“I’m trying to stay half-positive because there was some good things that went on. But it’s a 60-minute hockey game and right now we’re a team that finds ways to lose.”
It wasn’t “storm to the other team’s room” John Tortorella, but you could hear the tension building in the voice of the Columbus Blue Jackets head coach after his team dropped a 5-3 decision to the Vancouver Canucks Tuesday.
Columbus held leads of 1-0 and 3-2 in the game, but the Canucks closed it out with three unanswered goals in the third period. It was Columbus’ second-straight loss and fourth in its past six games. Tortorella, who’s been known to blow his top from time to time, picked his words carefully after the frustrating loss.
“I thought we were playing very well,” he said after the game. “We have two power play goals, we score a shorthanded goal to go up 3-2. Working, forechecking, creating chance after chance. But we just find a way to lose. Their goals were, I mean, they were just freebies. We had to work so hard just to gain the lead back at 3-2 and we just gave them freebies.
“That space of time where we go up 3-2 and in control and momentum’s on our side and the way we reacted it’s, it’s…I just can’t explain it. It’s playing to lose. And I don’t think we have a mindset of trying to lose the game. But that is a game that we have to learn from. You have to win that game. And right now we found a way to lose that game. That’s not a good sign.”
Tortorella replaced Todd Richards behind the Columbus bench on Oct. 21 after the Blue Jackets dropped their first seven games of the season. Since his arrival, Columbus has won four of nine games, but are still last place in the Metropolitan Division and four points behind the Carolina Hurricanes, who also have a game in hand.
“It was so easy for them to score,” Tortorella continued. “The breakdowns that we had, they could have been stopped by just playing decent defence. We’ve gotta stop these moral victories and find a way to grind that out. And we were not hard enough when we were up 3-2. We were not hard enough mentally and defensively away from the puck and that’s what cost us that game.”
