Blue Jackets fans have had little to cheer since the team's first season in 2000-01. (Terry Gilliam/AP)

As this unusually calamitous NHL season pauses for a few days, the bleary eyes of the hockey world will try to focus on the big All-Star Weekend party in Ottawa. But about 650 miles to the southwest, a much smaller hockey gathering on Saturday will be less jovial. In fact, it will be somewhat angry.

In front of Nationwide Arena in Columbus, perhaps a few hundred fans will gather to protest the state of the Blue Jackets, the league’s worst team and a franchise that has never really achieved much of anything. They want team president Mike Priest and GM Scott Howson replaced — things that owner John P. McConnell told Aaron Portzline of The Columbus Dispatch in Friday’s edition he is not contemplating — and they want a fresh start for a team that had only 13 wins in 49 games before the break. This stands to become the Blue Jackets’ worst season yet.

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Ken Hitchcock is a Stanley Cup-winning taskmaster expected to whip the underachieving Blues into shape. (Jeff Roberson/AP Photos)

Sunday evening, the axe fell for the first time this season on an NHL coach: Davis Payne, who told Jeremy Rutherford of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch the move was “shocking and disappointing.” Other than Payne, not very many people were shocked because the only disappointing thing was his Blues’ record (6-7-0). The bigger surprise to some is that Ken Hitchcock has replaced Payne, because the NHL rumor wire — which has only a fleeting relationship with fact — had Hitchcock resuming his old job as coach of the Blue Jackets.
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