Mathieu Olivier is paying the max. The Blue Jackets forward was fined $5,000 Wednesday afternoon for slashing Florida's Uvis Balinskis.
The fine follows Tuesday night's 7-3 loss to the Panthers in Columbus, a night Rick Bowness' group would rather forget.
Olivier finished that game with 15 penalty minutes in just 9:13 of ice time. He didn't register a shot on goal and went minus-1.
That $5,000 figure is the ceiling allowed under the CBA. Against a $3,000,000 cap hit, it barely registers.
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Think of it as a parking ticket outside the arena. Annoying, sure. But nobody changes how they drive because of one.
Player Safety stopped short of a suspension, which means the 29-year-old remains eligible for Saturday's home date with the Rangers.
And Columbus needs bodies who push back. The Blue Jackets sit at 2-3-0 with a -5 goal differential and two straight losses.
Panthers power play makes Columbus pay for every trip to the box
Here's the bigger problem for Bowness. Florida scored four times on the power play Tuesday, and the Tkachuk brothers were in the middle of all of it.
Matthew Tkachuk piled up five assists, four of them with the man advantage. Brady Tkachuk answered with a hat trick, two of those goals coming on the power play.
Sam Reinhart added two goals on seven shots. Seth Jones chipped in four assists from the Florida blue line.
Cameron Talbot gave up six goals on 23 shots. Jet Greaves stopped all four he faced, which is about the only clean line on the Columbus side of the sheet.
So what exactly did the slash accomplish? Balinskis still logged 16:19 and finished even.
The Latvian defenseman owns a +2 rating through four games this season. He's not the kind of player who usually ends up in a Player Safety headline.
Columbus, meanwhile, is giving up 4.2 goals per game. You can't hand a team like Florida extra power plays with a defensive number like that.
Olivier has two goals through five games, a useful return early in the season. The penalty minutes are the part Bowness can't afford right now.
The schedule offers little breathing room. After the Rangers on Saturday, the Blue Jackets head to Minnesota on Sunday for the back end of a back-to-back.
Florida comes back to Columbus on Nov. 10. Nobody on either bench will have forgotten Tuesday by then.
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Should Mathieu Olivier have been suspended instead of fined?
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