Making the pieces fit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/09/2015 (3697 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just going out on a limb here, but based on what we know about Paul Maurice, let’s state fairly confidently there aren’t a whole lot of off-the-cuff, oh-hell-why-not decisions during the course of his day.

That has to be especially true from the moment the Winnipeg Jets coach flicks on the light switch to his office early each morning. Every one of his decisions — from the AHL-heavy lineup the club iced Wednesday in Edmonton, to the line combinations, to the 11 players who were re-assigned on Thursday — is completely calculated and absolutely by design.

Heck, less planning likely went into building the pyramids than the meticulous thought he puts in just to organize a practice.

All of which brings us to the different roster machinations the man must have rolling around in his head right now, what with five exhibition games remaining before the curtain lifts on a new NHL season Oct. 8th in Boston.

Stare at the Jets depth chart and it’s easy to see nine defencemen on one-way contracts and the holes left up front by the exit of Michael Frolik, Lee Stempniak, Jim Slater and Jiri Tlusty. Where we see needs, he sees something else.

“I don’t look at it that way,” said Maurice. “It’s not what you need, it’s what you’ve got and the pieces have to fit with what you have.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the structure (of the depth chart) is. It’s the Christmas tree: you put your centre ice down and hang all the pieces off the end of it and see what fits. It will be the players that decide if they fit well.

“We’ll move the players around. There’s never a season you start with an idea and finish with that same idea.”

It’s true, putting together an NHL roster is like working on a puzzle that never gets finished. Maurice settles on defensive pairings and then gets blindsided by one injury after another (see: Jets 2014-15 season). He sees wingers as centres, forwards as defencemen.

He sees instant chemistry with two forwards and tries to find the right player to complete the trio. He’s got an overload of quality right-handed shooting defencemen in Jacob Trouba, Dustin Byfuglien and Tyler Myers and the dilemma of finding enough minutes for every one of them.

And he’s got the insurance/flexibility of having five forwards in his top nine capable of playing both wing and centre.

But in the right here and now in which he’s also got some heavy decisions to make, among them:

• Is Nikolaj Ehlers NHL ready? Ditto for Andrew Copp?
• Does this idea of moving Bryan Little to right wing and having Adam Lowry slot into the No. 1 centre role with Andrew Ladd actually have legs or is it just a fun little training-camp experiment? And how do the nicks to Ladd and Little impact that?
• Which works best, playing Alex Burmistrov along the wall or down the middle?
• Is there room for long-time European pro/29-year-old NHL rookie Thomas Raffl somewhere with the big club?
• Which winger is best-suited to a 13th-forward role, Matt Halischuk, Raffl, Matt Fraser, Anthony Peluso?

All of this, it’s worth noting, comes under the draft-and-develop-but-win-right-now blueprint. And so he’s got his decisions to make, knowing full well his boss — GM Kevin Cheveldayoff — is managing how to divvy up ownership’s money in the future between Andrew Ladd, Dustin Byfuglien, Lowry, Trouba and Mark Scheifele.

And so a guy who doesn’t half-ass his practice plan is hardly going to go willy-nilly on filling out his lineup card.

“We have to develop the pieces into players to fit what we need,” said Maurice. “We’ve got good young players. Whether they’re ready, we’re going to find out.

“The fact of the matter is we’re probably going to have — maybe not on the opening roster — but there might be four guys in our lineup that didn’t play in the National Hockey League last year up front. That’s a third of your forwards. But, we’re going to figure out how to do it and we’re going to play our style of hockey.”

Maurice has all these questions, and then some, to mull over in the next few days and weeks. And now it’s up to those in camp to provide more material for his answers.

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPEdTait