Jets sing the Blues again, with loss in St. Louis

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This article was published 29/12/2019 (2078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

St. Louis — A sloppy, sluggish line change. An inept penalty kill. And yet another loss for the Winnipeg Jets. 

There’s not much margin of error when you play the Stanley Cup champions. And the suddenly slumping Jets learned that once again on Sunday as a couple of critical mistakes proved costly in a 4-1 loss at Enterprise Center. 

Now 21-15-3, the once-soaring Jets are dropping like a stone in the ultra-tight Western Conference. They have just two wins in the past eight games (2-5-1) and will soon find themselves on the wrong side of the playoff line if they can’t find a way to start picking up some points. 

“We look at it, deal with it every day. There feels like there is a break. We’re not sitting on two in eight. We’re 0-1-1 coming out of the Christmas break against a pretty good team. Big pieces of that game was right, as good as we’re going to play. That’s what we have, so you focus on that,” head coach Paul Maurice said.

“If you can take a page out of the St. Louis Blues’ book, because they’re very, very consistent with their game, and that’s what we’re trying to get to.”

St. Louis won its eighth consecutive game and continues to rule the Western Conference at 26-8-6. They swept the home-and-home series, including a 5-4 overtime victory over Winnipeg at Bell MTS Place Friday night.  

“Well, they’re a good team, obviously. They’re the champs right now. At the same time I think a lot of the games, especially in this division, are played like that. They’re tight-checking games, there’s not a ton of room out there. I think if we just execute a little bit better, we’ll look to build on it,” said Jets forward Nick Shore, who scored the only goal for his team.

The Jets were playing a perfectly fine road game until late in the second period, tied 1-1 and keeping scoring chances to a minimum. Ryan O’Reilly had opened the scoring at 14:18 before Shore got the goal back for Winnipeg at 5:40 of the middle frame, his third of the season and first since being picked up on waivers by the Jets from the Toronto Maple Leafs. 

Then it came undone in the blink of an eye. Josh Morrissey, Jack Roslovic, Blake Wheeler and Nikolaj Ehlers all headed for the bench at the same time, having just dumped the puck in on St. Louis goalie Jordan Binnington.

Seeing the entire left side of the ice wide open, with only blue-liner Nathan Beaulieu back, Blues defenceman Alex Pietrangelo made a perfect long-distance feed to Brayden Schenn, who deftly chipped the puck to a streaking Jordan Kyrou for an instant three-on-one rush. A perfect saucer pass to linemate Jaden Schwartz and it was in the back of the net at 15:09.

Anthony Bitetto, Adam Lowry, Mason Appleton and Gabriel Bourque — the four players who had just stepped on the ice — could only watch.

“We need to get the puck to go deep, right? We’re at the end of a line change. We have to change. We don’t. We trip (Morrissey fell to the ice). Guy’s trying hard, I’m not blaming him. He falls down, we get it, we send it back to their tender and we’re just late. They’re fast,” Maurice said when asked what went wrong. 

While the Morrissey stumble was unfortunate, there was a lot more to it than that. The forwards coming off needed to show more hustle, while the trio coming on should have been more aggressive off the bench.

“A lot of the challenge is communication. That’s on us on the bench. We’ve got to be ready, to know who is going out. We like to say ‘one defenceman at a time,’ but sometimes you get two, it all goes back to communication and that’s the No. 1 thing when you have the long change in the second,” defenceman Neal Pionk said. 

“They made a good play, but at the end of the day, it’s preventable. With the guys on the ice and the guys off the ice, it’s a unit. It’s 20 guys. We’ve got to be ready and we’ve got to be aware.”

Fast forward to the third period, with Winnipeg short-handed courtesy of a Luca Sbisa boarding infraction. Robert Thomas finished off some slick puck movement for the all-important insurance goal that proved to be the dagger. 

The Jets have now surrendered nine power-play goals on their past 18 kills over the past seven games, a horrific 50 per cent “success” rate that is just killing them right now.

The Jets went 0-for-3 on their own man advantages, although Pionk, Patrik Laine and Mark Scheifele all rang iron. 

“Good stuff on our power plays, just not a whole lot of finishing plays. It looks right. It’s not far off from being right on,” Maurice said.

“That would be a place where I think we’ve been consistent the last handful of games. We’re not forcing pucks into the middle, we’re moving around, we’re moving fast, our puck recovery is really, really good. Some battles out there. So we like it. We like the structure of it.” 

Schwartz sealed the victory with an empty-net goal in the final minute. Binnington made 25 saves, while Connor Hellebuyck stopped 23 pucks. 

The game marked the start of a two-game road trip for Winnipeg. They’ll play in Denver against the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday, return home for a game against Toronto Thursday night, then hit the road for four more games.

In other words, it’s not going to get any easier, even though Maurice believes there’s plenty of positives to build around.

“It was a hard game to play, a lot of puck battles along the wall. Really liked the first 10 of the second period, I thought that was our best hockey we played. Good lessons in simplicity. They play a very simple, basic — and that’s not disrespectful, they won a Stanley Cup with it — but they’re very consistent with that game,” Maurice said.

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg