Blue Jackets Sunday Gathering: Sabres Jason Christies history in Columbus, questions loom with -

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A collection of notes, insights, ruminations, and did-you-knows gathered throughout the week that was for the Blue Jackets:

Item #1: “Smurf” returns

In the earliest days of the Blue Jackets’ franchise, Tyler Wright became a crowd favorite in Nationwide Arena. Wright was an undersized forward with an oversized heart and work ethic, and his passion for off-ice charities won him a legion of fans.

But Wright was not the first hockey celebrity in Columbus.

Almost a decade earlier, the Columbus Chill took the city by storm as a member of the East Coast Hockey League, playing fight-filled games before sold-out, beer-fueled crowds at the Fairgrounds Coliseum.

One player quickly became a big deal: Jason “Smurf” Christie.

“You say celebrity, but I would say ‘rock star,'” former Chill player and coach Don Granato said.

“I always tell people this story. When the Chill traded Jason Christie (1993), they broke into afternoon programming on TV — the soap operas — to announce the trade in Columbus. They felt it was that significant.”

We take this stroll down memory lane because fans may wonder what happened to Christie some 30 years later, and because he’s returning to town later this week as a member of the Buffalo Sabres’ coaching staff.

It’s an incredible story, actually.

Christie spent four seasons (1986-90) with the Saskatoon Blades of the Western Hockey League. His coach the final season was Terry Ruskowski, who left the WHL after one season to coach the new Columbus franchise in the ECHL.

The first player signed by the Chill was Christie, who was never drafted because of his size (5-foot-7, 180 pounds) but left a big impression on Ruskowski. Christie, from Gibbons, Alberta (pop. 3,000) laughs now that he had no idea what awaited him in Columbus.

“I was from Western Canada, so I was Western Hockey League all the way,” Christie said. “So when I flew in there (October, 1991) and saw (the) campus — the pilot took us over the Horseshoe during an Ohio State football game — I just couldn’t believe it.

“My first phone call home was a collect call, and my parents took it. I was like, ‘Holy smokes, you should see all the people at the football game!’ It was unreal.”

Two months into the first season, the Chill became one of the hottest tickets in town, beginning a sellout streak that set pro hockey records for the minor leagues. The club’s marketing and promotion, the brainchild of GM David Paitson, drew acclaim from all over the sporting world.

“We’d be in the dressing room during intermission, listening to the crowd go wild, wondering ‘What the hell is going on out there?'” Christie said.

It was all captured wonderfully in the book “Chill Factor: How a minor-league hockey team changed a city forever.”

Christie was the embodiment of the Chill: Undersized. Fearless. Relentless. He’d score goals and fight. He’d agitate and annoy. The crowd ate it up, and his personality led to a regular radio gig on Friday mornings at the most popular station in town, WNCI.

“The sports celebs in Columbus were OSU football players back then,” said Chill public relations director Brent Maurer. “It was Robert Smith and the Buckeyes.

“All of a sudden, here comes this alternate sport, and Smurf was such a magnetic personality. He never said no to a PR opportunity. He was that perfect face for the franchise.”

In his first season with the Chill, Christie had 28-56-84 to go with 218 penalty minutes in only 61 games. He was young, single and adorned with a Smurf tattoo on his chest. The party never stopped.

“It was unreal, all of it,” Christie said. “Columbus was a hidden city. The fan support was unbelievable. For a 21-year-old kid coming from farm country, it was a pretty big deal to me.”

This is where the story takes a “Behind The Music” type of turn.

Christie walked out of Chill training camp along with four other players in a contract dispute in 1994, leading to an ugly divorce with the franchise.

But five years later, when it was known that the arrival of the Blue Jackets in 2000 would lead to the demise of the Chill, Christie was brought back to town as a player-coach for the swan song season. He scored the game-winning goal in the regular-season finale.

“I talked (with Jason) a couple of weeks ago about this,” Granato said. “If there was one year you’d like to redo just for the fun of it, we both said we might pick one of those years in Columbus. It was just spectacular.”

Christie’s coaching career started two years later. With the exception of two seasons (2008-10) — he was an AHL assistant in Chicago — Christie was a head coach in the ECHL from 2000-2021. He’s worked benches from Peoria to Utah, Ontario, Calif. to Tulsa and, most recently, in Jacksonville.

Along the way, he became the winningest coach in ECHL history, totaling 667 wins.

Last summer, when Granato was given the full-time job with the Sabres, he had Christie’s name in mind immediately to join his staff. It would be a phone call as a coach that never came as a player — a call-up to the NHL.

Granato had Christie on his staff as a player-coach in Columbus and Peoria. He also had him on staff those two seasons in Chicago (AHL). But this was different.

“That was a very enjoyable phone call,” Granato said. “We’d stayed close over the years. We were teammates before I even coached, and we were incredibly close then.

“He should have had, in my opinion, a great opportunity through his coaching career. So to be in that position, to offer him a job here … I was very excited for that. I was excited to do that way before he even knew I was excited.”

Granato and Christie return to Columbus this week, along with another Sabres assistant coach, Marty Wilford, who also played for the Chill. Barring a COVID-19 interruption, the Blue Jackets play in Buffalo on Monday, then host the Sabres here on Thursday.

The most ardent Chill fans are planning a pregame gathering at Brother’s before Thursday’s game to celebrate.

“I was knocking on the door (as a player) in the American League, trying to get (to the NHL),” Christie said. “When Grats called … that was good. How he coaches and works each day, his philosophy on the game is unreal, and it’s still developing in the young players we have.

“Grats and I have always talked about Columbus being such a good city. The people are so nice. They’re welcoming, stuff like that. It’s been 30 years, and we still talk about it, about how well the Blue Jackets fans are doing.”

Item #2: A matter of time

The Blue Jackets placed three players in the NHL’s COVID-19 protocols on Sunday: forwards Boone Jenner and Jack Roslovic, and defenseman Gabriel Carlsson. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

On each stop of their recent road trip, the Blue Jackets played against opponents who would later be diagnosed as positive: Seattle’s Jamie Oleksiak, Vancouver’s Tyler Motte, Tyler Myers and Tucker Poolman, and Edmonton’s Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jesse Puljujarvi and Duncan Keith.

This has become a tangled mess for the league.

Poolman was pulled from the game in Vancouver late in the first period when a positive test result was returned after the game had started. Colorado’s Jack Johnson was cleared to enter a recent game after it had already started.

The good news is that most players across the league are said to be having mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.

The only player in the NHL who isn’t vaccinated is Detroit’s Tyler Bertuzzi, though it’s unclear how many players have had booster shots. Early studies suggest that booster shots are the most effective way to minimize symptoms, especially with the Omicron variant.

The Blue Jackets canceled practice on Sunday, their third consecutive day off the ice. That’s almost unprecedented during the season. They’re hoping to practice on Sunday and fly to Buffalo for a game that night against the Sabres. much like a preseason game.

3. Snacks

• As you try to make sense of the ever-changing landscape ahead of the NHL — how to handle the latest COVID-19 surge, how to make up these postponed games, whether or not to go to the Olympics — hasn’t an answer become abundantly clear? It sure feels as if both players and the league know that sending players to Beijing at the exact time Omicron is expected to spike in North America is an awful idea, but neither side wants to be the one to pull the plug. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has repeatedly said it will be the players’ decision, but this feels like a parent waiting for their child to make the right choice, standing ready to swoop in if they don’t. At last check, the NHL has postponed 41 games, but there are certainly more to follow. Those three-plus weeks in February could come in very handy for the league to play catch-up before the two-month stretch drive to the end of the season.

• This is already messy. It could get messier, especially if some players decide to go to the Olympics — perhaps against the league’s wishes — while others stay behind. Blue Jackets veteran forward Jake Voracek, who would be playing in his second Olympics with the Czech Republic, voiced a vote for unity last week before the Jackets played in Vancouver. “Hopefully, it’s going to be one decision as a whole, either we (NHL players) go or we don’t,” Voracek said. “I don’t think (the league) putting that much pressure on the players about going there should be the way to go, but we’ll see what’s going to happen. We’ve had some games postponed, a lot of players are going down with COVID … just weird times. I’m not a big fan of this situation as a whole.” On Voracek’s last point, we can all agree.

• With Jenner and Roslovic out of the lineup for Monday’s game, the Blue Jackets will be seriously thin at center. Justin Danforth has dressed on the wing lately, but he can play there. Other candidates: Alexandre Texier, Max Domi or a recalled Kevin Stenlund from AHL Cleveland.

• As it stands today, the Blue Jackets will need to return to Calgary at some point this season to play Saturday’s suspended game. This could get tricky because the Jackets leave the Eastern Time Zone for only two trips in the new year: at Winnipeg and Minnesota (March 25-26) and at Los Angeles, Anaheim, and San Jose (April 16-19). The more likely of the two would be playing in Calgary on April 20, a not-easy back-to-back at the Sharks and Flames. The Blue Jackets have an open week in early March — no games from March 8-10 — but Calgary would need to move games around to make that work.

• Blue Jackets top prospect Kent Johnson was able to join Team Canada on Wednesday before a two-day quarantine ahead of the IIHF World Junior Championship in Alberta. Johnson had been sick for the better part of two weeks, sitting out one game at Michigan and delaying his arrival at camp. Early indications are that Johnson will play left wing for Team Canada, just as he has in his first two seasons at Michigan. The Blue Jackets, who drafted him No. 5 overall last summer, have said they envision him playing center in the NHL.

• Another Blue Jackets prospect had a rough week. Last Sunday, Dmitry Voronkov, playing for Kazan Ak-Bars in the KHL, took a huge hit from Salavat Yulaev’s Pyotr Khokhryakov. Khokhryakov’s shoulder blow to Voronkov’s head may have knocked him out, but as much damage was done when Voronkov twisted and fell face-first on the ice. He was stretchered off and taken to a local hospital for observation, then released the next morning. Voronkov, expected to join Columbus for the 2023-24 season, issued a statement through his club. Translated to English, it read: “Thank you all for your support. Now I feel fine. I was released from the hospital. I will be recovering under the supervision of doctors with the club. I can’t see with my left eye yet, but I hope to return to the ice as soon as possible.” Khokhryakov was suspended for five games.

⛔️ GAME MISCONDUCT #KHL
ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL

Pyotr Khokhryakov is given 5+20 for this illegal check to the head of Dmitri Voronkov.

Shoulder to head then Voronkov smacked his head off the ice on the way down. He has to be stretchered off.#Salavat #AkBars #CBJ pic.twitter.com/q4DSvdew52

— This is the KHL (@KHLreplays) December 12, 2021

• There’s an old saw that coaches are hired to be fired, but Paul Maurice took the very rare step this week of stepping down as coach in Winnipeg after determining that Jets players “need a new voice.” Maurice had been on the job in Manitoba for parts of nine seasons, making the playoffs five times, including in the last four seasons. The last time Maurice was between jobs was after he’d spent the 2012-13 season coaching in the KHL (Magnitogorsk Metallurg). He didn’t catch on with an NHL team until the Jets hired him midway through the following season. So where did he spend the in-between months? Living in suburban Columbus, which kept him close to family in Toronto and close to great golf courses (a passion). He bought a home previously owned by former Blue Jackets center Andrew Cassels and his wife on the eastern edge of Union County in Dublin.

• Two questions in the wake of Maurice’s resignation in Winnipeg: Would Blue Jackets associate coach Pascal Vincent have been given the post if he’d stayed with the Jets last summer instead of joining Brad Larsen’s staff in Columbus? And, would there be anything more delicious than ESPN’s John Tortorella taking the Jets job and being reunited with center Pierre-Luc Dubois?

(Photo: Andy Devlin / NHLI via Getty Images)

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