John Tortorella still doesn't know how to fix the Columbus Blue Jackets, but he seems to be getting a grip on just what it is that ails them. Just before the Blue Jackets followed a 5-2 loss to the team with which Torts once won a Stanley Cup championship, the Tampa Bay Lightning, on Saturday with a 3-2 loss to the Florida Panthers on Sunday night, Tortorella took a moment to berate his current squad again and again to the assemblage of reporters, calling out his guys for a lack of leadership and mental weakness.
"Let's call a spade a spade," Tortorella said, per Shawn Mitchell of The Columbus Dispatch. "It's embarrassing, and that's what we are. I'm not going to tiptoe around here. That's how we play right now, and I think I'm going to need to depend on the kids to get us out of this because I'm not getting squat from the top players as far as that stuff."
Tortorella tore into the veterans on his roster, insisting that his team lacked leadership and suggesting that the negative play of the elder NHL statesmen on the Blue Jackets team isn't just endangering the current Columbus season, but future seasons in the careers of the team's younger players.
"I see weakness," Tortorella said, per Mitchell. "I think we're weak mentally, and it's not the kids. I worry about the kids getting into bad habits by watching other people. That's frightening to me. That has to change."
38 games into the 2015-16 NHL season, something indeed has to change. Columbus GM Jarmo Kekalainen already played his biggest card, firing Todd Richards and installing the gruff, no-nonsense Tortorella. Unfortunately, it hasn't amounted to much and the Blue Jackets now find themselves with the worst record in the league. Their 29 points are three less than the next-worst team, the Anaheim Ducks.
The Blue Jackets are inconsistent and lack discipline and worse, they're too talented to be performing in this manner. With players like Ryan Johansen, Brandon Saad and Nick Foligno, the Jackets should be the kind of gritty, talented but tough-to-play-against lineup that Torts found success with in Tampa and New York.
Unfortunately, something about the mixture is wrong, and Torts hasn't yet been able to find the cure. Reports continue to persist that Kekalainen would love to enact a deal with someone, anyone, but he's not simply going to give away his assets. Johansen has continually been touted as a potential trade piece, and that's the kind of landscape-altering deal that would immediately serve notice to the rest of the underperforming Blue Jackets team.
But it's a deal Kekalainen can't make unless he's seeing a monumental return, and with money tight across the league and too many Western Conference teams convinced they have a shot at the playoffs, he's not going to get that deal right now.
In the end, the Blue Jackets simply look like a flawed team. Perhaps there is no better evidence of this fact than Tortorella's stated belief that Alexander Wennberg, the Jackets' second-year, third-line center, he of the three goals and 10 assists on the season, is the team's best player at the moment.
"That's great for him," Tortorella told Mitchell. "That worries me for the team. But I think some of our veteran guys can learn from our younger guys. That's promising, as you look to the future, but right now it can't be that way. It has to be reversed with (the staff and the veterans) teaching those guys.
"You've played the game. You understand the leadership part of it. We have nothing there. Nothing. "
