Deja Blues: St. Louis Routs Columbus For the Second Time This Year
By Steve Sirk,  Columbus Wired (12/28/02)

The Columbus Blue Jackets have been a competitive bunch in season number three. Long gone are the days of the 8-0 Bruins game, the 10-2 Sharks game, or the annual 7-1 drubbing by the Kings. No, this year, the Jackets have competed night in and night out. Even if they’ve ended up on the wrong end of the score, they’ve always kept the scoreboard looking respectable.

Well, except for that 7-1 game in St. Louis back in October. And heck, the Jackets knocked ‘em off the next two times they faced off against one another. But tonight at Nationwide Arena, a sellout crowd was experiencing deja Blues all over again as St. Louis thwacked the listless Jackets by a 6-1 score.

After a sluggish opening five minutes, Columbus started picking up steam and would take the lead at the 9:06 mark on Geoff Sanderson’s 17th goal of the year. Mike Sillinger possessed the puck in the middle of the offensive zone. He spun around and slid a backhand pass to Jaroslav Spacek, who was creeping in from the left point. Spacek let it fly toward the logjam of players in front of Brent Johnson’s goal. The puck deflected off of David Vyborny and slowly trickled toward the net, whereupon Sanderson smacked it in.

The crowd had hardly enough time to finish their requisite high-fiving before the score was leveled. Twenty-four seconds later, Eric Bogunieki and Cory Stillman inexplicably found themselves completely unmarked at the edge of Marc Denis’ crease, giving defenseman Christian Laflamme a pair of targets and/or screens for his slapshot. (“Paging Jaroslav Spacek! Paging Luke Richardson! Urgent cleanup in aisle 30!”) Bogunieki, who, in just one season, has seemingly scored more goals against Columbus than all other players in the history of the NHL combined, beat Denis on the redirect to equalize. It was Bogunieki’s 12th goal of the year, five of which have now come against the Jackets.

“When you score, you never want to give one back on the next shift,” said Blue Jackets coach Dave King. “But they came out and scored on the next shift and took the momentum right away from us.”

Boy howdy.

The Jackets hung in the game for quite some time, but they never seemed to be firing on all cylinders. Passes routinely missed their mark, players seemed to be getting in each other’s way, and the offense consisted mainly of tepid dump-ins. Even the scoreboard operator seemed to be off his or her game. At one point, during a TV timeout, the video board ran a feature in which players discussed how they got their jersey numbers. The scoreboard read, and I’m dead serious here, “Why do you where your number?” Oh well. At least the “your” didn’t have an apostrophe.

As the game wore on, there was an ever-growing sense that such imprecision could not go unpunished forever, especially against a team such as St. Louis. Sure enough, the Blues took a 2-1 lead with just under five minutes remaining in the second period. It looked to be an innocuous play as Scott Mellanby took the puck from the left side and casually sashayed across the width of the offensive zone. He then effortlessly flicked a surprise wrister that hit the roof of the net, beating Denis on his blocker side.

It was the first, last and only goal Denis had a good look at all night. St. Louis erupted for four goals in the third period as Denis tended goal in a crease that had the population density of an Ohio Stadium men’s room at halftime.

“They got so much traffic to our net,” said King. “They got so many goals off of tip-ins and deflections. They really made it really difficult on Marc because they got that traffic in front of him and he couldn’t see a whole lot.”

There wasn’t much traffic on the first goal of the third period, but that doesn’t mean Denis saw it. At the 4:50 mark, Al MacInnis added to the legend of his jaw-dropping slapshot by literally knocking the stick out of Denis’ hand with six ounces of black lightning.

“I’ve seen Al do a lot of things with his slapshot,” marveled St. Louis coach Joel Quenneville, “but I’ve never seen him knock the stick right out of a goalie’s hands before. That was amazing.”

St. Louis would tack on three more goals and turn the game into a rout, but the combined distance of those goals couldn’t have been more than ten feet. Martin Rucinsky scored at 8:28 when he screened Denis and redirected another Laflamme slapper. At 11:51, Keith Tkachuk tapped in the rebound off of another fearsome MacInnis laser. And Tyson Nash dinged home the game’s final goal from a few feet out with five minutes to play.

“The third period obviously wasn’t good enough,” said King. “St. Louis really came at us. They had a good four-line game going all night. All four of their lines were relentless and really brought it to us. We didn’t have four lines playing well for us, and that was the difference. It caught up to us in the third period.”

The Jackets now face the not-so-enviable task of flying to St. Louis to do it all over again tomorrow. It should come as no surprise that each coach views the re-match differently.

“We’ve got momentum,” said Quenneville. “They beat us twice in a row and we needed to get that momentum back. And now we have it.”

“It’s good that we can go right back at it,” said King. “St. Louis has beat us before and we’ve responded. We’ve already won in their building this year, so we know we can do it. Tomorrow will be a good test of our mettle.”