ST. PAUL, Minn. — One year ago, Columbus Blue Jackets left winger Kent Johnson sat at his locker, upset but careful with his words. After scoring 16 goals and 40 points as a rookie, Johnson started his second NHL season as a surprise healthy scratch.
It was impossible to ignore the contrast between that scene in Nationwide Arena and the one that played out Thursday in Xcel Energy Center, where Johnson was the most noticeable player on both ends of the ice in a 3-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild.
The 2024-25 season opener might be a good example of how Blue Jackets fans can best extract good feelings about this season.
The Blue Jackets played their back ends off and lost. They figure to play hard every night under new coach Dean Evason — his reputation says he won’t accept less — but they don’t figure to win enough games to challenge for a playoff spot or even a winning record.
But another long season would be silver-lined if this club’s top young players — such as Adam Fantilli, Yegor Chinakhov, Cole Sillinger and, yes, Johnson — play like budding standouts. Put another way, if they turn in performances, like Johnson did Thursday, in which you can see a budding point-per-game All-Star.
All four of them had their moments, but Johnson stood out. The 21-year-old (he turns 22 in a week) had a goal, an assist, eight shot attempts and three scoring chances. He also played 18:05, which is more ice time than he drew in any game last season. The only player with more shot attempts was Zach Werenski (10).
Johnson scored the Blue Jackets’ first goal of the season, at 2:00 of the second period, when a loose puck found him in the slot and he turned and swept it past Wild goaltender Filip Gustavsson. He also assisted on Werenski’s power-play goal that made it 3-2 with 3:54 remaining.
ATTENTION #5THLINE, WE’VE GOT A KENT JOHNSON GOOOALLL 💥
Our first of the season!@FanaticsBook | #CBJ pic.twitter.com/tEFrD8vWOv
— Columbus Blue Jackets (@BlueJacketsNHL) October 11, 2024
And he was on the ice — with fellow youngsters Chinakhov and Fantilli, which was telling — with a minute to go as the Blue Jackets scrambled and scratched for the equalizer.
“It always feels good when you’re playing your game and feeling good,” Johnson said. “I’m not too surprised. I felt good in the preseason. Same hockey, just a bit better.
“Credit to the boys. They did a great job finding me. I always want the puck, but they’re really finding me right now. It’s a different system, too, where I can go to different places in the offensive zone. I think I’m finding the spots I want to go to better.”
Werenski has had a front-row seat, of course, to the entirety of Johnson’s NHL career. He watched the scrawny but crafty kid have an under-the-radar productive season as a rookie, and he watched him struggle from the start of his second season.
What does he see now?
“There’s a lot of confidence there,” Werenski said. “He’s making plays. He had a really good summer. He wanted the puck on his hands all night, and he was making plays all night.”
Johnson showed up at camp looking noticeably different. Off the ice, you can’t miss how much thicker he is through the shoulders, chest and neck. On the ice, you can’t miss how much quicker he’s accelerating. There’s a burst there that wasn’t apparent previously.
That could be seen during two monster backchecks in the third period. On the first, he tracked down the Wild’s Yakov Trenin on a breakaway and swatted his stick, altering his shot just before Trenin closed in on Jackets goaltender Elvis Merzlikins.
In the closing seconds, with Merzlikins pulled for an extra skater, Johnson hounded a puck heading toward the Columbus net and stepped in front of a Wild skater to prevent the empty-net goal and possess the puck.
“(Johnson’s) skating ability is out of this world,” Evason said. “He’s getting up and down the ice very confidently. He’s playing extremely well.”
There’s a debate to be had about Johnson’s handling last season under one-and-done coach Pascal Vincent.
Either Vincent deserves credit for showing Johnson no favors and forcing him to take the steps he’s taken or Vincent’s leaning on Johnson — the healthy scratches, the demotion — was no way to treat a young player whose development is so important to the franchise.
Johnson was asked if he recalled how angered he was on opening night 2023.
“Yeah, it was frustrating,” he said. “It’s long gone now. Anything that happened last year, whether I agreed with it or not, you try to take it the right way and try to help it make me better.”
The Blue Jackets head to Colorado for a game Saturday before returning to Columbus for Tuesday’s home opener versus the Florida Panthers. Evason wants to make a couple of fixes before they face the Avalanche, but he’d like to bottle the effort he saw from his club Thursday.
In the first period, a Minnesota skater got behind the Blue Jackets defensively for threatening chances that the Jackets survived. That’s likely a product of the Jackets’ defensemen carrying the puck down low, as Evason wants them to do, and forwards not being quick enough to circle back to support the back end.
“We got the effort, we got the work, the visual of how we want to play,” Evason said. “We need to score a couple more goals. We made a couple of mistakes, obviously, on a couple of the goals that happened. But I liked how hard we played.”
Losing is never fun, of course. But it’s not quite so bad when you can see the future without having to squint or rely on faith.
(Photo: Abbie Parr / Associated Press)
