Time: 7:00 Eastern
Place: Little Caesars Arena, Detroit MI
TV: BSOH, BSDET
Radio: 97.1 FM The Ticket
Jackets Blog: The Cannon
Folks, I think we can officially say the Red Wings are facing an actual trap game. Detroit is five points out of the Wild Card and has the worst goal differential in what you could consider their standings cohort but they’re 17 points up on Columbus and have a goal differential that’s almost 50 goals better.
I wasn’t paying attention but holy shit Columbus is doing a marvelous job keeping themselves in the sweepstakes.
Here’s a post from our sister site The Cannon about how things are going:
How are CBJ fans going to handle the second half of the season?
There’s not much hope in the near future, either. 24 of the remaining games are on the road, where so far the Jackets have earned just five points in 17 games (2-14-1). Some players will come back from injury, including Boone Jenner and Yegor Chinakhov, but others are out for the rest of the season: Zach Werenski, Jake Bean, Justin Danforth, and Jake Voracek.
It’s not like the losses are interesting, either, with the Jackets not scoring well, nor preventing goals against. 17 of the 27 losses were by a margin of at least 3 goals.
Damn, that’s bleak.
It’s not like we haven’t been in similar situations in the last several years so I’m not here to celebrate their suffering as much as I’m here to publicly sweat that losing to this team is going to make our entire fanbase completely unhinged for at least a week.
Stats-wise, the only thing Columbus has an edge over Detroit on is PK% and that’s by 0.1%. That hurts my feelings. Oh, I guess individually Johnny Gaudreau also has more points than our leading scorer Dylan Larkin. Larkin will be sad tonight because Zach Werenski is out for the season and if memory serves me correctly they know each other.
Filip Hronek didn’t practice yesterday and he’s day-to-day. Husso starts tonight. LGRW