Bad defence: Jets are undoing last season’s hard work

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This article was published 24/11/2015 (3576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON — Jets Nation, do you know where the panic button is?

Don’t bang it yet, but it might be a good idea to at least know where it is.

The 10-10-2 Jets have clearly lost their way in the most important element of their success and progress of 2014-15, and the recent 2-1-0 homestand didn’t do a lot to convince us otherwise.

The Jets have reverted to having a whole lot of trouble keeping the puck out of their net.

It was their ticket to last spring’s Stanley Cup playoff berth. The road to that kind of organizational advance was paved with defence and a significant reduction in goals against.

The club had never before been higher than the NHL’s bottom 10 in this category. In one season, the first full one under coach Paul Maurice, the team advanced to the top 10.

What the first 22 games of this season have shown — and for sure what’s happened since Game 10 — is the Jets have regressed to the form of the seasons that preceded their playoff appearance.

At the 10-game mark last season, the Jets were 4-5-1 with a 20-26 goals-for/goals-against chart. It was middle-of-the-pack stuff, hardly alarming as the team found its way to a high-compete, defending identity.

This year’s 10-game tally was actually encouraging in some ways.

A mark of 6-3-1 was comparatively better, as the Jets had found some extra offence. The for/against chart was 32-26 and it now seems some were distracted by the improved scoring as opposed to concerned about the said defensive number that was middle-of-the-pack.

Some would have expected more there from a team that learned how to play better defence last season.

This season’s second 10-game segment was a cold shower on any optimism that had been created.

Last season, this period showed the same offence and a huge leap forward in defence, at a 40-43 for/against total. The 43 goals against represented a move all the way to fourth-best in the league and set the tone for a consistent level that carried the team past Game 82 and into the post-season.

This year’s move was the other way. A team with a different makeup provided mostly bad news defensively. The for/against tally after 20 games was 54-62, again with more offence than last season but a defensive number so regressive the Jets are now back where they used to reside, firmly in the league’s bottom 10.

No. 28, in fact, better today than only the Calgary Flames and Columbus Blue Jackets.

At more than three goals against per game and a full goal against per game worse than last season, that’s worst in the Central heading into Wednesday’s contest against an offensively potent and firing-on-most-cylinders opponent in the Washington Capitals.

Yes, the Jets are aware of this slide. They vow they have not forgotten what sparked their progress last season and yet recently, they often seem powerless to do anything about it.

During the bust of the four-game trip through the Central Division earlier this month, there were odd-man rushes and breakaways against on a regular basis.

“One of the challenges has been, you leave last year and you think everything is great with your game and you won every game by a big margin and you just pounded teams and you’re really disciplined at the end of the year,” Maurice said the other day. “That wasn’t our game. We got really good goaltending in November last year, just spectacular. And you built confidence from that.

“We’ve just got to build confidence in a different way here.”

Things in this area were slightly better against the Vancouver Canucks and Arizona Coyotes last week (both wins), but the clean looks and odd-man chances returned against the Colorado Avalanche Monday and in the end, for all their puck possession, the Jets couldn’t keep it out of their net.

The overall game plan hasn’t been altered that much. The execution is the issue and it only gets harder, now that their most experienced goalie, Ondrej Pavelec, is on the sidelines for at least a month.

“It seems like we haven’t necessarily gotten away from (defence), it’s just that we haven’t been as successful this year,” forward Adam Lowry said. “You look at the last few games, against Arizona and Vancouver, I’d say we did a much better job limiting their goals and their chances and it turns out into wins.

“We’ll look for that consistent effort ahead. We’ve been able to iron out some of the kinks.“

It’s only about one-quarter of the season, but these kinds of kinks have put the Jets on the road back to big-time danger.

In the three seasons before the Jets truly understood what it takes to make the playoffs, the inconsistencies led to far too many highs and lows and a nervous, chasing approach to the season’s second half and the playoff line itself.

Each time, a bid was made. Each time, it eventually failed because goals against are just too lethal a flaw for a team that is not among the elite in terms of NHL talent, especially offensive talent.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca