Over the past month of Stanley Cup Playoff hockey, I’ve found myself constantly asking one question: how do the Columbus Blue Jackets stack up against the NHL’s elite?
This past season was a success in many regards, and yet, the Blue Jackets undoubtedly have work to do. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the first three rounds:
1) When It Comes To Scouting, Competitive > Speed
Much of the discourse around amateur and pro scouting comes down to tropes about a given player's foot speed, and whether or not they can 'keep up' in an ever-increasingly fast NHL regular season.
And yet, when looking to the Florida Panthers, the class of the NHL, it's fair to wonder. What speed? The team's best and most productive players - Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Bennett, Brad Marchand, etc. - are anything but burners. Instead, the word that keeps coming up regarding these players (and these teams)? Competitive.
It's something of a paradox, but you could argue that speed actually matters less in the playoffs. With teams more intent on taking away time and space, there is simply less open ice in which a speed differential matters. Connor McDavid is the exception, not the rule.
Years ago, I wrote about how NHL GMs must essentially construct two rosters - one for the regular season and one for the playoffs - and the difference between those two seasons/rosters seems as pronounced as ever. The Blue Jackets have some players/prospects whose games should translate well to the playoffs: Boone Jenner, Adam Fantilli, Sean Monahan, Kirill Marchenko, Dimitry Voronkov, etc. Adding players that can get them to the postseason (skill/speed), while continuing to layer in competitive players, should be the focus.
2) Goalies Remain Voodoo
In what is beginning to feel like an evergreen statement, NHL teams don't need the best goalie to win a Stanley Cup, just the right one. Stuart Skinner is perhaps the most obvious example of this, a goalie who's boom or bust like the California Gold Rush. Dallas and Florida, with Jake Oettinger and Sergei Bobrovsky, respectively, certainly have two of the higher-echelon goalies in the NHL. But when was the last time the league's clear best goalie (Henrik Lundqvist, Connor Hellebuyck, etc) led his team to a championship?
Skinner is now playing for his second straight Stanley Cup, and Bobrovsky, who was maligned for years for his inability to win when it matters most, has turned the narrative.
For Columbus, that means the pressure to find that top-tier replacement should be lower. Perhaps Jet Greaves becomes the classic 'solid' NHL goaltender that is sufficient to help his team. After all, history shows us that having a good - not great - goalie, is good enough.
3) CF%/CF still very predictive
Those first two are anecdotal and subjective, so let's get down to brass tacks. Over the long run, tilting the ice in one's favor is arguably the single most predictive metric of postseason success.
Per NaturalStatTrick (all stats full 2024-25 season and 5v5 unless otherwise noted), the top three teams in the NHL in CF (shots for) are the Carolina Hurricanes, Edmonton Oilers, and Florida Panthers. When seen as a percentage (shots for/all shots taken), the Oilers drop to 4th, passed only by the Colorado Avalanche. The Dallas Stars, who are middle of the road in both metrics, were without their best player, Miro Heiskanen, for much of the season, and didn't acquire their new best player, Mikko Rantanen, until March.
I mean, analytical research has been showing that 5v5 offense has the highest correlation to PO success and cups more so than any other facet for years. https://t.co/K2pHnxiEU5
— Garret Hohl (@GarretHohl) May 19, 2025
Columbus finished 11th in CF and 21st in CF%. That alone is illustrative. When the going was good, they were able to tilt the ice. You can't be 11th in shots-for without that being true. On the other hand, finishing 10 slots lower on shots-for as a percentage of total shots tells us what we already knew, which is that they were porous defensively and, on many nights, the ice was tilted against them. Put more bluntly, when compared to the top 10 teams, the Blue Jackets were, by far, the worst in terms of both shots (and goals) against.
A lot of Blue Jackets players had successful offensive seasons in 2024-25. But for this team to be a playoff contender, much less among the elite, they will need to improve their defensive play and goaltending.
