Blue Jackets rally in shootout

Detroit had the game in its hands until the last 17 seconds. Then Adam Fantilli drifted into the right circle, took a quick pass from Zach Werenski, and snapped the puck past John Gibson to tie it. A few minutes later, after Jet Greaves turned away Detroit’s last good chance in the shootout, Werenski skated in and scored the winner himself. Columbus left Little Caesars Arena with a 4-3 shootout win on Tuesday night, and with something rarer this late in the season than a pretty finish: breathing room. (nhl.com, espn.com) The comeback was small in the way late-season hockey often is. Nobody erased a five-goal deficit. Columbus simply kept the game within reach long enough for one clean play to matter. Danton Heinen scored early, Werenski added a power-play goal in the second period, and the Blue Jackets spent the night answering Detroit rather than controlling it. Justin Faulk scored twice for the Red Wings, Dylan Larkin had a goal and an assist, and Gibson stopped 32 shots. With 17 seconds left, though, all of that was suddenly fragile. Fantilli’s equalizer turned a regulation loss into a guaranteed point, and then into two. (espn.com, nhl.com) That is the strange arithmetic of the NHL standings in April. A shootout does not just decide a game; it changes how much damage a team avoids. Columbus had entered the night on a six-game losing streak and level on points with Detroit. By winning after regulation, the Blue Jackets moved to 90 points. Detroit, which got one point for reaching overtime, moved to 89. Columbus also stayed two points behind Ottawa for the East’s second wild card and two behind Philadelphia for third place in the Metropolitan Division. Detroit fell one point back of Columbus, which is not much on paper until there are only a handful of games left. (nhl.com, espn.com) The game’s shape made that swing feel even sharper. Columbus was not rescuing itself from a random Tuesday in January. It was ending a skid in a direct race with another team on the same patch of ice. Greaves made 34 saves and even picked up the first point of his NHL career with an assist on Werenski’s goal. Werenski, who grew up in suburban Detroit, logged more than 33 minutes and set a Columbus single-season record with his 26th multipoint game. The winning shot in the shootout was his first shootout goal in the NHL, which is the sort of detail hockey likes to save for the end of a game like this. (espn.com, nhl.com) The wider night around it was crowded. Eleven NHL games were on the schedule, and several of them touched the same playoff map. Philadelphia beat New Jersey, which kept the Flyers ahead of Columbus in the Metro race. Elsewhere, the standings kept tightening and hardening at the same time, with each result shaving away one more margin for error. That is what made Columbus’s finish feel larger than one shootout in one arena. For most of the night, the Blue Jackets looked like a team running out of runway. Then Fantilli scored with 17 seconds left, and Werenski, back in the city where he grew up, closed it with a wrist shot in the fifth round. (nhl.com, espn.com, nhl.com)