Missed opportunity for Jets

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This article was published 05/02/2016 (3565 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s never too late to start winning games but tonight’s home start for the Winnipeg Jets marks the end of a missed opportunity.

With a 7 p.m. start against the Carolina Hurricanes, the Jets will complete a stretch of nine out of 10 at home. They are 3-6-0 since it began on Jan. 10 and find themselves nine points away from the Western Conference’s playoff line.

At 47 points (22-25-3), Winnipeg is tied for the conference basement and is only two points out of last overall in the NHL.

“It’s a broken record,” Jets winger Blake Wheeler said this morning. “We’re just trying to stay with what we believe makes us a good team. We just hope that the results are going to follow, I guess.

“I think it’s just important to have any positives at all, home or on the road. We’ve got to get something going soon.”

Jets left-winger Mathieu Perreault said there’s always a chance to get going. His team has lost four of the last five.

“We’ve got to start winning games,” he said.

Perreault pointed to special teams as a place where the Jets could make some instant progress.

“A little bit of a focus, especially the PK,” he said. “We’ve given up a lot of goals on the PK lately so to find a balance, where our power play can get one or two and our PK is doing the job, that makes a big difference.”

This morning, Jets captain Andrew Ladd took the morning skate off, sending a few tongues wagging.

But coach Paul Maurice said Ladd was just taking a maintenance morning and will be in the game tonight.

“He’s playing tonight. Just a morning skate off,” the coach said.

Tonight marks a brief change in their schedule balance. The Jets will have played 26 home games and 25 on the road.

Earlier in January, the team had played the most road games in the NHL, and that trend will return. Eight of Winnipeg’s next 10 are away from home, starting with a Saturday night game in Colorado.

After that game, the Jets have just one more back-to-back instance, and both of those contests are at home in early March.

“We’re looking for that good feeling (tonight),” Maurice said. “It’s such an important part of this time of year. We’ve had a tough stretch here at home but we’ve got some people back in our lineup now and this will be the second game back for (Mathieu) Perreault and we’ve fueled some people up.

“It’s really important to get that positive feeling so when you get into that stretch, you can handle some of the losses that are happening to every team we’re fighting with.”

Thursday, the NHL fined Alex Burmistrov $2,000, having been flagged for two dives this season.

Both he and teammate Nikolaj Ehlers will face a $3,000 fine for their next infraction and if it should go any farther than that, Maurice himself will be fined by the NHL.

“I haven’t gone down once,” the coach joked today, then added seriously: “The two guys that are in the league didn’t play in this league last year. And probably played in leagues where that worked.

“We addressed that individually with each player long before the league got involved with it. I don’t care about the fine or whatever happens to me. It’s not part of the way we play. It’s not part of … we’re not very good at it, it seems to me. To be quite honest with you, it seems to me that there are other teams that are far better at it than we are. We just need to stay out of that mindset. They’re two players that we’re probably a lot more used to it coming in and they’re probably trying to figure it out.”

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca