It won’t take a lot to get this very good, talented-at-every-position team back into the playoffs, but it shouldn’t have taken anything in the first place. (Getty)

The Blue Jackets won on Saturday night, and did so convincingly.

They not only put up six on New Jersey, a team with which they are ostensibly competing for a playoff spot, but they also put up 50 shots on goal. This after games in which they put up 37, 39, and 49.

The difference then was that they lost those three games, as well as 15 more of the previous 24. And if you took OT wins out of the equation, their only regulation wins in that stretch were against the Coyotes on Jan. 25, Stars on Jan. 2, Leafs on Dec. 20, and Islanders on Dec. 12. That is, they’ve now won five games in regulation in their last 26 tries, after starting out 19-10-1 in their first 30.

Which is what makes their season so confounding. Last year was, of course, a bit of a fluke in terms of what kind of regular-season results they pulled, but they got better in the summer and should have probably learned a few lessons from what happened. Whether they did is up for debate, but early in the season, it certainly seemed as though they had things figured out; they were winning a bunch but all the underlying numbers supported a pretty strong setup.

If we want to take that first 30 games as the point at which the season started to turn sour, and run the splits, well, they’re not pretty.

In those opening few months, the Blue Jackets scored almost 56 percent of their goals at 5-on-5 on an expected-goals number of 54 percent, so not too out-of-whack with what they should have done, especially given the talent level (i.e. high-skill players and great goalies often outperform expected-goals numbers and Columbus has both those benefits).

Since Game 31, Columbus has been perfectly good (51ish percent of most underlyings, and almost 52 percent of the goals) but that’s a sharp step down, and it’s gotten worse as time went on:

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The red line here indicates what percentage of the goals they should have scored based on the quality of shots they took and gave up. If you really want to drill down into this, it’s a situation where the team has suffered a decline in both shot generation and shooting percentage, even while the save percentage has remained extremely high.

It’s worth noting that a lot of this likely has to do with the spate of injuries Columbus suffered at that time of year, with guys like Cam Atkinson, Alex Wennberg, Brandon Dubinsky, Murray, and Werenski, all missing at least a decent amount of time (Murray is still out, in fact). But the results didn’t straighten themselves out when almost all of those guys got healthy again. It’s fair to say injuries can put you behind the 8-ball, but after this long? Probably not so much.

Of course, anyone who watches Columbus at most points this year isn’t seeing a team that struggles too much at 5-on-5. The special teams are rotten to the core, of course, at least in terms of results. They have the worst power play and fifth-worst kill in the league.

The numbers suggest they “should have” scored about eight more goals on the power play than they have, which may not sound like a lot but Columbus could use another two or three points in the standings here. Call it bad luck, especially given the talent level of the guys on this team, but one wonders if the loss of Sam Gagner is that a big factor here, or if it’s just that the system got figured out after that freak start last year. Either way, doesn’t seem like anything has been done to address it, and a team with this much skill shouldn’t be fifth from the bottom of the league in expected goal generation on the power play.

Meanwhile, the PK has been awful no matter which was you slice it, but unlucky here as well, with opponents scoring more than four additional goals above the expected rate. I have a theory here, though: Check the PK TOI leaderboard for Blue Jackets defenders. No. 1? Yeah, it’s Jack Johnson. Of course it is. No. 2? David Savard for some reason. No. 3? Seth Jones, who wow, he’s actually good. No. 4? Ryan Murray, and he’s played fewer than half of the team’s total games. Then at No. 5 you hit Zach Werenski.