Jets blow off blown lead

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This article was published 23/12/2014 (3919 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TRY to keep your eye on the forest, even when you’re looking at the trees, the Winnipeg Jets insisted on Monday.

It required a little effort on the part of JetsNation, given the frustration of blowing a 3-1 third-period lead in Sunday’s home contest against the Philadelphia Flyers, a result that went the Flyers’ way, 4-3 in overtime.

“We’re learning how to handle leads because we’ve had a bunch of them,” said Jets coach Paul Maurice after Monday’s team meeting and brief skate for a half-dozen players at the MTS Centre. “And that’s a good thing.

“We’re learning to find the confidence to make plays.”

The Jets didn’t do enough of that in Sunday’s third period, so their record taking leads to the third period didn’t improve.

Nonetheless, it’s still 12-1-4 this season and one of the reasons the team is 7-1-4 in its last 12 games as it heads to Chicago to meet the Blackhawks in tonight’s pre-Christmas finale (7 p.m., TSN3, TSN1290).

Monday, nobody seemed to be worried about picking up the pieces of Sunday’s mess, simply putting down the setback to just another bump along the road of improvement.

“We’ve lost one game in regulation in the last 12, so I think the way that we play, the effort we bring every night allows for a little bit of slack when things maybe don’t go your way,” right-winger Blake Wheeler said. “You’re not going to win every game in this league and that was the case last night.

“We had a two-goal lead in the third period. We’d like to get two points regardless of how successful we’ve been, you’d like to close that out.”

Wheeler said the Jets know what happened, and what should have happened.

“Those things are going to happen, but the more you learn from it… once they get that second goal, you’d like to see our team pick it up a little bit, do some of the things that gave us success the first half of the game and try to get that fourth one that closes them out.”

Both Mark Scheifele (a Rob Zepp save) and Blake Wheeler (post) had excellent chances to extend the Jets’ lead with a fourth goal Sunday.

That fourth goal was something that caught Maurice’s attention as he talked about the forest as well as the trees, a portrait that involves a large canvas of one-goal games.

“There’s a value to getting comfortable in those games,” the coach said. “And then learning how our game fits in those one-goal games is where we’re at right now.

“At 3-1, we want this game to go to 4-1. That’s the mentality we want, to use their risk change to our advantage and make those plays.

“So we’re not a team that snaps the puck around. Our success isn’t coming from seven good passes and into the back of their net. It comes more from a grind. So how do we improve our playmaking and our willingness to make plays when it’s not necessarily our strong suit? But we have to do that to get to our strong suit, which is our forecheck.”

The problem Sunday was, with the lead, the Jets were content to force the puck out of their own end into the neutral zone, or to just flip it there.

Those safe plays — getting the puck temporarily out to safety — precluded what Maurice called the “simple” plays the team normally employs, which is the quick exit and move of the game down to the offensive zone to let its forecheck create chances. It’s a work in progress, he said.

“You have to get into enough of those games where it goes from 3-1 to 3-2 to 4-2,” he said. “Or it holds at 3-2. Or if it gets to 3-3, that you’ve got enough wins under your belt that it’s not the end of the world that it just happened. So we’re still battling that one, that dread.

“This team and all teams like it for the last four or five years have played games in December that would have been viewed as must-win games. The pressure in that December game, if you get enough wins, you can learn how to do things right and get confidence, so when you get into those games, a 3-1 lead can be 4-1 more times than not.”

 

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca