At this point it’s gone from amusing to surreal to patently ridiculous.

The Columbus Blue Jackets, a consensus pick to finish outside the Eastern Conference playoffs if not the bottom of that conference, have a three-point lead for the top spot in the entire National Hockey League at 27-5-4.

The Columbus Blue Jackets are the betting-odds favorite to win the Stanley Cup.

The Columbus Blue Jackets’ coach John Totorella, whom not even their fans thought was the right man for this franchise at this point in either of their existences, is going to win the Jack Adams in a rout.

The Columbus Blue Jackets can tie the 1992-93 Pittsburgh Penguins for the longest single-season winning streak in NHL history with a win over the Washington Capitals on Thursday night, which would be their 17th straight.

The 1992-93 Penguins had Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Ron Francis, Larry Murphy, Joe Mullen and Scotty Bowman behind the bench.

The Blue Jackets … don’t.

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Short of a catastrophic injury to their goaltender or an unexpected in-season contraction to the Original Six by the NHL, the Columbus Blue Jackets are going to be a playoff team in 2017, and potentially a Presidents’ Trophy winner. It’s one of the most inexplicable runs in recent sports history, one of those ‘were it not for hockey’s place in the pecking order’ stories that should be dominating the chat shows on ESPN.

Yet there seems to still be a collective keeping-at-arm’s-length about this team and its run, not only by the mainstream media but by the hockey world. Maybe we’re too stunned to process it. Maybe we’re conditioned to believe the next team to go on a run like this will be as unsustainable as the previous ones. Maybe we have streak fatigue this season. Maybe it’s a John Tortorella thing. Maybe it’s a 2000 expansion team thing. Who knows?

If they win – OK, when they win – on Thursday, we imagine there will be a full embrace of the Blue Jackets. The sports world loves streaks. Maybe Sports Illustrated will even say they “saved hockey” on its cover.

So how the hell are they doing this? It’s a frustrating dissection. There’s some logic to it. There’s some magic to it. There are some intangibles that defy measurement but that those who are close to the team swear have been factors. And yeah, there’s been a mountain of luck behind that 103.53 PDO (5 on 5, zone and venue adjusted), but who gives a [expletive] at this point – Hillary was leading in Michigan, too.

A few reasons why it’s currently the Blue Jackets’ world and we’re just living in it…

***

They’ve Gotten Better

Blue Jackets fans have taken up arms to battle the evil forces that dared say a team with a PDO through the ceiling and a Corsi (5v5) that was lingering at 46 percent after the first month of the season had unsustainable success. But this is one of those “you’re both right!” type of deals, even if the analytics community is taking its biggest loss here since the Oilers signed Mark Fayne.

The Blue Jackets have worked on several of the underlying problems that could have easily led them down the path of unsustainable success like the Maple Leafs, Flames and Avalanche teams that came before them in the “flashes of brilliance, descent into hell” mode.

They’re not a possession monster by any means, but a 51.24 Corsi (5v5, zone and venue adjusted) puts them No. 11 in the NHL and squarely on the positive side of things. And interestingly, it rises to 53 percent when the Jackets are trailing by a goal.

But then again, that could be a sample size thing, because …

The Jackets Never Trail

Dmitri Filipovic did an interesting study recently on teams leading or trailing so far this season, and the numbers for the Jackets are absolutely stunning.

Wrote about ways to sniff out which teams are for real, which ones are lurking and which ones are barely hanging on. https://t.co/jvWs3WueKn pic.twitter.com/XB3Y3lrRIr — Dimitri Filipovic (@DimFilipovic) January 3, 2017





Those were before Tuesday night’s win against the Edmonton Oilers. They’re leading 47 percent of their total time on ice – by far the best in the NHL this season. They’re trailing only 18 percent of the time, which was second-best to Minnesota at the time of the graph-making.

Getting a lead in front of a Sergei Bobrovsky-led defense that’s leading the NHL at 2.03 goals-against on average is a pretty good recipe for success. The Jackets have scored the first goal of the game 25 times, best in the NHL. In their 27 wins, they’ve scored first in 20 of them.

Story continues