Tortorella at center of Blue Jackets’ turnaround

John Tortorella wasn’t thrilled with where a recent question was headed.

Has this been an enjoyable season for you as a coach?

The question was posed last week, a day before his Blue Jackets edged the Winnipeg Jets 4-3 at Nationwide Arena to go into a nine-day break on a 16-2-4 hot streak.

“You’re asking questions like it’s the end of the year,” Tortorella said, slightly annoyed. “You see, what happens is you win a few games and you think we have all the answers. We don’t have all the answers.”

It was a moment straight out of Coaching 101, prompted by Tortorella’s push the past few weeks to credit his team as a whole for climbing into the playoff race despite a mountain of injuries.

“This year is no different than any other,” he continued, deflecting any and all attention away from himself or his assistants. “Every year brings different problems … last year had its own situations. This year, no one expected the onslaught of missing some bodies, but we don’t get too worried about it.”

You could tell a coaching cliche was approaching, and a second later, there it was.

“We got 30-plus games to play,” Tortorella said. “We’re going to try to

take it one day at a time and go about our business that way.”

They “went about their business” by taking care of business against the Jets, playing better in their sixth straight win than they had, arguably, in the previous five. At the time, the victory vaulted the Jackets back into the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference, one point back of the New York Islanders for third in the Metropolitan Division.

It’s a stretch that has defied logic — as much as logic matters in a sport where players attach razor blades to their feet and chase around a rubber disc on a sheet of ice — but it’s not all luck, and the “team” wouldn’t be

quite this unified were it not for its leadership.

That includes the Jackets’ leadership group in the locker room and their coaches, who’ve also played a large role — starting with the guy in charge. It’s easy to forget this now, more than six weeks after the team was 11 points out of a playoff spot on Dec. 8, but this season once teetered on the brink of disaster.

The tipping point was a 1-0 overtime loss Dec. 10 at Pittsburgh, which prompted a postgame team meeting and stinging words from Tortorella after practice the following day. He said it was the “most embarrassed” he’d ever felt in five seasons as their coach but then did something that helped spark their return to the race.

“Torts worked with us to climb out of it,” captain Nick Foligno said of Tortorella, who

surpassed 200 victories as the Jackets’ coach during this run. “Sometimes, when you get to that point, you just throw your hands up and go, ‘I’ve done everything I can.’ Well, he was like, ‘No, I’m going to figure out a way.’ As a player, you respect that about him, because he doesn’t give up — and he never will until he’s told otherwise.”

The fact Tortorella hasn’t been told otherwise, in a season when seven other NHL coaches have been replaced, is a statement of its own. Tortorella and general manager Jarmo Kekalainen aren’t afraid to “air things out” but also maintain a healthy respect for the other’s perspective and knowledge.

It’s something they’ve each come to admire about each other, especially in a season that most figured the Blue Jackets would be noncontenders after an exodus in free agency.

“One thing that I really like about him is that he has never complained about what he has for players — not this year, not other years, not ever,” Kekalainen said last week, during an exclusive interview on The Dispatch Cannon Fodder podcast. “That’s pretty good for a general manager to have when you don’t have a coach complaining that he doesn’t have good enough players. He just coaches and tries to make them better on an individual level and as a team — and that’s what it should be all about. We need to give him a little more credit.”

Even if he doesn’t want it.