(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we’re bound to lose some friends along the journey. We’ve asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers and fans who hated them the most. Here is Ryan Lambert of Puck Daddy, fondly recalling the 2016-17 Columbus Blue Jackets.)

By Ryan Lambert

(Subtitle: You’re not gonna believe this, folks, but I was right about the Columbus Blue Jackets all along)

Only two months and 13 days before Zach Werenski was born, on May 4, 1997, the 23rd episode of the eighth season of The Simpsons aired on the Fox broadcasting networks.

The episode was titled “Homer’s Enemy,” and was of course written by the genius John Swartzwelder. It told the story of new Springfield Nuclear Power Plant employee Frank Grimes, who was new to Springfield and therefore had no idea how the town’s reality bent toward this one guy, Homer Simpson.

Nothing should go this guy’s way. He’s dumb. Dangerously so. He’s not particularly nice to anyone. And he seems to succeed constantly anyway. And Grimes seems to be the only person in town who sees that this is not how things should be. Things should not go Homer Simpson’s way, and yet they do, constantly.

In a just universe, people like Frank Grimes, who are smart and work hard and understand how things should be, are the ones who get ahead. But Homer Simpson not only falls ass-backwards into success, people love him for it.

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Frank Grimes tries to tell the world that what they’re revering is wrong, and that the success Homer Simpson enjoys is ridiculously and obviously ill-founded, and how do they not see it? Everyone just tells him to shut up.

Starting on Oct. 13, 2016, the NHL transformed itself into Springfield.

The Columbus Blue Jackets, a team nobody thought was going to be especially good this year, coached by a guy everyone knew for a fact was actively bad at his job, started winning a whole hell of a lot of games in short order.

Within six weeks, they were 11-5-4. Six additional weeks later, they’d won 16 games in a row and sat at 27-5-4.

Were they playing well? Of course they were. But the real question was, “Were they playing well enough to even come close to supporting a pace for more than 132 points?”

And the answer was, “Absolutely.”

The reaction among Columbus fans and not-even-particularly-credulous members of the hockey media resembled that of Springfield’s reaction to another Homer Simpson adventure that inevitably works out in his favor: “They clearly earned this.”

There were no two ways about that. Like a former astronaut chosen for his everyman qualities enjoying a lobster dinner with his family in their giant house, if you had the feeling a team with the 15th-ranked 5-on-5 expected-goals percentage in the league after playing a fairly soft schedule for 36 games hadn’t earned “first place in the league standings by a mile” you were absolutely wrong.

Why were the Blue Jackets — and their coach, whose backward approach to the game had just been worthy of widespread ridicule and scorn during September’s World Cup of Hockey — winning?

Tortorella, long reviled for being an unlikable, bad coach, had completely changed his approach, and with it, the team’s culture.

They had the third-highest shooting percentage in the league. And the second-highest save percentage. They were exceeding their expected-goals share by more than 12 percent. And it was pretty much because Tortorella trusted his team more. Morning skates? Who needs ’em!

This was a Kinder, Gentler Torts. He let the guys listen to whatever they wanted in the dressing room instead of forcing them to listen to “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” on a loop, and he would only sometimes call it “crap.”

That extra effort to be nicer is what, in everyone’s opinion, resulted in a 103.5 PDO and the best power-play in the league.

It was running about 35 percent and generating exactly as many good looks as you might expect a man-advantage anchored by elite players like Nick Foligno to generate. So clearly, that’s why this team that drew the sixth-fewest penalties was blowing out every team it faced.

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