Stuart playing his 600th game tonight against the Oilers

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This article was published 21/12/2015 (3608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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EDMONTON — Mark Stuart will play his 600th NHL game and the Winnipeg Jets won’t likely make any lineup changes when they meet the Edmonton Oilers tonight at Rexall Place.

The Jets start their eighth back-to-back sequence of the season tonight with one win in the last three (defeating the Rangers at home last Friday) and four wins in the last seven..

Winnipeg moves on to Calgary on Tuesday before taking the Christmas break.

“We’ll celebrate Christmas when it’s Christmas,” said Jets leading scorer Blake Wheeler this morning. “We’ve got a little work to do before then.”

The 15-15-2 Jets believe they’ve started to straighten out their game in recent weeks.

“The simplest answer is, the areas where we needed to compete harder, we are,” head coach Paul Maurice said today. “We’re trending in the right way of the three of our things that were really a problem for us — shots against, where the shots were coming from, and on the power plays, where we’re giving up a number of power-play goals and how they were going in.

“Those were the areas in which we were struggling and we’ve gotten a little bit better at those.”

While they may be trending the right way in some important areas, the results have still not been a big positive.

For instance, since the epic 7-0 blowout in Nashville on Nov. 14, the team is 7-7-0.

“We had a really rough stretch in November, the sky falling on us a little bit,” Wheeler said. “Since then we’ve been happy with the way we’ve been playing. The results have kind of been uneven.

“But overall I think our game has been pretty solid. We’ve let some games go where we should have won and we really haven’t had those games yet where we shouldn’t win that we do win.”

Stuart, 31, plays Game No. 317 for the Jets franchise tonight and said hitting the 600-game milestone is something to ponder at another time.

“Once you’re in the middle of it, you don’t think about it too much because you’re just thinking about the games and winning games and playing well,” he said. “It’s something we’ll look back on later and have some time to dwell on it.

“I feel fortunate to play and play every game. Most guys in the league would say that, that it’s a blessing to get to play any games. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to make it this far.”

Maurice looked this morning like he’ll be sticking with rookie Connor Hellebuyck in goal tonight, and with Joel Armia and Matt Halischuk on the fourth line with Andrew Copp.

The Oilers will be without defenceman Brandon Davidson and have recalled Mark Fayne from the AHL to play in tonight’s game.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca