Columbus Blue Jackets: Nick Foligno will be Captain
The Columbus Blue Jackets have announced that after three years without a captain, the team will name a new leader on Wednesday. That new leader will be Nick Foligno.
Could it really be anyone else? Sure, the Blue Jackets have a couple of core players that have molded the team into a competitive hockey club, like Brandon Dubinsky, Jack Johnson and Cam Atkinson. But I believe that when the team makes the announcement on Wednesday, it will be Foligno standing up there with the newly sewn ‘C’ on his jersey.
Right now, he is pretty much the unspoken captain of the team. He is a very vocal and emotional leader who his teammates respect. He is the type of leader people can get behind because of the way he plays the game. Foligno plays with an edge and leaves everything out on the ice. He has become a player others in the league are starting to notice and fear.
The Columbus Dispatch said of Foligno: “He brings a bottom-six mentality to a top six role, which is exactly the kind of ‘worker-bee’ mentality this management group admires and hopes to spread throughout the roster.”
I think that perfectly sums him up. How do you not appreciate, root for or want to be led by a person who just won’t quit? He gives you everything he has every shift and that style is infectious; it gets people excited, it raises the level of emotion in the game, its gets everyone’s adrenaline pumping.
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Over the past season, Foligno has become the face of Blue Jackets hockey. He led the team in points, recording 73, and goals with 31, and represented the Blue Jackets at the 2015 All-Star game, which the city hosted, as the captain.
The All-Star game was his public accent into the captaincy. It gave hockey fans around the country a glimpse at a player who is not only talented and humble, but who is also someone that can raise the level of play in Columbus.
Foligno and Columbus’ journeys in the NHL have emulated one another. Throughout his short career, Foligno has to overcome many obstacles, both personal and professional, to become the player he is today. He struggled to produce and find his place with the Ottawa Senators over the first few seasons of his career. It was his maturation and life as a father and husband that really changed him into the player he is today.
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The organization has had many of the same struggles. It is the youngest team in the NHL, joining the league 15 years ago, and has had a hard time with the compete level of the NHL. It had to battle, scratch and claw its way to victory every year. It had to work hard to gain the respect of other teams. In years past, Columbus’ opponents would see they were playing them on the schedule and not even flinch. Now, the Blue Jackets pose a threat. They have an extremely talented goaltender in Sergei Bobrovsky and a young and skillful core group of players. Columbus is no longer the land of misfit toys; they are a hockey club!
So, who better to lead that hockey club than Foligno? In my mind, no one. He deserves the captaincy and I believe that he will get it. He just signed a six-year contract extension and will be in a Blue Jackets uniform until 2021.
Columbus is finally primed to enter into the next chapter of its history by letting all remnants of the Rick Nash-era go and beginning the new Foligno chapter.
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