Jets make roadkill of Preds

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This article was published 04/11/2014 (3971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An unexpected resource provided the winning edge for the Winnipeg Jets on Tuesday night.

Two power-play goals in the game’s first six minutes provided enough favourable wind to sail the Jets home with a 3-1 victory over the Nashville Predators before 15,106 at the MTS Centre.

These are the kinds of things drawn in by momentum.

The Jets were 28th out of 30 NHL teams with the man advantage coming into the game, but clicked for goals by Andrew Ladd and Mark Scheifele on their first two chances.

“That definitely felt good but the biggest thing was getting the win,” Scheifele said about only his second goal of the season. “To come back from a good road trip, it was definitely huge to get a win at home. A great team effort.”

The decision raised Winnipeg’s unbeaten-in-regulation streak to six games, now 5-0-1 in that time.

More importantly, it pushed the Jets to a 7-5-1 mark through 13 games and for the day, into third place in the Central Division. That’s a guaranteed playoff spot at the end of 82 games.

In their rise after a bumbling start, the Jets are now 3-1 in Central Division games, a department that wounded them lethally last season when they went 9-15-5 and missed the playoffs by seven points.

 

Power in Play

After being dormant again for three games, the Jets’ power play surfaced early Tuesday night.

Ladd tipped in Dustin Byfuglien’s point shot 2:53 in and Scheifele’s hard wrister at 5:29 gave the home side a big advantage early.

The last time the Jets had anything on the power play was seven days earlier against the Islanders, another two-goal game that helped them win, 4-3.

Tuesday’s outburst dragged the percentage up, from 7.7 to 11.6, much of that low number attributable to the goose egg put up in the season’s first six games.

“That was big for our power play, especially against a team like that that doesn’t give you much five-on-five,” Ladd said. “It was nice to get a two-goal cushion and have that energy from our power play, even in the third. I thought that our one power play, we were snapping it around pretty good and gained some momentum off it.”

Scheifele said the team’s power play hasn’t been that bad.

“It was just a matter of time,” he said. “We got chances. We got shots. It was just a matter of them going in for us.”

Cooling Preds

After blazing from the gates to the top of the division, Nashville has lost three of the last five to drop to 7-3-2, now just one point ahead of Winnipeg with one less game played.

The Preds are now 2-2 through four games of their six-game road trip, which also takes them to Dallas and St. Louis before going home.

Filip Forsberg, the super rookie, had Nashville’s only goal on Tuesday, a left-wing shot that wiggled through Pavelec late in the second period to make things tight.

 

Extended Zeroes

A sidelight to Tuesday’s game, but something good teams will talk about more often than bad teams, was Winnipeg’s shutout streak extending into a franchise record.

With back-to-back shutouts on the weekend and holding the Predators off the board until 16:17 of the second period on Tuesday, the Jets went 161 minutes 17 seconds without being scored on, according to the NHL.

That eclipsed the old franchise mark of 151:55 set in 2005.

Winnipeg’s streak was 169:44 of actual play, but a ridiculous league guideline dictates that a team losing a shootout loses credit for the shutout time in that game that preceded the shootout.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca

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