Jets fall flat in 4-2 loss to lowly Sabres

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This article was published 14/12/2021 (1413 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the Winnipeg Jets ultimately miss the playoffs this season — a prospect that becomes more likely with each lacklustre loss — they are going to rue games like the one that went down on Tuesday night at Canada Life Centre.

Once again, the club found a way to fritter away another valuable pair of points to an inferior opponent. This one came in the form of a 4-2 setback to lowly Buffalo, who limped into town with one win in their last 12, and none in the last seven.

Frustration is clearly setting in, based on the tone of the post-game chatter. Coach Paul Maurice — whose seat some may suggest is getting warmer by the minute — was as curt and brief as he’s ever been, speaking for a total of 169 seconds despite being asked 10 separate questions.

A brief sampling:

“We were slow to start with. We skated for 15, 20 minutes. And then slowed and could never get back up to speed,” the veteran bench boss said of what he thought went wrong.

“That’s my job. We gotta play faster than that, we gotta player harder than that, be more engaged than that regardless of our set of circumstances. We need to be better than that,” Maurice replied when asked if he takes responsibility for not having his players better prepared.

“Just attention to detail. Focus,” is all he offered when asked what needs to change.

Okay then. It’s become a bit of a troubling pattern around here. Winnipeg also rolled out the welcome mat to Arizona (1-0 loss) and the New York Islanders (2-0 loss) in recent weeks, which isn’t exactly helping to fill the downtown rink which has yet to sell-out to its capacity of 15,321 for a single game this season. Just 13,484 took in this latest stinker, and plenty of the ones who didn’t head for the exits early booed the Jets off the ice.

Throw in a pair of defeats in Vancouver (3-2 in regulation, 4-3 in a shootout), and the Jets are 0-4-1 against four of the NHL’s basement-dwellers. For a team currently below the Western Conference playoff line with more than one-third of the regular-season now complete, that’s potentially a major problem. Overall, Winnipeg is now 13-10-5 on the year. Buffalo improves to 9-15-4.

“A coach used to tell me it’s always easy to get up for big game, it’s not the easiest to get up for the games,” said defenceman Nate Schmidt, before stopping himself mid-sentence. “At the same time, it’s the National Hockey League, every team can beat any team. I just think that we have to come in, off a road trip or not, come home and be better than we were tonight, myself included.”

The Jets hadn’t played since last Friday, when captain Blake Wheeler went down with a serious knee injury expected to keep him out multiple weeks. But they should have been rested and raring to go considering this is their only game in a six-day span. And yet…

“You feel s—-y every time you lose a game, and in this league it doesn’t matter who you’re playing against,” said forward Nikolaj Ehlers, who scored one of Winnipeg’s two goals on the night. He had no answers for why so many eggs are being laid on home ice this year.

“I think you obviously want to win games at home, you want to have a great atmosphere. All of that fires us up, no doubt, and playing in Winnipeg is pretty amazing. So, yeah, you want to win every single game. You know you’re not going to do that,” said Ehlers.

“I still think that with this team, we go out there and we try to win, of course, we work hard, and (Tuesday) wasn’t the game for us. So, like I said we’re going to move on from this and get ready for the next game because we need to bounce back.”

It’s not going to get any easier, with top-tier opponents in Washington (Friday night) and St. Louis (Sunday afternoon) next on the docket.

Schmidt was asked if any of this was on the coaching staff, especially since Maurice pointed the finger at himself following a 4-2 loss to Carolina in their previous home game on Dec. 7, saying “we just weren’t prepared to play. That’s my job.”

“It’s on the players,” he said forcefully.

“That’s us having the giddy-up and get-going to play and understand this (Buffalo) team…they have young players, they’re good, they’re skilled, they can make great plays and playing with that kind of go out there and just kind of go play attitude, you can go and have a lot of confidence to make those types of plays. For some of these young guys, they’re breaking into the league. They’re good players. It’s 100% on us, being ready for the game, being prepared and have the giddy-up, the jump to go the whole game.”

Two of those young players stood out in particular. Goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, 22, made 34 stops as the 2017 second-round draft pick made just his eighth NHL appearance. And defenceman Rasmus Dahlin, the first-overall pick in the 2018 draft, had two goals on the night.

Dahlin opened the scoring on the power play at 7:14 of the first period with a beautiful shot just under the crossbar to beat Connor Hellebuyck. Pierre-Luc Dubois answered Dahlin’s tally with his 14th of the year a few minutes later. After Anders Bjork was inexplicably allowed to get in behind the Winnipeg defence pair of Schmidt and Josh Morrissey to restore the one-goal lead midway through the second, Ehlers evened it up just over a minute later.

“We didn’t do enough hard things well. You leave a guy wide open in front of your net, you’ve got a problem,” Maurice said of the Bjork goal. “We’re straight legged, waiting to get the puck back.”

Dahlin restored the lead, this time for good, with just 39 seconds left in the second period as his point shot made it through a screen. Jeff Skinner added an insurance marker with just over eight minutes to play in the game.

The Jets, as they have on many nights this season, lost the special teams battle. In addition to giving up the power play goal by Dahlin, they went 0-for-3 themselves with the man-advantage.

Schmidt was asked what it’s going to take for the Jets to get going. A bag skate by the coach? A closed-door player’s only meeting?

“A huge win on a Friday night against a really good team,” he said.

“I think that usually pulls guys out and, thankfully, we have one of those — a Friday night game at home against a really good team coming up, and I think that’s what gets guys amped up and ready to rock and get things moving in the right direction.”

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg