John Tortorella makes us fear for the Blue Jackets (Trending Topics)

World Cup of Hockey training camps opened yesterday, with Team USA headquartered in the home arena of its coach, John Tortorella of the Columbus Blue Jackets.

In opening the camp, he talked about the two players under his charge for the regular season, who will also be on the USA roster: Brandon Dubinsky and Jack Johnson. Tortorella basically said two things at different levels of scariness. The first is that he plans on using Dubinsky as a center, and probably in a matchup against either Sidney Crosby or Ryan Getzlaf. The second is that he plans to use Jack Johnson in any role other than press-box seat-filler.

Then, from the team’s first practice, came the USA lines. Max Pacioretty and Patrick Kane flanking Joe Pavelski. Fair enough. Solid first line there. Derek Stepan between Zach Parise and Blake Wheeler is also pretty good as a second line. The third line is where things get dicey: Justin Abdelkader, Ryan Kesler, and TJ Oshie. Not great. Not great at all. And then on the fourth line, you had James van Riemsdyk, Brandon Dubinsky and David Backes. Hoo-boy.

So what we have here, then, is the acknowledgement that this team — which was already put together in baffling fashion … leaving off injured Phil Kessel is one thing, but leaving off healthy Tyler Johnson is another entirely — is really just going whole hog, to use the USA Hockey language, “team-building” rather than icing the most talented roster possible. Because not only are they saying, “Okay, well we’re not going to have the most talented club, necessarily,” but they’re also saying, “And we think van Riemsdyk shouldn’t be used as much as we use Justin Abdelkader.”

There really is a non-zero chance Abdelkader gets more power play time than van Riemsdyk, who’s basically going to give you 55 or 60 points every 82 games. At some point you have to throw up your hands and accept it, but it’s very troubling.

We know, by the way, that Crosby’s line for Canada — the only team the US cares about beating, even if it seems as though getting past Team Europe might be a task for a no-depth group like this — is going to feature not only the best player alive, but also the best two-way center in the sport (Patrice Bergeron) and a top-four left wing (Brad Marchand). All of them excel at driving possession to near-unbelievable extents. This is a specious stat, but the fact that Dubinsky’s career goals-for percentage at 5-on-5 when he’s matched up against Crosby is only about 23 percent, well, feels about right.

More worrying, here’s Tortorella lamenting the fact that Ryan Callahan couldn’t also be in the lineup to match up against Crosby as well:

“I was really looking forward to having Cally on that line. … When Canada decides to step it up a notch in the physical play, we’ll maybe have some people who can answer. I think that’s been one of our problems in the international tournaments. When we step away from the skill – and the game gets into the grinding, the protecting pucks, etc. – I wanted to have that type of player and that type of line.”

All of this is a long way of saying that we shouldn’t be too concerned with the ability of the US to win this tournament. They just clearly aren’t going to do that. They don’t have the talent level, mindset, or coaching acumen to propel them past anyone with an actual talented roster. It’s unclear whether they’d even be able to corral Russia, which has a deep forward group and no real defense to speak of, let alone Finland, Sweden, or Canada. One imagines the North American 23-and-under team would beat them up pretty badly.

The team I’m really worried about, though, is the one Tortorella coaches as his day job.

Columbus really didn’t make too many changes this summer at all. They bought out Fedor Tyutin and Jared Boll. Not that Tyutin was killing them or anything (he was actually their second-best usage-adjusted possession defenseman behind little-used Kevin Connauton), but he was too expensive. The only player they signed in the summer — the entire summer! — was Sam Gagner, who’s a good middle-six center that isn’t really going to make any sort of big difference.

One argument you can make is that they got a very good young defenseman in Seth Jones last year, and that he was their big acquisition (though it cost them a disquieted and out of favor No. 1 center in Ryan Johansen). Jones is a good player, and he came aboard in early January. But even he wasn’t enough to really scrape Columbus out of the season-long rut they’d suffered. He, in fact, did not come close. The Blue Jackets ended the year more or less as dire as they were at any other point in the season. The number of times they cleared 50 percent adjusted possession over any 25-game stretch in the season was “zero.”

Maybe you also argue that they drafted third overall and got a guy who can probably contribute in the NHL this season. But since most agree that they whiffed on taking Jesse Puljujarvi No. 3 overall and took Pierre-Luc Dubois instead — and why? “Character,” baby! — you have to say both club and coach have a dogmatic adherence to the wrong things. And they still have a pretty much maxed-out salary structure once you include Dubois and defense prospect Zach Werenski into the big club’s mix. Five players on the roster also have no-movement clauses.

What assurance do we have, then, that Brandon Saad is going to get any help at all from Tortorella as a coach — “Ya gahtta block moah shots, Saadsy!” — or the roster Kekalainen has cobbled together? How can we rely upon Tortorella to put Jones in a position to succeed? When the second- and third-highest paid D on the roster in terms of AAV are Johnson and David Savard, neither of whom are all that good.

Because even if you thought this team was turning things around, or that a coach as stubborn as Tortorella was going to change his ways after a truly dreadful season, well, now you have Dubinsky-versus-Crosby to deal with in the evidence against. Clearly, a coach whose teams have finished with just 70 wins out of their last 157 games may need to evaluate whether his philosophies are working.

Granted he took over a pair of already-sinking ships, but his is clearly a method that simply does not work. After he took over Columbus, they were 22nd in adjusted possession and 20th in shots-for. If the Tortorella style is all about denying scoring opportunities, it’s troubling that they allowed the sixth-most per 60 minutes in the league after Tortorella was hired.

Now to be fair, there were some things the team did well, including generating a lot of scoring chances themselves (the most in the league per 60 after adjustments for score, venue, and zone starts). You’ll never guess what happened to that number after they traded a very good center like Johansen, though: Their margins thinned out because they lost a big, young, good center who was actually pulling the toughest assignments on the team; tougher than Dubinsky’s, in fact.

And also you have to factor in that Joonas Korpisalo played almost as many games as Sergei Bobrovsky last year. Except that Korpisalo was a .920 goalie in 31 games last year, and oft-injured Bobrovsky checked in with .908 in 37.

The Blue Jackets started with a brutal and almost inexplicable losing streak of seven games under Todd Richards in which they scored just 13 goals and allowed 34. After Tortorella took over, they were 34-33-8. After they traded malcontent Johansen and improved their defense with Seth Jones, they went 21-16-5. You’ll note neither of those marks are all that good (82-game averages of 83.1 and 91.7 points, respectively).

There’s almost no way the team can be as bad as it was last year because of that dismal start. The best you can really hope for is that Saad and Boone Jenner can keep shooting 13-plus percent, and that the wheels haven’t fallen off for Scott Hartnell, and that Nick Foligno can go another PDO bender. A team with two 30-goal scorers last year — one of just eight teams to get there — still finished 17th in the league in goals for a reason.

“Mediocre” is the worst thing to be in the NHL. No hope for the present or really for the future unless you develop players very well. Which, if we’re being honest, Columbus hasn’t. Neither is good enough to get you anywhere near the playoffs. Neither is bad enough to get you anywhere near the top pick absent a few incredibly lucky bounces in the draft lottery.

With a salary structure that makes improvement near impossible, a roster with relatively little talent, a coach who values the wrong things, and a style that causes a lot of man-games lost to injury, the Blue Jackets might simply aspire to come out on the good side of mediocre.

But hey, at least Brandon Dubinsky can keep on doing this.

Can’t put a value on that kind of physicality. Even if it only results in 23 percent of the goals.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.