It’s fitting that, after a summer unlike anything James van Riemsdyk has experienced in his career, the final months of this regular season have given him a much more familiar experience.
For the first time in van Riemsdyk’s career, he entered September without a contract. It’s not that he didn’t have any interest from teams throughout the summer, coming off a solid 11-goal, 38-point season with the Boston Bruins. But in a salary cap world, teams always need to figure out their situations and make sure they have everything in place before signing another player, especially as you get later into the summer.
“It’s easier and harder in a way to do it that way,” van Riemsdyk told Daily Faceoff. “It’s easier in the sense of how you can be more patient, as you’re willing to wait out certain situations, seeing what might be available, what might be options, and knowing stuff like that to let things play out. But on the flip side of that, having a family and wanting to get them situated makes it harder in a different way.”
Enter the Columbus Blue Jackets. The club needed some extra veteran experience, and van Riemsdyk certainly had it. Along with 1,011 games played over the course of his career with the Philadelphia Flyers, Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins, he also has an additional 82 games of experience in the playoffs across eight of his 15 seasons, including a trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 2010 with the Flyers as a rookie. He’s also had several stints internationally with the United States, whether it be the World Juniors, World Championship, the World Cup of Hockey, or the Olympics.
“I’m trying to find a situation where I wanted to bring on-ice value being a productive player, but I also take a lot of pride in being there as a good veteran presence and being able to help them along with some of the experience that I’ve had over my career,” van Riemsdyk said. “I think ultimately that’s why a place like Columbus, for me, was in the track of options.”
The 35-year-old put pen to paper on Sept. 15, signing a one-year, $900,000 contract with the Blue Jackets. With training camp beginning only three days later, that didn’t leave him much time to get situated. He had to begin the move to the city without his family to find a house and get his two kids registered for school, among other responsibilities.
But that initial phase on his own did have an upside. Without the need to be at home more early on, it allowed him a lot more time to spend with and get to know his new teammates. It also allowed them to show him around the city, particularly the younger players that didn’t also have families to go home to.
“They took me out for dinner every night and showed me some of the ropes locally,” van Riemsdyk said. “That allowed me to develop good relationships with a lot of the younger guys, and I think it helped make my transition on and off the ice very easy.
“[The veterans] have good relationships with those guys,” JVR added. “They feel like you can be approachable where if they feel like there’s something they want to bounce off of you, they feel comfortable doing that.”
The Blue Jackets entered the season with limited expectations, especially after the tragic loss of Johnny Gaudreau. They had a 5-8-2 record through the first 15 games of the season, falling down the standings quickly.
But after some steady .500 hockey over the next 19 games, followed by a 10-3-1 stretch through the season’s holiday portion, Columbus wasn’t just hanging around the playoff race – they were in a playoff spot. They were surprising the hockey world, and most of it was rooting for this team’s success.
“From the outside looking in, no one really picked us to be in the position that we’re in right now,” said van Riemsdyk. “But I think we really came together as a team and bought into realizing that the best aspect that we wanted to have on our team was that we stuck together, we played together, and we made sure the sum of our parts made us a better team than just trying to do things as individuals.”
They were the feel-good story of the season, and they were exciting to watch, all thanks to the very youthful core that van Riemsdyk had hoped to provide guidance for this season. Kirill Marchenko produced at a nearly-elite level with 31 goals and 70 points, Kent Johnson, Adam Fantilli and Dmitri Voronkov have all taken big steps with 50, 47, and 43 points themselves, and even a more-veteran player like Zach Werenski has had a career year and will most likely wind up as a finalist for the Norris Trophy.
To say that van Riemsdyk’s addition played a big role would probably give him too much credit. But the team certainly recognizes his impact on them.
“He’s been team first,” said Blue Jackets head coach Dean Evason. “He’s provided us with offense, but he’s also provided us with leadership and a veteran presence.”
“I’ve learned a lot just from watching him, how he conducts himself, the stuff he says, how he sees the game,” added Werenski. “It seems like he’s always in the right headspace, and I think you can learn a lot from that.”
It helps that van Riemsdyk has been in this exact situation before. Flash back eight years ago, and van Riemsdyk is one of the key forwards on a Maple Leafs squad coming off of a season that saw them finish in last. Their reward for that season was Auston Matthews, who became one of seven rookies infused into that lineup and gave them new life.
Suddenly, between the youthful energy of Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Connor Brown and Zach Hyman and the experience from players in their prime like van Riemsdyk, Tyler Bozak, Nazem Kadri, Morgan Rielly, Jake Gardiner and Frederik Andersen, the Leafs were also surprising the hockey world and contending for a playoff spot.
But it wasn’t a walk in the park either. That Leafs team fought tooth and nail all the way to the end, only securing their playoff spot on the second last day of the season with a 5-3 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins. While they lost in the first round to the Washington Capitals, it started the era of consistent success in Toronto, one it hadn’t seen in the salary cap era. Or, at least, they’ve had regular-season success.
van Riemsdyk himself played a pivotal role in the Leafs’ stretch run to clinch a spot in 2016-17 – the team’s best season at the time in more than a decade. In their final seven games, he had six goals and seven points, including a goal in the playoff-clinching win over the Penguins, and both goals in their 3-2 loss on the final day to his soon-to-be team in the Blue Jackets. That season was one of van Riemsdyk’s best seasons as well, with a career-high 62 points and his best goals above replacement output at 13.2.
But this season doesn’t quite compare to that Leafs season from a personal standpoint for van Riemsdyk like it does from a team standpoint. With only 30 points thus far, it’s his lowest-scoring season with at least 65 games played since his rookie campaign. He’s also played the fewest minutes per game in any season of his career, and more recently, he saw a four-game stretch at the end of March and beginning of April where he was a healthy scratch.
“You want to play, you want to be out there, anyone who says otherwise is lying about that, but you have to just channel it in the right way, and make sure that you’re ready to go when you do get your opportunity,” said van Riemsdyk. “You realize that those decisions, as a player, are out of your control, and you just take it from there.”
However, van Riemsdyk’s healthy scratch stretch was less so due to performance and more to circumstance. He’s actually been one of the Blue Jackets’ more underrated performers this season.
When you adjust for van Riemsdyk’s decreased ice time this season, his production is one of the best on Columbus. His 0.9 5v5 goals per 60 minutes ranks fifth on the team, while his 2.12 5v5 points per 60 is sixth. van Riemsdyk has also had a big impact beyond production, with his 6.6 GAR ranking sixth on the team.
As perfect of a story as it would be to see van Riemsdyk’s experience with the Leafs continue to parallel his season with the Blue Jackets, that wasn’t the case. Before Tuesday’s 5-2 win over the Ottawa Senators, a stretch of four losses in five games (along with the Montreal Canadiens winning six straight games) has put the final playoff Wildcard spot almost officially out of reach.
But that doesn’t mean this season was a failure for the Blue Jackets. They proved to the hockey world that they were done contending for lottery picks, which they had the two seasons prior, and were on the cusp of taking that next step. With two first-round picks and nearly $43 million in salary cap space this summer, the world will be their oyster as they continue to build the team into a legitimate contender.
This season showed van Riemsdyk that even as an experienced player, he can still learn new things. Amidst a year with many ceremonies and memorials for the Gaudreau brothers, van Riemsdyk and the Blue Jackets learned to appreciate the little things in hockey – just like Johnny and Matthew did.
“We really want to make sure that we realize the gratefulness of being able to do what we love to do, live out our dreams, and make sure that we take advantage of that,’ said van Riemsdyk. “We don’t let a day pass where we don’t enjoy being around each other, doing what we love to do.”
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