Some fight left in battered Jets

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This article was published 16/03/2017 (3162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — When you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose.

Bob Dylan, meet the Winnipeg Jets.

Riding a four-game losing skid and with their NHL playoff hopes hanging by a fraying thread, a battered and bruised Jets team rolled into the Barclays Center Thursday night and defeated the New York Islanders 4-2.

It’s probably too little and it’s probably too late to make any difference to the playoff hopes of a team that had a 0.1 per cent chance of qualifying for the post-season coming into the night, according to analytics website sportsclubstats.com.

But in a month in which the team’s hopes and best-laid plans were turned to dust by a playoff push that went in reverse, there’s something to be said for the therapeutic value of finally turning the tables and inflicting a bit of a beating of your own.

This one was timely. With a loss Thursday, the Jets would have equalled their season-worst losing skid of five games and you’d have had to wonder with 11 games remaining in the regular season whether this team had played itself into a death spiral that could have transcended ugly and gotten embarrassing.

Full credit: after falling behind 1-0 less than one minute into the game and finding themselves under a relentless Islanders siege, the Jets found the up-tempo game that has been their most successful formula all season and, thanks to a pair of first-period goals from Bryan Little, turned a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead heading into the first intermission.

By the end of the second intermission, it was 4-1 Jets thanks to single markers from Mathieu Perreault and Adam Lowry — and that was basically the game as the fans at the Barclays Center threw in the towel and turned their patented New York derision towards their own team.

About those Little goals

Little’s goals were his 19th and 20th of the season, giving the charter member of the Jets his fourth 20-goal season in six years in Winnipeg — this one coming in an injury-shortened campaign that has so far allowed him to play just 48 games.

Little’s milestone also gives the Jets five 20-goal scorers this season: Little, Patrik Laine (33), Mark Scheifele (28), Nikolaj Ehlers (22) and Blake Wheeler (21).

“And just as importantly, three of them are very young,” Jets head coach Paul Maurice reflected after the game.

“We have gone from a place where a couple years we thought we had some good heart and good character but we felt we had a whole hell of a time scoring goals… We think we’re fairly close to a threshold.”

There’s also still big room for improvement, said Wheeler.

“We have enough guys that can put the puck in the net, we need to get better at other aspects of our game to have a fighting chance at being the team we want to be,” the Jets captain said. “Pieces are in place offensively, it’s just kind of now figuring out the rest of the game.”

Petan responds

After being a healthy scratch Monday night in Nashville and hearing his coach tell the media this week he needs to improve his game, forward Nic Petan did just that — setting up Little’s second goal for Petan’s first point in 17 NHL games.

Petan also appeared to have scored his first goal in 38 games in the second period, only to have it disallowed on a coach’s challenge that the play had been offside.

Hellebuyck survives

After giving up a shaky goal from long range in the game’s first minute, Jets netminder Connor Hellebuyck turned back the rest of a first-period Islanders onslaught to keep his team in the game long enough for Little to take over with those two first-period goals.

Hellebuyck finished the night stopping 27 of 29 shots.

Up Next

A three-game Jets road trip that ended up being just two games after a match Tuesday night in New Jersey was postponed by a blizzard ends with the Jets going 1-0-1 and now returning home to face the Minnesota Wild at the MTS Centre Sunday afternoon.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek