Jets’ Chipman, Maurice weigh in on off-season developments

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/06/2015 (3785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Mark Chipman isn’t sure what he thinks of expansion, Paul Maurice likes 3-on-3, there is room on the roster for Nik Ehlers and Connor Hellebuyck will have to elbow his way into a spot with the Winnipeg Jets.

On Day 2 of the 2015 NHL draft — while Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff continued to add to his team’s prospect pool — team chairman Chipman was available for a few questions, as was head coach Maurice.

The Jets are an emerging franchise and Chipman’s business formula is proving successful. The club is reinvesting and making major improvements to MTS Centre this summer, and has transferred (to Winnipeg from St. John’s, Nfld.) and renamed (Manitoba Moose) its AHL club.

Maurice, meanwhile, has settled in after his first full season on the job which resulted in a playoff berth.

Here are some highlights from conversations with the two men on the draft floor:

On last week’s announcement the NHL will explore expansion and the widespread belief the league will grow to 32 teams for the 2017 season:

“That’s true, it will be dilutive. The whole business is diluted. The number of, or the quality of, players perhaps is dilutive… I don’t know how I would characterize my feelings about expansion,” said Chipman. “I would say I haven’t really thought through the long-term effect of it. I guess you’d put me in the category of cautious right now. I’d love to jump and down and say it’s great all around, but I’m not sure of that.”

The Manitoba Moose have returned to Winnipeg and will play out of the MTS Centre this season. Chipman has said he’ll adopt a wait-and-see approach on having two pro hockey teams in the Winnipeg market, but early indications are the AHL franchise is economically viable:

“I think the last number I saw was about 3,300 full season tickets, which is great. It’s not far off the number we had when we left or when the team moved in 2011. And that, frankly, is without having a sales staff that’s picked up a phone and done any outbound-sales efforts. That’s really just from our existing (NHL) season-ticket base and our wait-list customers and people that were interested enough to go online or call in and buy tickets,” Chipman said before he was asked what number of ticket sales per game would make the business work. “Somewhere between four (thousand) and five thousand on a game-by-game basis. If we can drive that season-ticket number up a little bit more, which I’m sure we will over the summer, that gives us the opportunity to do the kinds of things we’ve done in the past with group sales and there’ll be a walk-up component. If we get anywhere near what we’ve done in the past, we’ll be fine. So I think the economics of it look good right now.”

The Jets have been a budget team and Chipman’s stance on this has been clear: the team would spend in the third quartile of the salary range on a year-in, year-out basis with the ability to bump up salary expenditures when deemed necessary by competitive forces. If the team is on the verge of contending and capable of winning multiple playoff rounds, Chipman will give spending to the cap the green light.

“We’re getting closer to the cap every year. It’s unclear exactly where we’ll fall in this year because as you know we’ve got some (player contract) situations that are pending right now,” said Chipman. “But I would imagine we’ll be well in that third quartile and getting pretty close to the cap. I would say we’ll be under the cap but I can’t tell you exactly how far.”

Meanwhile, Maurice will have to determine a strategy for the NHL’s new overtime rules, in which teams will play 3-on-3 prior to a shootout if a game isn’t previously decided.

“All the guys who can really skate and have great hands get to go. We were talking about the options that we have from our back end alone. It’s very possibly you would go with three forwards,” said Maurice. “But why wouldn’t you have (blue-liner) Tyler Myers on the ice? Dustin Byfuglien, Jacob Trouba, Paul Postma can get up the ice with a great amount of speed. So when you start going through the list, there’s not a team in the National Hockey League that’s not going to be able to put on some wildly dynamic players. I’m all for it. I mean, I have a love-hate relationship with the shootout. I hate it as a coach for the value of it and what it can cost you. You’ve played a great tie hockey game with some great battles and you end up feeling low because of the shootout. I understand from a fan’s point of view, when I used to go scout games during lockouts I wanted to see somebody win. I want a finish. So I get the shootout and I have no problem with it staying in, but I’m really happy that they went to 3-on-3. I think it’s great.”

The Jets have seven unrestricted free agents from last season’s forward group and there’s been lot of talk 2014 first-rounder Nik Ehlers will step into the lineup. Maurice, however, isn’t making any promises.

“He has to make the team, I mean that’s it at the end of the day. I’ve got no problem with a kid coming out of junior and playing in the NHL…. That’s an option for you, but you have to be able to play or you have to have a bit of Adam Lowry early on. I moved him around a little bit, but you knew we were going to better by the end of the year and so was he,” said Maurice. “So I think if you can answer those two questions affirmatively — if Ehlers will be better by the end of the year and the Winnipeg Jets will as well — then he’s on the team. But at the end of the day, he’s got to make the team.

“I don’t remember who the old coach was that said, ‘Young players are great, they’ll play great but they won’t produce for you.’ So I’m not limiting what Ehlers can do down the road. I’m trying to be a little protective of what we expect of this young man. He has a great skill set and he has fantastic speed so it’s the normal progression for him. He’s going to be a wonderful Winnipeg Jet for a long time. I just can’t predict when that’s going to happen. I think that we have enough size and speed on our team that we can protect a player like that…. There’s other good young players that have to get a legitimate look. Now, they may not have Ehlers’s blinding speed but they have a skill level. We have some options. I do think we’re big enough and strong enough that we can have a young player like that (in the NHL) maybe even earlier than people would have thought. We are a draft-and-develop team, but the whole point of drafting and developing is when a player is ready, he’s ready.”

Jacob Trouba was paired with Mark Stuart the last two seasons, but with Tyler Myers, Toby Enstrom and Dustin Byfuglien also on the blue-line it’s going to be difficult to divide the minutes equally through three pairings. Trouba, Myers, Enstrom and Byfuglien need big minutes, potentially leading to a top four made up of this group.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

The Warm-Up

Winnipeg Jets Game Days

On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop.

Sign up for The Warm-Up

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

“Eventually, the minutes have to get divided like that. I don’t know that we would have to start a game necessarily with these pairs, but when you get into a tighter game or you’re chasing a game, that’s probably the way you go,” said Maurice. “One of the areas we have to look at was our inability to come back in games last year. How you roll who goes over to the left side, and being careful not to push your top four quite a bit harder over the course of the year. If you’re winning a lot of games and you’re leading, you’d like not to have to do that too much…. In my mind, Jacob Trouba is absolutely ready for 24 minutes a game because he’s actually been doing it for a couple of years. That’s the develop part of draft and develop. He was ready to play, but we have an expectation that he’s going to continue to get better.”

The Jets will bring three pro goalies to training camp: Ondrej Pavelec, Michael Hutchinson and Connor Hellebuyck. Maurice says it will be hard for Hellebuyck to unseat the incumbents. Waivers for Pavelec and Hutchinson are an issue so, most likely, the goaltending scenario will be Pavelec and Hutchinson beginning the season with the Jets and Hellebuyck waiting for an injury or for one of the others to hit a slump.

“Ondrej Pavelec put up the best numbers of his career last season and he put up numbers that are good NHL numbers. So it’s not a matter of it’s his job to lose, it’s a matter of performance gets the job…. And you go back to November-December-January and Michael Hutchinson is a revelation in the National Hockey League and his performance says that that’s what we expect of him,” said Maurice. “Connor had a great world championships and he had a great year in the American Hockey League, but he has to take somebody’s job. To be honest with you, it’s nearly impossible to do that at a training camp on a seven-game schedule. I mean, who is going to make that your decision? ‘There’s our guy. We’re going with him for the year on a seven game schedule.’ Nobody is going to do that. What we do know is, we have depth…. We could bring any one of those three up and put them in the net and say we expect to win this game tonight. I’ve always approached the exhibition games as getting your No. 1 guy ready first and your No.2 guy ready second. And everybody else after that, we’ll see over the course of the year.”

gary.lawless@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @garylawless