If the Blue Jackets wanted to avoid a letdown down in their first game back after a four-game road trip, their first period was the exact opposite of what needed to happen.
Playing a Buffalo Sabres team that’s sitting in 30th place and clearly looking toward the future perhaps didn’t seem like a rousing matchup, but as Todd Richards said this morning, the Blue Jackets needed to be ready to go — and instead, they spotted the Sabres two goals and fell in an early hole that they could not climb out of.
Buffalo got 45 saves from Michal Neuvirth to stave off a barrage from Columbus in the final 40 minutes, and it’s safe to say he was a major factor in the Sabres’ 4-2 victory at Nationwide Arena that split the season series between the two teams.
Two misplays by rookie goaltender Anton Forsberg (one on a Cody Hodgson backhander and another on an attempted poke check that went awry) gave the Sabres a 2-0 lead despite being out-shot and out-possessed heavily. The Blue Jackets could not beat Neuvirth in the first period and perhaps the outcome would have been different at 2-1 after the first instead of 2-0, but the real trouble came after the Jackets got one back in the second period.
Richards said he thought about pulling Forsberg and inserting Curtis McElhinney, but how the team and Forsberg responded to early adversity was something he wanted to get a closer look at.
“It’s a team game,” Richards said. “The goaltender isn’t always perfect. There are some nights when pucks get behind him, and as a group, we have to do a better job of picking him up. There are probably two shots there, two decisions he’d like to have back.
“Part of (not pulling Forsberg) it is, as a young kid, seeing if he could battle through it and see how the team also responds to it. I liked how he responded to it.”
Brandon Dubinsky, who missed the morning skate due to illness, set up Matt Calvert just 1:18 into the second period to make it a 2-1 game. The crowd was back in it, the Jackets’ bench had some energy and they seemed primed to take over and get going in the right direction — but what happened in the three-plus minutes after Calvert’s goal was perhaps the most disappointing sequence of the night.
Mark Pysyk scored off the rush 42 seconds after the Calvert goal, restoring a two-goal lead for Buffalo but the trouble did not stop there for Columbus. Back-to-back penalties to Alexander Wennberg (holding) and David Savard (hooking) just 37 seconds apart set the Sabres up with a lengthy two-man advantage, and they broke through at 4:30 of the middle frame.
Chris Stewart cranked a slap shot through Forsberg on the short side to give the Sabres a 4-1 lead, a goal that was a back-breaker for the Jackets, who needed a big penalty kill to keep the game within striking distance. Kevin Connauton scored on a delayed penalty at 7:24, but they couldn’t beat Neuvirth for more than two goals tonight.
The Blue Jackets’ possession numbers were staggering: they had 69 percent of the game’s shot attempts at even strength (67-30) and several players really drove play, including Jack Johnson (+28) and Ryan Johansen (+27). Tonight, the story was a goaltender playing very well and a first period that proved to be the difference in the game.
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