Maurice creates some turbulence at practice after Jets’ opening-night flop

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This article was published 05/10/2017 (2901 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was no sign of a panic button. Or anyone looking for one, for that matter.

There are, however, plenty of other indications that maintaining the status quo will not be an option, after the Winnipeg Jets kicked off the NHL season Wednesday with a collective thud.

Coach Paul Maurice ended practice Thursday by putting his squad through a punishing 20-minute skate that included nearly two dozen full-speed laps individually, in tandems and as a team. It had nearly every player doubled over and gasping for air by the end. There was, however, no evidence of mop-and-pail armed staff ready for action.

“Oh, that wasn’t even close to a bag skate,” Maurice told reporters afterward at Bell MTS Iceplex “Nobody puked… if we had spent 20 more minutes at ‘er…”

The Jets were embarrassed 7-2 by the Toronto Maple Leafs in their opener Wednesday night and now face the daunting task of playing three straight road games. The potential to go from bad to worse is staring the team in the face.

“Our first month is teams that made the playoffs or teams that think they’re right there,” Maurice said. “So we are going to get right into the teeth of it.”

Maurice made changes to all four of the forward lines from Wednesday’s debacle. Nikolaj Ehlers and Mathieu Perreault swapped positions at practice — Ehlers skated with Mark Scheifele and Blake Wheeler, Perreault with Bryan Little and Patrik Laine. Joel Armia was taken off the third line with Adam Lowry and Shawn Matthias, replaced by healthy-scratch Nic Petan. Armia moved down to the fourth unit with Andrew Copp and Brandon Tanev, bumping Marko Dano out of the lineup entirely.

Maurice also moved things around on the blue line: Dustin Byfuglien and Josh Morrissey, Toby Enstrom and Tyler Myers and demoting Jacob Trouba to the third unit with Dmitry Kulikov. Wednesday’s pairings were Byfuglien-Enstrom, Trouba-Morrissey and Myers-Kulikov.

“I didn’t love all the performances (Wednesday) night. So we’re not sitting and waiting three weeks. We gotta get it going,” Maurice said of the wholesale changes made after just one lousy game.

“I told them today, ‘We’ll deal with this every day, all year.’ Because this franchise doesn’t move forward until it can defend. You can put all the talent in the world on the ice and you’re not winning a damn thing until you’ve got a real good comfort level to defend.”

And therein lies the rub. For all the off-season talk about what the team needs to improve to be successful — specifically in its own end of the rink — things unravelled at an alarming rate at the first hint of trouble against the Leafs. Winnipeg got off to a strong start, carrying the play for the first 10 minutes but unable to capitalize on several glorious scoring chances.

And then some familiar themes reappeared. Trouba took a careless minor and the Jets’ much-maligned penalty killers were unable to survive the Leafs’ power play, and that seemed to zap all the momentum they had built earlier. Toronto quickly added two more — the three goals came in a shocking 2:38 —before the first period was over, as miscues and breakdowns suddenly became the norm.

“It’s 1-0 and we’re sleeping on a faceoff. It’s 2-0 and we’re blowing the zone. Do they care? For sure. But they’re gonna get it back in the next two shifts and you’re down 4-0 before you know it,” Maurice said.

“It’s a certain mentality at 2-0 that causes the game to get away from us instead of being settled. We got off that and got quiet and stopped communicating on the ice so, defensively, we had way too many breakdowns.”

The team was also put through a lengthy film session Thursday, going over every painful aspect of the loss. No word on whether the video was rated “R” for disturbing content.

“It’s not going to be on the front of the brochure — ‘Come watch the Jets play,'” Maurice said. “So that one hurts a little.”

Once they were able to breathe again, several players spoke in the dressing room about accountability.

“We gotta be better. I know I have to be better,” said Trouba, who was a ghastly minus-four on the night. “We know the team has to perform better. I think we got that message.

“I thought we got out to a pretty good start. I took a really bad penalty that you can’t do, especially at that time of game, with the momentum we had. They got a goal off that. And it kinda got away from us.”

Byfuglien repeatedly stressed it was “just one game ” — he repeated the phrase five times in a two-minute interview — and said it’s too early to make any judgments about where things may be headed. He viewed the lengthy skate Thursday as being more about fitness rather than punitive for a poor performance.

“We’ve got to keep moving forward,” he said. “It’s only one game and we’ve got a long season.”

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg