Columbus Blue Jackets new head coach John Tortorella,top, joins players watching a replay on a goal by Minnesota Wild's Zach Parise against Blue Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, of Russia, in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

It's hard to argue with the results.

Columbus started the year 0-7, and fired Todd Richards. Now they're 8-7 under John Tortorella, but also 6-4 in their last 10. This is a team that, at long last, appears to be moving in the right direction.

Like all Tortorella-coached teams that have any amount of success (sorry, 2013-14 Canucks), people seem to be fixating on the coach's defense-heavy, shot-blocking demands of his players as the thing that leads to all the winning. And it's impossible to say that Columbus isn't collectively getting in the way of more shots per game than they were before. In fact, the number of shots they're blocking every night has increased more than 38 percent (from 10.4 under Richards to 14.4 under Tortorella).

But here's the thing: It's easier to block more shots when you're also giving up more shots. And is that what Columbus is doing? Of course it is.

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Once you adjust possession numbers for the various score effects involved, Columbus goes from a slightly-below-even possession team (49.7 percent) to a dreadful one (46.6 percent). (Ed. Note: These stats do not include Sunday night's loss to San Jose.) The latter number is the third-worst score-adjusted number in the league since Richards' last game behind the bench, ahead of only Ottawa and Florida.

The positive thing you can say about the Blue Jackets under Tortorella is that they're allowing fewer high-quality chances per 60 minutes (a 13.3 percent drop) and getting more of them (23 percent improvement), which is obviously going to be quite conducive to winning more than you lose. But otherwise, there seem to be a lot of cracks in the system that should give everyone pause as to the whole “Columbus has improved immensely under Tortorella” thing.

There's no question, for example, that they play a more muted style of hockey, which isn't necessarily good or bad but is certainly not as fun to watch or, presumably, play (no one has ever accused Torts Hockey of being boring or injurious, right?). And that comes almost across the board, with scoring chances, shot attempts, unblocked attempts, and goalscoring all taking at least some step back on a per-60 basis.

That “unblocked attempts” one is interesting too. You'd think a team like Tortorella's that blocks almost 40 percent more shots per game than it used to would, if it reduced shot attempts against per 60, likely see fewer unblocked attempts getting through as well; simply because the team would, theoretically at least, be getting better at controlling shot quality. But interestingly, the number of unblocked attempts they concede per 60 has actually ticked up under Tortorella, albeit very slightly (by 0.1).

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Indeed, despite the apparent effort to get in front of more shots, they haven't taken a huge step forward in this regard. Before they were blocking about 1 in every 4.5 shot attempts per 60 minutes. Now it's 1 in every 3.9. That's an increase to 25.9 percent of attempts from the previous 22.2 percent. It's hard to be impressed with that number, or at least to say, “Well, this is why Columbus is winning.”