Jets fly through some turbulence, but flight ’17-’18 on schedule to land in playoffs

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This article was published 20/12/2017 (2879 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It could have gone badly, really badly.

Having lost four of their previous five games and having just gotten spanked 5-1 at home by Chicago last Thursday, a worrying December swoon was in danger of turning into a death spiral as the Winnipeg Jets headed into a stretch that saw them play three games in four nights against the two best teams in the Western Conference.

But instead of going very wrong for the Jets the last few days, it went very right instead, as they posted impressive wins over division rivals St. Louis at home Sunday and Nashville on the road Tuesday to go along with a 48-shot shutout loss to the Blues on the road Saturday that might just be the most impressive loss Jets 2.0 has ever recorded.

Put it all together and I cannot help but wonder whether months from now we will all look back on these last three games as the moment these surprising 2017-18 Winnipeg Jets transitioned from pretenders to bona fide contenders.

We already knew this was a formidable team that could win when it was healthy. And we already knew this was a streaky team that could post wins in bunches, including seven in a row at home until that loss to Chicago last week.

But what we didn’t know until these last few days is how this group would respond when suddenly the roster wasn’t so healthy and the wins weren’t coming so easily anymore.

What, we wondered, would they be like when — to borrow a phrase from sniper Patrik Laine — hockey was hard again?

The answer, it turns out, is these Jets just get harder.

If the test of a great team is its ability to overcome adversity, this squad just passed with flying colours.

Limping out of St. Louis Saturday night with nothing to show for a fantastic effort in a 2-0 loss, it would have been easy to have gotten demoralized and roll over against the Blues in the rematch at home less than 24 hours later.

Instead, the Jets posted their best performance of the season in a dominating 4-0 victory. Or rather, it was the Jets’ best performance of the season until it was surpassed just two nights later in a gutsy 6-4 win in Nashville.

Captain Blake Wheeler called it “a huge win.” Free Press colleague Mike Sawatzky, on the ground in Nashville, called it “their biggest victory of the 2017-18 season.”

They were both right.

It might be December, but that game looked a lot like playoff hockey to me. And the Jets played exactly the kind of hockey that it’s going to take to win when they finally return to the playoffs in the spring: a gritty, physical, relentless thing that saw Winnipeg surrender leads on three different occasions only to come back again each time and finally notch the winner with less than two minutes to play.

There was something perfectly fitting that this one was decided on a game-winner that was both ugly — I’m still not sure it was, technically speaking, even a shot — and scored by one of the Jets’ grinders, Brandon Tanev.

Those are exactly the kinds of goals and kinds of players who have been winning Stanley Cup playoff games since they were played outdoors. And it was made all the more noteworthy by the fact it came against a Nashville team that demonstrated with a remarkable playoff run last season that they know how to win those kinds of games.

While St. Louis got off to the fast start this season, it’s the Predators who have been the class of the Western Conference for the past month. The Preds were 8-1-1 in their previous 10 games and had been beaten just twice at home in regulation heading into Tuesday night’s contest.

You want a measuring-stick game? They look a whole lot like that. And when the buzzer sounded to end the affair, there was no longer any question that these Jets measure up pretty well with the very best teams in their conference.

Thank goodness. Because it just so happens that the very best teams in the Western Conference also happen to be the teams the Jets share the Central Division with.

The Central has always been tough, but it is absurdly so this season. All seven teams currently have better-than .500 records, and it tells you all you need to know about the neighbourhood the Jets play in that five of the seven Central teams — Nashville St. Louis, Winnipeg, Chicago and Minnesota — would be in the playoffs if the season ended Tuesday night, with a sixth (Dallas) next up for a wild-card spot.

And it says a lot about the Jets that with the results of the past couple of games, Winnipeg is now 7-3-1 this year against Central teams. If the road to the Stanley Cup final this season runs on Central Time, the Jets have established that they can keep time with the best of them.

Look, none of this gets any easier. There’s still road games this week against the Bruins and the Islanders and with Christmas coming (and a three-day NHL break), the challenge for Jets head coach Paul Maurice will be to keep his team of youngsters focused on what’s in front of them this week instead of what might be under the tree Monday morning.

But it’s also as good a time as any for the rest of us to reflect on the unexpected gift to this city’s hockey fans that the Jets have been this season.

If you saw this coming — and by “this” I mean one point out of first place in the Western Conference, 35 games into their schedule — then I hope you wagered the mortgage on it, because you’d have gotten spectacular odds.

Let’s be honest: at the start of the season, only the most optimistic fans were even predicting the team would make the playoffs.

But flash forward a couple of remarkable months, including the last few impressive days, and the question is no longer whether the Jets will make the post-season — only a collapse of epic proportions would scuttle that now — but how far they will go.

The last few days have given us a meaningful glimpse of what this team might look like come playoff time.

In a week where things could have gone very badly, the Jets looked good. Really good.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek