Columbus Blue Jackets: Are Hitch and the Boys Ready for Prime Time?

Hockey’s regular season is down to a few short weeks remaining.

It is exciting! For the first time in many years, I really care about the race to see who makes it in, and who has the offseason to re-tool.

The sun is setting on another NHL regular season, and the sun begins to rise on another, the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do everything humanly possible to win.

Your mission is to turn childhood dreams into reality.

Your goal is to skate faster, shoot harder, check with more vigor, and play with more intensity.

Your job is to do your family, yourself, and your teammates proud. You WILL lace up those skates, you WILL battle hard and you WILL bleed, for you are among the final 16 teams left standing.

Your only goal now is to win the most cherished trophy in all of sport—the Stanley Cup.

Each year, as the season winds down and the dust begins to settle ever so slightly, all NHL teams will ultimately find themselves falling into one of four possible categories, each of which contains certain characteristics and similarities with each other:

1. First, there are those teams that have already made the playoffs, having locked in a berth two weeks ago (Detroit with 105 points and San Jose with 104 points).
   
   In some cases, they will have clinched a division title as well, as is the case with San Jose.
   
   
2. Second, you have the teams who are playing some good hockey and are in the first through fourth slots within their division.
   
   Teams like Washington, New Jersey, Calgary, and Chicago all have solid point totals.  In many cases they still may move up or down in the standings, but chances of them falling out of the playoff race are relatively slim.
   
   
3. Third, you have your teams that are scraping and fighting for every point they can get. Teams like the NY Rangers, Montreal, St. Louis, and Minnesota. They are often at the tail end of the playoff picture, hovering around the seventh through tenth slots.
   
   Depending on what night of the week it is, it’s conceivable a couple of teams move back INTO the playoff race, and as a result, a couple of OTHER teams get pushed down the ladder out of the playoff picture.
   
   
4. Fourth, and the least popular of the categories to find yourself in, are the teams who fell out of the race a long time ago. Often teams in this category are considered “sellers” in terms of openly shopping one or more players on their teams, often for draft picks in hopes that next year, next year will be different indeed.
   
   Teams falling into that category include Tampa Bay, the NY Islanders, Phoenix, and Colorado.
   

You're currently logged into Facebook

Do you want to share your Bleacher Report activity on Facebook?