Jets trick-or-treating in St. Paul dressed as playoff contenders

Opinion

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This article was published 30/10/2017 (2874 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TSN’s Bob McKenzie says he uses this approach to assess the early season play of NHL teams:

“My rule: don’t believe anything you see for 1st 2 wks. Take note after three, book it after four. Some exceptions obviously,” McKenzie tweeted a while back.

Well, we’re now four weeks and 10 games into this Winnipeg Jets season and the book this team has been writing so far has been quite a page-turner.

We’ve had some wild twists and turns already: an appallingly bad first two games, followed by an exceptionally strong 5-1-2 run since that included a wild 7-1 shellacking of the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins Sunday night that was the talk of the NHL Monday morning.

“What’s going on in Winnipeg?!,” Sportsnet play-by-play man Bob Cole asked incredulously during the first period Sunday night, moments after Joel Armia had made the score 4-0 Jets.

What’s going on?

Well, we’ve got the start of a compelling redemption tale in Connor Hellebuyck, who has provided the club with exactly the kind of consistent, elite-level goaltending he didn’t provide last season.

We’ve had a bunch of different heroes already: Nikolaj Ehlers was red-hot early, Blake Wheeler has been even hotter lately and Mark Scheifele has been a disruptive force every moment of every shift he has been on the ice thus far.

And we’ve even had a villain or two: I don’t care whether Dustin Byfuglien was being lazy on that giveaway in overtime in Columbus last week or deliberately playing possum, as head coach Paul Maurice insists. Either way — slothful or just stupid — it cost the Jets a point.

But the question we still don’t have an answer to is the most compelling one of all: is the story the Jets have been writing non-fiction or fiction?

In other words, has all this foreshadowing we’ve been seeing night after night leading up to an exciting and — dare to dream — happy ending? Or has what we’ve seen this first four weeks the dreaded “exception” to the rule that McKenzie referenced?

Look, no one has ever won a Stanley Cup in October — but you can definitely play your way out of a playoff spot by American Thanksgiving, which falls on Nov. 23 this year.

A Hockey News study a few years back found more than three-quarters of NHL teams who go on to make the playoffs at season’s end are already in a playoff position by U.S. Thanksgiving — and most of the rest are within two points of a spot when the turkey’s being carved.

If you’re any more than five points out a playoff spot come late November, the study found your odds of making the playoffs fall to barely one per cent.

Jets fans know that script well. There is a causal relationship between the fact this team has been a notoriously slow starter and the fact they have missed the playoffs in five of the six years they’ve called Winnipeg home.

And that’s what makes this 5-3-2 start so compelling. Regardless of what they do in their final game of the month against Minnesota Halloween night, the Jets have already posted their second-best October record since the team arrived in 2011.

That has them in a playoff spot right now — holding down second place in the Central Division as of Monday morning — with turkey day across the border a little more than three weeks away.

But most compelling of all is who the Jets have posted their record against. Nine of the 11 games the Jets will have played in October after Tuesday were against teams who were in the playoffs last season — and Vancouver, one of the two opponents not in the post-season derby last year, is holding down a playoff position right now.

Put it all together, and the Jets had the sixth most-difficult schedule in the NHL to start this season, according to the website hockey-reference.com.

That fact alone would seem to suggest that what we’ve seen so far from this Jets club is something more than early season smoke and mirrors. These guys have been tested by the very best and, to this point anyway, they’re winning more often than they’re losing, which is the name of the game.

From my perspective, the most interesting thing about Sunday’s wacky win over the Penguins wasn’t the seven goals the Jets scored that had everyone in hockey talking, it was that for the third consecutive game the Jets had just given up just one goal after three periods.

We already knew this young and highly talented lineup would score goals this season. The question we didn’t have an answer to was whether they could keep the puck out of their own net; the early evidence should be heartening to any Jets fan longing for a return to playoff hockey in this town.

While you can certainly make the case this team still has far too many defensive lapses and still shoots itself in both feet too often by taking dumb penalties, the Jets are getting the kind of goaltending that has allowed them to make the occasional mistake without it automatically proving fatal.

Now, it’s still unclear what the Jets have in their free-agent signing of goaltender Steve Mason: the guy who got shelled in his first three starts, or the guy who helped keep his team in that game against Columbus last week.

But what is beginning to come into focus is that whatever Hellebuyck did differently over the off-season, it worked. He’s seventh in the league in save percentage at .937, eighth in goals-against average at 2.06 and providing exactly the kind of goaltending that goes with being a legitimate contender.

While Hellebuyck has always been capable of making the big save, it was the soft goals he gave up occasionally that killed the team in his 56 starts last year and in 26 the year before. He seems to have eliminated them — so far — and it’s made a huge difference in a lot of one-goal games .

Now, are there areas of concern? Of course. And that begins — as it always seems to with this franchise — with the special teams.

The power-play is 22nd in the league and the penalty kill — while improved lately — is 25th. You cannot help but scratch your head and wonder how it is that everyone can agree, year after year, that this is area of vital concern that must be addressed, and yet it somehow never is.

And then there’s Patrik Laine. Maybe it’s just because of the incredibly high bar he set during his rookie campaign last year, but he’s looked almost invisible a lot of nights so far. Some of that is, no doubt, the increased attention he has attracted and opponents shutting down that blast from the top of the left faceoff circle that was his bread and butter.

Four goals and two assists through 10 games suggests that if he’s off, it’s not by much. But when people are used to watching you play at the highest possible level, even a slight regression stands out.

And then there’s Buff, who hasn’t changed a bit. He remains the most dangerous player on the ice every time he steps out there, but it’s just hard to know from game to game — even shift to shift — whether the danger he poses is to the opposing team or his own.

How’s this story going to turn out? Keep turning the page. The Jets have played just one game against a division rival — they beat Minnesota 4-3 — and it’s those games that so often determine who’s in and who’s out when the regular season draws to a close.

And then there’s this: the only time the Jets had a better record in October was in 2015-16, when they went 7-3-1. That team then promptly squandered the strong start, going 4-9-1 in November and spent the rest of that season trying, and ultimately failing, to dig themselves out of a hole.

We’ve read that book already. It started happy and turned out to be a horror story.

This one’s started similarly. The question now is whether this team can finally author a happy ending for their fans.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek