New Columbus Blue Jackets head coach John Tortorella didn't think the practice he put his guys through the day before their game against the New Jersey Devils on Tuesday was hard. But he changed his tune after seeing the way his team responded. Despite coming out on the winning end of a 3-1 decision against the Devils, Tortorella's Jackets looked gassed. Is there a conditioning issue at play here?
"I'm not saying we're out of shape," Tortorella said, via Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Post-Dispatch. "But we have to figure out what happened tonight and that's going to be on the coaching staff.
"It's very difficult (to do during the season). It worries me. We have to find a way."
The day before the game, Tortorella put the team through a 47-minute practice that the gruff head coach later suggested may have been "too demanding." Though it wasn't "too demanding by Tortorella's standards.
"I didn't think that practice was hard, but their bodies showed me tonight that it was hard; it was too hard for them," Tortorella said, per Portzline.
The newly-minted Jackets bench boss can talk until he's blue in the face about his team playing with "tempo" and practicing with "pace," but if there are conditioning issues keeping the team from performing in that manner, then the grueling slog back to relevancy may be even longer than expected.
And while the fact that the game against the Devils was Columbus' 10th in 19 days could be a reason behind their tired legs early in the season, the franchise will at some point need to stop making excuses for their inability to play a consistently high-level brand of hockey.
GM Jarmo Kekalainen, who just this past week jettisoned head coach Todd Richards and brought Torts on board, seemed ready to accept his new bench boss's suggestion that the players suffered Tuesday because of a too-heavy practice workload.
But he wasn't willing to admit that the Blue Jackets' preseason fitness testing could be part of the problem.
"I don't think anybody can say we're out of shape," Kekalainen told Portzline.
