"I thought we played a good game," Zach Werenski was saying late Wednesday night in the visiting locker room at PPG Paints Arena. "I thought there were some positive things we could take from it."
No.
And to that second point there, kid ... um, go nuts?
Werenski's really good, so don't misunderstand. This isn't about the individual. He's 19, he returned from injury just in time for Game 1 of these Stanley Cup playoffs, and he'd just been by far the Blue Jackets' best player.
But this nonsense about his team having played a good game, which was repeated around that room and obviously originated with John Tortorella, who'd later speak the same sentiment publicly ... wow, no.
The Penguins prevailed, 3-1. So let's open anew with the positives: They lost Matt Murray in warmups, came out pancake flat in the first period, had Marc-Andre Fleury glove one early point-blank wrister from Werenski, put together an eight-minute surge of scoring finishes in the second and ... and ... OK, I can't do this. They basically killed time. They killed time. Because there really wasn't anything else that needed to be done.
Sorry, I know no one likes reading about the other team, just as everyone likes reading about what their favorite team did to win. Well, hey, we serve all your coverage needs around here, and we've got plenty of both here and here.
But I watched this, just as I watched when the Blue Jackets were creamed here a couple weeks ago, just as I observed from afar as that Christmastime 16-game winning streak dissolved into a .500 second half, just as I wondered how the heck they lost six of their final seven regular-season games and couldn't sniff a goal in the process.
What I'm seeing now, to be blunt, is a team that's got no business sharing ice with this defending Stanley Cup champion.
And what I'm hearing, plain and simple, is spin.
Give a listen to Tortorella after this game: "I thought we were pretty good. I'm not worried about the team. That's why this is a series. I thought we had some good minutes. ... I'm encouraged. I thought they surged on us, and we have to learn from that. But I thought we did some good things."
This was Tortorella in the morning before the game: "We've got a good team here."
He uses that last line a lot, and it comes up that much more when the Penguins are the contrast at hand. This was from Columbus a couple months ago: "They've got a good team, and we've got a good team here, too."
It's like he's trying to convince someone, most likely his own guys.
That's spin. And that, if you ask me, is really weird at this level of the game. Not even the Capitals, the eternal kings of the collective inferiority complex, speak that way.
Maybe it's that, almost since entering the NHL, the Blue Jackets have stared across state lines with this bizarre obsession toward manufacturing some neighboring rivalry. Seriously, that runs top to bottom. We've heard it from people all through that organization, how it's Pittsburgh this, Pittsburgh that. Even though the Penguins, and by extension their fan base, couldn't make it clearer that their one and only one rival isn't outside state lines at all.
Because, you know, rivalries take two.
Or maybe the motivation behind the spin is just that all concerned, notably Tortorella himself, grasp the increasingly obvious, that the Blue Jackets are lacking confidence, quite possibly that's because they're just not that good.
Picking some of this apart:
• The Blue Jackets outshot the Penguins, 16-3, in the first period. They also counted toward 78 percent of the shot attempts.
Awesome, right?
Well, that Fleury-on-Werenski save I cited earlier comprised the totality of the quality shots on goal. The puck did pass perilously through the slot a few times, and Sidney Crosby did a fine job tying up Nick Foligno on a chance at the crease, but no shot means no shot.
Tortorella came close to acknowledging this.
"I liked a lot of our minutes, as far as the forechecking," he said. "But to get the finish to the blue, to get the pucks to the blue, it was a little bit of a struggle there for some minutes. We've just got to keep on working at it."
Working at what? Developing skill?
Who was Columbus' evident scoring threat on this night or, for that matter, any other night since that holiday run?
• Cam Atkinson?
He should be that player after putting up 35 goals in the regular season, 11 more than any teammate. But he isn't. He's scored twice in the past month, and those barely count coming against the defensively depraved Sabres and Maple Leafs. And in this game ... I'm honestly not certain he played. The scoresheet shows a single shot over 18 minutes, but I'm hard-pressed to recall routine possession.
His previous time in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, he was his team's most visible player. This time, he was outright invisible.
Small wonder Tortorella benched him five days ago in Philadelphia and absolutely burned him afterward with the explanation: "The way Cam was playing at the time, it wasn’t helping him to play. I’m trying to save him.”
Atkinson has a finishing touch unlike anyone on the Columbus roster. But it doesn't matter if he can't get going.
• That first period, if we're being honest, is the best the Blue Jackets can offer. But it took the Penguins half a shift coming out of that intermission to force two quick turnovers in the Columbus zone and demonstrate that all that had really gone awry in the first period was that they weren't close to being themselves.
I asked Justin Schultz about that:
