Jets seek more from special teams

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2017 (2888 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They spent much of the off-season talking about the need to improve their special teams if they want to be a legitimate playoff contender.

But the power play and penalty kill have come limping out of the gate for the Winnipeg Jets. While they’ve managed to string together a 3-2-0 start — thanks mainly to some strong five-on-five play and some stellar goaltending the last three games, all wins — they’re certainly playing with fire if things don’t improve.

The Jets are currently second-worst in the NHL when short-handed, killing off 71.4 per cent of all penalties (15 for 21). Their power play isn’t much better, going just 2-for-19 so far. The 10.5 per cent success rate is 23rd overall in the league.

“We can do everything a little faster, not force too many things. Try and just get the pucks to the net, get some traffic and just put it in from there,” forward Nikolaj Ehlers said Monday of the power play. “When we try and do too much, that’s when it’s not working. So we’re going to have to try and just play simple and get pucks to the net.”

The Jets now face the additional hurdle of losing forward Mathieu Perreault for an extended period time. He’s a big part of the power play. But his linemate, Bryan Little, believes improvement is coming even if the statistics haven’t shown it yet.

“So far, even when we haven’t been scoring, we’ve been getting a lot of good chances and moving the puck around really well, which for long points of the stretch last year, we (had a tough time) even getting the puck set up, let alone moving it around and getting chances,” said Little. “I like what I see. I think it’s just a matter of time before we get some luck around the net.”

Head coach Paul Maurice has been tinkering with his special teams, including using offensive players such as Mark Scheifele and Blake Wheeler to kill penalties. The original plan was to give most of that work to bottom-six forwards, but surrendering four power-play goals in the first two games prompted changes.

“I’m confident with the direction the PK is going. There was a pretty major shift,” Maurice said Monday. “It’s a tradeoff. I know when I’m running those guys to kill penalties they don’t have quite the same jump on the power play. We gotta get our PK down. We gave up four in the first two games, which is unacceptable.”

Matt Hendricks has yet to play in the regular season due to injury, and he’s expected to be a key penalty killer this year. Maurice is hopeful that giving up only two short-handed goals in the past three games is a sign the Jets are trending in the right direction.

As for the power play, Maurice said it’s about getting more pucks to the net. Much of Monday’s practice was spent working on that. Missing Dustin Byfuglien for two of the first five games, and net-front presence Adam Lowry for the last game, didn’t help, either.

“There’s lots of things. At the end of it I’ll just say that we started to move the puck an awful lot slower on the power play than we did, and that was the focus (Monday), getting back to that speed,” said Maurice.

In addition to their not-so-special teams, Winnipeg is also functioning right now with almost nothing in the way of bottom-six scoring.

A short-handed goal by Brandon Tanev and a short-handed assist by Andrew Copp are the only points accumulated by bottom-six forwards so far this season.

Lowry, Shawn Matthias, Marko Dano, Joel Armia and Nic Petan are all still looking for their first contributions to the scoresheet.

“Defence is an important, critical piece to what we’re doing. But we still think we can score an awful lot of goals. For, let’s say the bottom-six guys, they need to find a way to play a game that’s slightly different than the top six. Get pucks to the net,” said Maurice. “We’re working on getting the other two lines to do that as well. But they’re not going to snap it around the same way, they’re not going to generate the same kind of offence. Those guys gotta get to a pretty meat-and-potatoes style of hockey and get pucks to the net.”

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @mikemcintyrewpg