The Columbus Blue Jackets have been hard by a lot of things - reality, the brutal Central Division and Western Conference - but injuries rank pretty high on that list.
Losing Jeff Carter and James Wisniewski for extended amounts of time obviously garners the headlines, but they’ve been without a 20-minute-per-game for most of 2011-12 and he won’t be back again. The Blue Jackets announced that Radek Martinek will sit out the rest of this season because of his concussion issues.
Considering the fact that Martinek only appeared in seven games, it might be a stretch to say that Brett Lebda has been signed to “replace” him in the lineup, but one can look at Lebda’s one-year deal that way. To some long-suffering Blue Jackets fans, the signing of Lebda adds salt to their wounds because he’s been a scapegoat of a blueliner in his other shaky NHL stops.
Either way, these stories are all too typical for the woeful Blue Jackets, who cannot be blamed if they decide to “Fail for Nail/Mikhail” for the rest of this season.
