David Savard Autographed Card

The Columbus Blue Jackets had lost 10 of their past 11 games while dealing with an incredible amount of injuries, but they kept hold of the Wild Card position tonight by defeating the Vancouver Canucks 5-3, overcoming a 3-1 deficit in the process. The Canucks' loss helps the Vegas Golden Knights, Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames out West.

A key player on the Jackets since the 2014-15 season has been David Savard, an underrated defenseman who plays behind Seth Jones and Zach Werenski but would be a fist-pair defender on most NHL teams.

We're talking about a guy who is built like a cliché'd Canadian Lumberjack - 6'2" with a perfect stature, 230 pounds of muscle and a face that reads "no bullshit" and "no drama" at the same time - who doesn't make mistakes yet plays upwards of 20 rough minutes per night, like a mixture of Nicklas Lidstrom and Niklas Kronwall.

As the Jackets as a whole have taken a step back in terms of offensive production - last year's points leader on the team, Artemi Panarin, produced 87 points in 79 games while this year's leader, Pierre-Luc Dubois, may not hit the 60 mark - so has Savard, yet his PDO (shooting % + save percentage) is a solid 99.7%, which is fine on a bubble team that scores so little.

Internationally, he's only suited up for Team Canada once - at the 2015 World Championships - and the team went to have a perfect 10-0 record to win gold for the first time since 2007. He can't make it all that often because the Blue Jackets are always in the playoffs.

Here he is wearing Columbus' white (away) uniform, on card #297 from Upper Deck's 2017-18 O-Pee-Chee set:

He signed it in thick silver sharpie, which didn't leave him enough room to spell out his entire name. He did attempt to tag his jersey number (58) at the end, though.