NHL Picks: Blue Jackets will open John Tortorella era with a win – CBSSports.com
Welcome to the NHL Daily Picks, where CBSSports.com hockey writers Chris Peters and Adam Gretz share their predictions for select games every day.
Columbus Blue Jackets at Minnesota Wild, 8 p.m ET
John Tortorella makes his return to the NHL on Thursday night when he makes his coaching debut for the Columbus Blue Jackets when they travel to Minnesota for a game with the Wild. The Blue Jackets won’t just be looking for their first win in the Tortorella era, they are still looking for their first win of the 2015-16 season as they look to snap their season-opening seven-game losing streak. They are just one of five teams in league history to ever start a season 0-7.
Only one team, the 1943-44 New York Rangers, has ever started a season 0-8 (on their way to an 0-11 start).
The numbers at this point for the Blue Jackets are simply staggering. They’re not only winless, they haven’t even been all that close to winning. Every loss has come by at least two goals while their goal differential for the season is minus-21, the fourth-worst in league history through seven games, trailing only the 1985-86 Detroit Red Wings, the 1924-25 Boston Bruins and, of course, the aforementioned 1943-44 Rangers team. Making matters worse is the fact their schedule starts to get brutal as they begin a stretch that has them playing seven of their next eight games on the road, including an always difficult west coast trip to play the Los Angeles Kings, Anaheim Ducks and San Jose Sharks. In other words, things aren’t getting any easier.
That stretch starts on Thursday night with a game in Minnesota against a Wild team that has earned seven out of 10 points. It’s going to take a lot for Columbus to crawl out of this early season hole (and they showed last year that it sometimes doesn’t matter how well a team plays down the stretch if they can’t win any games in October and November) and even though it seems like it already might be too much to overcome, they’re not going to lose every game, and there is sometimes a brief surge from teams in the immediate aftermath of a coaching change, even if it’s short-lived and doesn’t turn around an entire season.
Columbus might be able to get enough out of that to pick up its first win of the season on Thursday night. Pick: Blue Jackets 3, Wild 1
The rest of Thursday’s picks
New York Rangers 4, Arizona Coyotes 2
Pittsburgh Penguins 5, Dallas Stars 3
Ottawa Senators 2, New Jersey Devils 1
Anaheim Ducks 4, Nashville Predators 3
Chicago Blackhawks 3, Florida Panthers 2
Washington Capitals 5, Vancouver Canucks 2
Los Angeles Kings 3, San Jose Sharks 2
John Tortorella makes his Columbus Blue Jackets coaching debut on Thursday night against the Minnesota Wild. (USATSI)
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