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Blue Jackets 4, Maple Leafs 3 – SO (Box) – Highlights

Record: 30-23-6  (66pts – 6th place)
Sports Club Stats Standings: 7th place, 68.6%

There wasn’t much fanfare. No fist pumps, no dogpiles, no hoisting of the coach on the players’ shoulders. After all, that’s just not his style. Center Michael Peca delivered his coach the game puck in the locker room afterward. Otherwise, you might not have known that this was anything other than just another win for coach Ken Hitchcock. That couldn’t be further from the truth, however. The Jackets managed to win another game in which they played less than solid at times, outlasting the Maple Leafs in a shootout. For Hitchcock, it was the 500th win of a storied, and often-times unheralded, coaching career. But, far from one to talk himself up, Hitch was naturally glib: “(The players) were genuinely happy,” Hitchcock said. “I told them the reason you get to 500 is because you’re old.”

Sadly, I was unable to watch this game last evening, though listening to the shoot-out in my car on the way home from the prior engagement I was attending almost caused me to wreck. I won’t spend a lot of time breaking down the actual game action, since I didn’t see any of it. The important things to know about this game itself: the Jackets rallied from a third period deficit to force overtime, Steve Mason stopped 32 shots, Rick Nash managed to bury a goal with less than a second left in the first period, Jason Williams and Nash both scored in the shoot-out, and Steve Mason only allowed one goal in three chances in the shoot-out to ice it. Bottom line: two more points for the Jackets, and a little breathing room between themselves and the teams in ninth place and below (five points). Perhaps the coach’s reaction to his milestone win was calculated: don’t let the players think or feel like they’ve accomplished something when there’s still more to be done. That is, after all, one of the threads in the tapestry of Ken Hitchcock’s career.

As a Jackets fan since their inception, I’ve seen it all.  The Jackets have always adopted the attitude of their coach, whomever it has been. And, for many, many seasons, they were a listless ship, BECAUSE of that fact. GM Doug MacLean is a polarizing figure among Jackets fans: many were always bitterly opposed to the way he ran the team (MacLean’s firing of inaugural coach Dave King, and subsequent replacing of King with… himself… is a move that springs to mind), but many fans also point to the fact that the majority of the players on the roster were brought in by MacLean. It was, after all, MacLean who wheeled and dealed his way up to the #1 pick on draft day in 2002, which enabled him to select Rick Nash.

But the Jackets never had a coach who would force them to pay the price. They never had someone to instill the work ethic that was needed to get them to the next level of being competitive for a playoff spot. From King, to MacLean, to Gerard Gallant (shiver), the Jackets bench always had a gaping hole in leadership and in accountability. It wasn’t until Gallant started off the 2006-2007 season 5-9-1 and earned himself a pink-slip in mid-November that the Jackets finally took a long, hard look in the mirror, went outside the “circle of MacLean”, and made the hire that has arguably turned the franchise around.

Ken Hitchcock was hired by the MacLean and the Jackets on November 22, 2006. As the Jackets players would soon find out, things were going to change. Hitchcock has long been known as one of the most demanding coaches in the NHL, but it’s hard to argue with the results. His competitive fire and knack for game preparation are legendary; “He knows the game of hockey, he knows it inside and out,” says Mike Commodore. “He makes sure that you are prepared – that you know what the other team’s going to do, you know what you’re supposed to do. And then if you don’t do it exactly how he wants it, you’re going to hear about it.”

The Jackets’ dressing room had long had the label of a “country club” atmosphere under the first regimes of the team. It was widely whispered that, when Hitch arrived, the players there were in for a rude awakening. Perhaps that was true. But, whether they were reticent to change or not, it’s hard to say that Hitch’s approach has done anything short of re-making the entire franchise. Some of Hitchcock’s most ebullient praise has always come from his former players, and one in particular who had also played in Columbus summed up the change in the Jackets’ fortunes best:

“When I heard Hitch got the job in Columbus, I just had to chuckle,” said Dallas Stars defenseman Darryl Sydor, who has known Hitchcock for more than 20 years and won a Stanley Cup under him with Dallas in 1999. Sydor played for the Blue Jackets in the 2003-04 season, two seasons before Hitchcock arrived. “I had to chuckle because I knew the honeymoon was over in Columbus. Everything was going to change, in a dramatic and really positive way. And it was going to be intense.”

After MacLean’s ouster in the spring of 2007, Scott Howson was hired from the Edmonton organization to replace him, and Howson and Hitchcock have formed a solid front-office/coaching foundation for this team for years to come. But, it was Hitchcock’s hire that finally got the ship turned in the right direction. In his first full season (‘07-‘08), the team set its franchise record for points, and fell just one win short of the franchise record. This season, the team is already just five wins and 14 points off those franchise-best paces… with 23 games left to play. And, more importantly, is truly being considered a playoff contender in the tough Western Conference.

For Hitchcock himself, 500 wins is a big milestone. Only 12 other coaches in the history of the league have gotten there. His winning percentage is third all-time. But, you’ll never hear the coach trumpet his accomplishments. In fact, you won’t often hear media people around the league going out of their way to talk about him, either:

Hitchcock has only once been a runner-up for the Jack Adams Award as the league’s top coach, something that likely won’t change this season even if he manages to get the Columbus Blue Jackets into the playoffs. There just never seems to be a lot of buzz around Hitchcock, which is sad, because he’s one of the most innovative, intelligent and productive coaches in the game today.

Perhaps that’s how the coach likes it, though. He’s always the first to deflect accolades, and, even in spite of his reputation of being hard on his players, often he will go out of his way to talk them up instead of himself: “I’m proud of it and I’m proud of the people I’ve worked with, but I’m really proud of this group here. This is a really gutsy group we have going here right now.” And, specific to this game, his 500th win, even though he didn’t always like what he saw, he left everyone know how he felt about his team:

We made more mistakes in the first two periods than we had in the previous five games (combined). It was a game where we had no legs, but we found a way to get the two points. We have relied on the character and the competitiveness of our team, and it came through in the third period and overtime. To do what we have done in this seven-day period is pretty impressive.

At the end of this Thursday night in Toronto, arguably the center of the hockey world, two things were now evident: Ken Hitchcock’s coaching numbers have always been worthy of being looked back upon as a hall-of-fame career, and the latest product of that legacy—a competitive Columbus Blue Jackets hockey team well in the hunt for the franchise’s first playoff spot—has finally stepped forward to illustrate that fact. Thursday’s game was easily a game the “old Jackets” would have lost. But not this Jackets team. Not a Ken Hitchcock coached team. There can be no greater statement about his career than that.

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Other Important Scores
Thanks to the great people at Sports Club Stats, we have started looking at Jackets games in the context of the rest of the conference and who the Jackets are fighting with for those playoff spots. In response to the “Who To Root For” section of the preview, here are the “Other Important Scores” from around the Western Conference:

Edmonton at Dallas – DAL wins, 4-2
Calgary at Minnesota – CAL wins, 3-2 (OT)
Los Angeles at San Jose – SJS wins, 4-2
Vancouver at Ottawa – VAN wins, 5-2
St. Louis at Nashville – STL wins, 2-1 (OT)
Atlanta at Phoenix – PHO wins, 4-3 (SO)

SCS had the Jackets as the biggest movers-up in terms of playoff-probability-percentage, so despite the Vancouver win keeping them out of sole possession of fifth place in the point standings, it was still a pretty good night. Some separation is finally starting to develop between seeds 5-7 and the rest of the pack. The Canucks and Jackets have a five-point cushion on ninth place at the moment.