2019-20 Playoff Appearance
A pandemic-shortened season, a bubble-born playoff run, and a Blue Jackets team proving its mettle.
The 2019–20 Columbus Blue Jackets playoff appearance stands as one of the most unusual postseason runs in franchise history, arriving at the tail end of a regular season truncated by the global pandemic. After a shortened 68-game regular season that concluded in early March 2020, Columbus earned a berth in the 2020 NHL Playoffs, which were ultimately staged in a biosecure bubble at Rogers Place in Edmonton, Alberta, beginning in August of that year.
For a club that had spent much of the late 2010s in a transitional, rebuilding phase, reaching the postseason again represented a meaningful step forward. Though the Blue Jackets were knocked out in the opening round, the run underscored the depth of a roster featuring young core pieces like Oliver Bjorkstrand, Seth Jones, and Cam Atkinson, and it set the stage for the franchise's subsequent competitive trajectory.
- Season
- 2019–20
- Playoff Result
- First-round elimination
- Playoff Venue
- Rogers Place, Edmonton, Alberta
- Season Context
- Regular season shortened to 68 games due to the 2020 pandemic
- Franchise Era
- Late rebuilding / early competitive window
- Notable Roster Players
- Oliver Bjorkstrand, Seth Jones, Cam Atkinson, Matt Duchene
Lore & Background
The 2019–20 campaign was unlike any the Blue Jackets organization had experienced. The regular season, already compressed to 68 games, was halted in early March when the NHL suspended play amid the escalating global health crisis. For months the franchise operated in limbo—players dispersed, training facilities closed, and the future of the season uncertain. When the league announced a restart plan in late June, Columbus was among the sixteen Eastern and Western Conference teams granted a playoff spot, and the journey to Edmonton began.
The bubble itself became a defining backdrop. Stripped of home-ice advantage, crowd noise, and the familiar atmosphere of Nationwide Arena, the Blue Jackets competed in a sterile, controlled environment where every shift carried the weight of a season that had been upended. The team's identity—built around speed, physicality, and the electric energy of its young forwards—had to be reasserted in a setting that felt almost antiseptic compared to the roar of Columbus fans.
Though the postseason run ended in the first round, the experience was formative. Players who had been in the midst of development found themselves in high-pressure playoff conditions, and the organizational staff gained invaluable insight into managing a roster through an unprecedented disruption. Fans, watching from living rooms across Ohio and beyond, found a thread of continuity and hope in a season that had otherwise been defined by uncertainty.
In Their Own Story
The ice at Rogers Place was quiet in a way the Blue Jackets had never known. No 20,000 voices shook the rafters. No drum line pounded the boards. Just the whisper of skates carving into fresh ice and the soft thud of a puck dropped by a linesman in a face mask. Oliver Bjorkstrand stood at the blue line, tapping his stick against the ice, watching the opposing captain skate to the center. He could hear his own breathing. He could hear Seth Jones's skates two meters behind him. The arena was a glass house in a city that wasn't theirs, and the season that had led them here had been ripped away and stitched back together in a way no one in the league had ever imagined. The puck dropped. The silence broke. And for one shift, it felt like Columbus again.
Reader's Guide
The 2019–20 Columbus Blue Jackets playoff appearance was a first-round run in the 2020 NHL Playoffs, held in the Edmonton bubble at Rogers Place after the regular season was cut short by the global pandemic.
The regular season had been reduced to 68 games and was suspended in early March 2020. When the league resumed play in August, Columbus entered the postseason as a lower-seeded Eastern Conference team, competing against the top four seeds in the opening round.
The Blue Jackets were eliminated in that first series. While the result was a loss, the significance of the appearance lay in what it represented: a franchise in the middle of a competitive window, a group of young players gaining playoff experience under extraordinary circumstances, and an organization that had navigated one of the most disruptive seasons in modern NHL history without losing its identity.
For fans, the run was a reminder that the Blue Jackets' trajectory was upward. The depth, speed, and physicality that defined the 2019–20 regular season carried into the bubble, and the experience of those playoff games became a foundation the team built upon in the seasons that followed.
Did You Know?
- The 2019–20 season was the first in NHL history to be suspended mid-season due to a global pandemic, with the regular season cut from 82 games to 68.
- All 2020 playoff games were played at a single venue—Rogers Place in Edmonton—meaning the Blue Jackets never played a home playoff game in Columbus that season.
- The 2019–20 roster featured a core of young players—Bjorkstrand, Jones, Atkinson, and Duchene—many of whom were in their prime development years, making the playoff experience a key part of their growth.
- The pandemic-era bubble format meant no fans, no media in the building, and a strict biosecure protocol, making the 2020 playoffs unlike any postseason in the league's history.