 home loss to the New York Islanders on Tuesday and were very upset about it, knowing they can ill afford any defeats.
“We just beat ourselves,” captain Sidney Crosby said. “We made some mistakes. Obviously, they’re going to push … but there just wasn’t a lot of pushback (from us).”
Making the loss sting more was that the Penguins were ahead 2-0 through two periods. New York then produced four unanswered goals, starting the comeback on an odd-man rush only 17 seconds into the third period.
“It’s still a 2-1 game. We still have a lead. We’ve got to respond,” Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan said. “We got to respond and play the right way, and we didn’t. We gave up odd-man rushes. We didn’t stay on the right side of people. We weren’t physical enough in all three zones. We didn’t close on people in the defensive zone. We just didn’t play hard enough.”
There were two Penguins milestones in the clash. Joona Koppanen collected his first NHL goal in his 10th career game and his first NHL clash of the season.
“Great feeling, of course, but we’re all here for a win, so can’t be too happy with that,” Koppanen said.
As well, Crosby scored to post his 1,670th point, which moved him past Wayne Gretzky for the fourth most by a player with one franchise. Crosby is riding an 11-game home-ice point streak.
–Field Level Media
