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Blue Jackets coach Scott Arniel issues his candidate for quote of the year

Scott Arniel

Coaching a team that’s destined to miss the playoffs has to be trying. You spend all year trying to arrange things the right way while trying to avoid injuries and make sure the chemistry between all your players and staff stays well enough to keep things clicking along positively.

Of course, when you’re coaching the Columbus Blue Jackets the way Scott Arniel does doing all of those things can be made a bit more difficult. With just one bonafide superstar in Rick Nash, a host of injuries as well as inconsistent play from goalie Steve Mason and clashes with players like Mike Commodore along with unfulfilled potential from Nikita Filatov, getting frustrated is more than understandable.

Today while addressing whether or not to bring some guys up from the AHL to get a taste of the NHL while the Blue Jackets play out the string, Arniel told Tom Reed of The Columbus Dispatch just what goes through his head when deciding whether or not he wants the young guys to get a taste of the NHL under these circumstances.

“I’m kind of caught on the fence on that one,” Arniel said. "(It’s) a little bit of the guys that are here are the ones who got us into this mess and they are the ones who have to finish it off. The other side (of it) is do we want to have to some guys play some games that could help us next year?”

Well all right then.

I suppose the only real metaphor for this is like having the puppy that made a mess on the floor and then shoving their nose in it to try and show them the way.

Considering how things have gone this year, a good way to do that in the hockey sense would be to have Steve Mason sit in a theater with a highlight reel of all his poor outings playing and then saying, “OK see that? Don’t do that again” repeatedly after each bad goal.

All right so that might be going a bit too far, but we can understand why Arniel’s a bit frazzled. Columbus showed signs early in the seasons of perhaps getting things turned around and challenging for a playoff spot as they started off hot in the first couple months of the season. As all things seem to do in Columbus, all good things come to an end and the hot streak stopped and Steve Mason fell back into his inconsistent ways while Mathieu Garon proved to again just be a solid backup goalie.

Things need to change in Ohio for the franchise’s sake and for the sake of Rick Nash so he doesn’t become the league’s most pitied superstar. GM Scott Howson will have a tough job in the offseason trying to fix things up with five restricted free agents to get re-signed including Jakub Voracek as well as having seven unrestricted free agents set to take off. Getting college prospect Cam Atkinson signed to an entry level deal is the first step in the process, but in Columbus the rebuilding process seems to be forever ongoing.