Blue Jackets seeing payoff from patience with picks, trades

A losing streak the NHL hadn't seen to start a season in 72 years sent Columbus Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekalainen scurrying for his checklist.

With a background in player evaluation, Kekalainen prefers to look behind the results, so it was time to examine his team's 0-8 start to the 2015-16 campaign, the worst beginning since the 1943-44 New York Rangers went 0-11.

• Were players pointing fingers at each other?
• Is the group falling apart?
• Who keeps working hard?
• Who stays positive?

"You find out a lot about the people," Kekalainen told CBC Sports before this year's outfit fell 5-0 at Washington on Thursday night to halt the second-longest win streak in NHL history at 16 games. "I think we had a good group [last season], a lot of good people and teammates.

"We're a confident group now. Our confidence was shattered last year [early in the season] but we pulled together and learned from it. How you handle it is what determines your future."

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The Blue Jackets learned and moved on, firing Todd Richards as head coach and hiring John Tortorella, who guided the team to a 34-33-8 record and 8-1 mark to finish the season as Columbus missed the playoffs for the 13th time in its 15-season existence.

But there's a buzz in Ohio this season as the Blue Jackets entered play Friday leading the 30-team league at 27-6-4.

During the streak, Columbus' NHL-best power play (27 per cent) clicked at 28.3 per cent and the penalty-kill at 81.6 per cent. The Blue Jackets had eight wins at home, eight on the road, six wins by three or more goals and six, one-goal victories.

It's a lot easier to have patience when you have a group of guys that believe in each other, like each other, trust each other and respect each other.— GM Jarmo Kekalainen on his 1st-place Columbus Blue Jackets

And different players stepped up each night, from goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, to checking forward Josh Anderson, to rookie defenceman Zach Werenski, to leading scorer Cam Atkinson, to last summer's big free-agent signing, Sam Gagner.

"I've been most impressed with the consistency of the team's play," said the Finnish-born Kekalainen, in his fourth season as the club's GM. "There haven't been too many games when we've played bad, and when we haven't been at our best, our goaltending has usually bailed us out.

"We believed we had enough talent on the individual level. It's a lot easier to have patience when you have a group of guys that believe in each other, like each other, trust each other and respect each other."

Atkinson, a sixth-round pick by Columbus in 2008, is poised to shatter last season's career-best 27 goals and 53 points.

Defenceman David Savard, whom the Blue Jackets chose in the fourth round in 2009, partners with Jack Johnson and plays against the top lines on each team. The 26-year-old boasts a team-leading plus-22 while Johnson (plus-20), who was part of the Jeff Carter trade in February 2012, is "probably playing the best hockey of his career" at age 29, according to Kekalainen.

Alexander Wennberg, a third-line centre to start this season, has flourished on the top line with Atkinson and Foligno. In 37 games, the 22-year-old has already matched his eight goals from last season (69 games) and is six points shy of last year's 40.

"We felt he could be an offensive guy," said Kekalainen of the 2013 first-round pick. "Every player takes his own time. He had to spend some time in the minors [last season] but came back with a completely different confidence."

Kekalainen and others in the Blue Jackets' hockey operations department were also "drooling" over Werenski's performance in the American Hockey League playoffs last spring when the eighth overall pick in 2015 "dominated" with 14 points in 17 games for the Cleveland (formerly Lake Erie) Monsters.

This season, the 19-year-old has made a seamless transition to the NHL with six goals and 25 points in 37 games partnering with another highly touted blue-liner in Seth Jones, 22, whom Kekalainen acquired last January from Nashville for No. 1 centre Ryan Johansen.

"There are a lot of teams that have a 1-2 punch that has won Stanley Cup championships, so you don't want to get too loud about how good they are or can be," Kekalainen said of his young defencemen. "They have so much potential to get to another level and that really excites me.

"We're going to be pushing them to that level because we want to see them at their best and then we're truly going to have a 1-2 punch."