Rookies Ehlers, Copp and Petan make opening roster for the Jets

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/10/2015 (3652 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rookies Nikolaj Ehlers, Andrew Copp and Nic Petan have all made the season-opening roster for the Winnipeg Jets.

The team made several roster decisions today, including sending winger J.C. Lipon to the AHL’s Manitoba Moose and waiving defenceman Jay Harrison, who was not in practice this morning at the MTS Centre.

“That’s a tough day today,” Jets coach Paul Maurice said, asked about the decision on Harrison. “It’s tough if it’s any player that you’ve coached but when you have the relationship we’ve had, the time spent together, it was a tough one.”

The Jets open their regular season on Thursday in Boston but must declare a starting, cap-compliant roster of a maximum of 23 players by tomorrow afternoon.

“I feel great,” said Ehlers, the 19-year-old who was the team’s first-round pick in 2014. “Of course, I’m still here and I’m just happy for sure. I’ve worked hard for this and I’m here.”

Today’s news, apparently delivered to the players by head coach Paul Maurice, brought Petan’s biggest smile of training camp.

“It was pretty exciting,” Petan, 20, said. “You think about it all the time growing up, whether in junior, so it was good to hear (it) from him.”

Today’s decisions leave 24 players still on the ice with the team this morning. Austrian-born winger Thomas Raffl remains with the club and is practising today, though he has no NHL contract yet.

“There’s conversations going on to see what his status will be here in the next 24 hours in terms of where he played last year and our interest in having him play for us in our organization,” Maurice said today. “Things have to get worked out before five o’clock tomorrow.”

The NHL and Austria do have a transfer agreement, so if Raffl joins the Jets organization, there will be a development fee paid to his club, Salzburg Red Bulls.

The team and the Jets have some kind of understanding ongoing while Raffl is here on his tryout arrangement. The Jets can sign him and he won’t have to pass through NHL waivers because the game he has played for Salzburg this season came before the NHL season began.

Raffl said after practice today that today is likely decision day and he wouldn’t speculate as to whether he’d take a two-way deal with the Jets.

“I’ll have to talk to the team and my agent today and we’ll have to make a decision,” Raffl said. “It depends how my team… agrees on the terms of that. That’s the thing my agent, they go between my (Austrian) team and the Jets and they’re going to find a solution and we’ll see what it all looks like.”

The fact he was still here today was a good sign, Raffl said.

“It was good. Obviously a good feeling for me, still with the team and practising with them,” he said. “Now we’ve just got to go step by step and we’ll see how the day’s going to turn out.”

In practice today, the Jets were going with this configuration:

Andrew Ladd-Bryan Little-Blake Wheeler
Mathieu Perreault-Mark Scheifele-Nikolaj Ehlers
Alex Burmistrov-Adam Lowry-Drew Stafford
Nic Petan-Andrew Copp-Chris Thorburn

Toby Enstrom-Tyler Myers
Ben Chiarot-Dustin Byfuglien
Mark Stuart-Jacob Trouba

Ondrej Pavelec
Michaelf Hutchinson

Extra D: Paul Postma-Adam Pardy

Extra F: Anthony Peluso-Thomas Raffl

 

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca