Home game feels like part of road trip to busy Jets

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This article was published 11/02/2016 (3556 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Into another run of marching all over the continent, the Winnipeg Jets are home for one game tonight. The Boston Bruins are the visitors for a 7 p.m. start at the MTS Centre (TSN3, TSN1290).

Tonight is the third straight game which required the Jets to travel, and that number will be 11 in a row before they next stay in the same place for two — March 1 and 3 at home.

Winnipeg has won the first two games of this run, on the road in Denver and in St. Louis, bringing it an eighth opportunity this season to put a three-game winning streak on the board.

So far, the Jets are 0-7 when trying to get the third win, one of the reasons they’re below .500 at 24-26-3 and seven points off the Western Conference playoff line today.

“This particular block of going back and forth is probably a little more like last year,” Jets coach Paul Maurice said this morning, after the game-day skate. “We’ve had a bunch of those, come for a home game and travel to both sides of the country. We get a little bit of that here again.”

The team had a murderous schedule in the season’s first half and Maurice thinks they’re all a little wiser in dealing with those inevitable challenges.

“Just in terms of when we travel, when we leave, staying over a little bit or flying the next day, the off days,” he said. “The hardest part about this month with our travel days is finding four days that are actual days off to the (NHLPA). It’s actually a pretty light schedule but we’re traveling on a lot of Sundays and we can’t count them.

“If we get off (the plan) after 2 a.m. when we come home, we can’t count those. So you have to fit them in. We’ve got a little bit of experience now so we’re using that.”

Jets leading scoring Blake Wheeler, now at 49 points in 53 games and tied for 10th overall in the NHL, said today it does in many ways feel like an 11-game road trip.

The Jets’ next game after tonight is Saturday in Edmonton, the start of four more in a row away from home.

“I think that’s the way you approach it,” Wheeler said. “The only difference is that on the road, you’re not chasing your wife and kids around.

“This is going to be a tough stretch for us but we’re not really looking at it as eight or 10 games. We look at it one at a time and that’s given us a little bit of success the last two nights.”

Tuesday’s win in St. Louis was courtesy of a shootout goal by centre Mark Scheifele.

“We feel good,” Scheifele said today. “Winning two games, you’re going to be feeling a little bit of confidence. But we know we have to come out and play our game, do what we did the last two games and we know if we do that, we’ll be successful.

“No matter what adversity came to us, we stuck to our game and didn’t change it at all.”

The Jets will be facing a Bruins team that was shellacked 9-2 by L.A. at home on Tuesday, their worst loss since 2008 and the most goals allowed at home since 2007.

Boston, starting a six-game road trip tonight, gave up 57 shots in that game.

“We understand we’re going to get their best game tonight and it’s going to be a real challenge for us,” said Wheeler, the former Bruin.

Maurice said it’s a similar focus the Jets took into Denver on the weekend after a poor start here last Friday and a loss to Carolina.

“We had their attention and focus in Colorado and everybody knew that was a huge game,” the coach said. “Sometimes that comes from a little bit of what the Boston Bruins are bringing in here.

“We didn’t like our Carolina game, the start of it.”

The Jets will return with Connor Hellebuyck in goal tonight.

Ondrej Pavelec, out since Nov. 21, skated both Thursday and today and Maurice said this morning that it will only be another day or two before he’s cleared for action, at which time the coach will then have decision to make.

He didn’t give any clue today as to what that decision will be.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca