Welcome to November. Welcome also to shorter days and more nighttime. We’re in the thick of fall. For the Columbus Blue Jackets, this means their annual trip to California.
The team flew to San Jose on Monday in advance of their game Tuesday night against the Sharks. Then they’ll have three days before playing a back-to-back set against the Kings and Ducks on Saturday and Sunday.
We have plenty to get you caught up on in this edition of News and Rumors. We begin this week catching up with Cole Sillinger.
Catching Up with Sillinger
The Blue Jackets are coming off an awful set of games losing by scores of 6-2 and then 7-2 to the Jets and Capitals. The games were nowhere near the standard set by the team.
Sillinger knows the effort wasn’t good enough.
“It wasn’t to our standard,” Sillinger said. “We know we slipped a bit. It just goes to work ethic. I think for us, that obviously wasn’t good enough both games and obviously a response. We have a game like that at home and then we have a chance to make it a decent weekend. And then we go out there and don’t get the job done as well.”
While the team wants to move past the weekend as quickly as possible, Sillinger admits they don’t want to forget about it either in the sense of knowing what not to do. It’s a fine line.
“You don’t want to be so caught up in the past because then it’s too hard to move on and then really to make strides if you’re always worrying about what happened in the past. But you want to know why. Maybe it wasn’t the best effort or the best consistency and stuff like that. But turn the page and get the opportunity to do it again.”
Sillinger is starting to take ownership of this team as are some of the other younger players. However don’t try telling them young and old is an excuse. In his eyes, that’s not even a story with these Blue Jackets.
“Young, old. I think that storyline is past us right now. We don’t have any excuses just because we’re young. We don’t have any excuses just because we have some key guys out. All of those excuses are out the window. We talked at the start of the year that as a young core, we want to take the next step. I think as we do that and as we take more ownership then it just shows more maturity in our group. We win as a team. We lose as a team. At the end of the day, it’s on everyone but we all have to look in the mirror after this past weekend.”
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