by Bob Hunter, The Columbus Dispatch , The Columbus Dispatch

Last season in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Red Wings turned up the energy meter and swept a Blue Jackets team it had split the season series with. Last night, the third-place Wings needed less than 12 minutes to take a 4-0 lead on the second-place Jackets and hung on for a 9-1, uh, never mind.

The Jackets' play was uglier than a hungover rhinoceros, but a lot of what has happened says it was more aberration than reality. The standings say that the Red Wings (8-5-3) are a weaker team this season. Even if that wasn't discernible in this snoozer -- the sleepy Jackets made these Wings look like the 1983-90 Edmonton Oilers -- common sense says that the gap between the two is closing. At the moment, glass half-empty types will have to take that on faith.

"They played a solid game; we played terrible," Blue Jackets captain Rick Nash said. "We know we can beat them. We proved last year that we can stick with teams like that. It's just a matter of us not showing up tonight."

It might not be quite that simple, but there is a lot of truth there; as evidence, defenseman Mike Commodore offered up the 8-2 loss the Blue Jackets hung on the Red Wings last season in Detroit.

That Red Wings team really was stronger than this one. But the salary cap is grinding away at the rosters of the rich and powerful, and all that grinding finally did its job on the Wings this past summer, sending forwards Marian Hossa, Jiri Hudler and Mikael Samuelsson elsewhere.

Detroit is still good, obviously, but coach Mike Babcock has said they no longer have such a wide margin for error.

"They still had (the margin for error) last year, because when they dialed it up, it was not a contest," Blue Jackets coach Ken Hitchcock said before the game. "For me, it's different now because they lost some players. But, knowing them, they'll adjust."

This game wasn't an adjustment. This was a Blue Jackets team that for some reason looked like it had spent the week getting ready for the game by consuming a half-ton of pound cake.

"We're not checking," Hitchcock said. "When you don't check, you look slow. When you don't check, you don't win the board battles. When you don't check, you get beat to every loose puck."

But that's a job for the team's chief mechanic. The best thing for fans to do is forget about this stinker and keep reminding themselves that the Red Wings and Blue Jackets are no longer living on different planets.

"(The salary cap) is a huge friend for us," Hitchcock said. "It's allowed the Carolinas and other franchises to contend for the Stanley Cup and win it."

It has also helped beef up the Blue Jackets roster. The only reason the Jackets have R.J. Umberger and backup goaltender Mathieu Garon is because their former teams didn't have the cap room to retain them.

9-1? Forget it.

When Blue Jackets fans made the short trek from the arena to the Arena District bars to drown their sorrows, here's hoping they still offered a toast to the salary cap.

As hard as it was to see it, it really is their new best friend.

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.

bhunter@dispatch.com

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