Hellebuyck, Connor power Jets past Avs 4-2 in Central Division showdown

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This article was published 07/12/2023 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DENVER — A statement win of the young season? It sure looked and felt like it, as the Winnipeg Jets came here to Avalanche country on Thursday night and skated away with an impressive 4-2 victory over Colorado.

No, it wasn’t always pretty, and you can always find things to pick apart. But perfection is the enemy of progress, as Winston Churchill famously said, and the Jets have been taking several big steps lately.

This feels like one of the largest, a tightly-contested battle of Central Division rivals that had a playoff-style intensity.

“It was a great effort. It’s a great hockey team over there,” Jets coach Rick Bowness told the Free Press outside his team’s locker room at Ball Arena. “We want to be considered an elite team. You gotta beat the teams ahead of you. We proved tonight that we can play with anybody.”

Kyle Connor scored twice while Adam Lowry and Josh Morrissey had the others for the visitors. Goaltender Connor Hellebuyck continued to display his Vezina Trophy form as he stopped 32 of 34 shots.

“Right now hockey’s fun,” said Hellebuyck, who racked up his 250th career victory. “Less practice more games, the way we’re playing. Just keep it rolling, less thinking and more just playing.”

Winnipeg is now 15-8-2, having won three straight games, and are within two points of first-place Colorado, who are 16-8-2. The Jets have now gone an incredible 15 straight games without surrendering more than three goals. Their structure, discipline and attention to defensive detail has become a strength.

Let’s break down how this four-game road trip got off to a flying start in the Mile High City:

1) An unexpected turn of events: It had been a tidy first period for the Jets when, with 27 seconds remaining, they iced the puck with their fourth line (Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, Morgan Barron and David Gustafsson on the ice). You could see the excitement on the Colorado bench as their big guns (Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Jonathan Drouin, Cale Makar and Devon Toews) hopped over the boards to take the offensive zone draw.

Trouble was brewing for the visitors.

But not only did Gustafsson beat Rantanen cleanly in the faceoff dot, the Jets calmly broke the puck out of their own end and got it deep into the Avalanche zone where the speedy Jonsson-Fjallby forced a turnover and fed a wide-open Lowry (who had just come on for Gustafsson), who ripped a wicked wrister to the top corner with three seconds left on the clock.

Lowry’s fifth of the year gave Winnipeg the kind of payoff that often comes with sticking to your system, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake and then pouncing.

“I think that’s huge. I thought the fourth line was great all night,” Lowry said. “To come in up 1-0, it’s a different feeling than when you battle hard and you’re not rewarded.”

2) Does this still count as going “Bang Bang!?” Former Jets broadcaster Dennis Beyak used to break out the phrase whenever the club would score twice in rapid succession. So when Connor’s shot found the back of the net just 32 seconds into the middle frame, you wonder if this would qualify?

Winnipeg had technically just scored twice in 35 seconds, albeit with an 18-minute intermission sandwiched in between. Most importantly, they had a two-goal lead, with the top line of Connor, Nikolaj Ehlers (who had the primary assist) and Mark Scheifele continuing their strong play of late.

It was Connor’s team-leading 16th of the season, and his second in as many games following a six-game drought.

3) Who’s the sixth defenceman? On this night, it was Logan Stanley, with Declan Chisholm and Nate Schmidt relegated to the press box. Chisholm had played in two straight games, while Schmidt has now been healthy scratched for three straight outings. Expect this mini-rotation to continue.

After a fairly strong first period, Stanley got burned — badly — by MacKinnon less than two minutes after Winnipeg took a 2-0 lead. The six-foot-seven defender, who doesn’t have the best foot speed to begin with, got walked by a streaking MacKinnon, who went in all alone and roofed a shot past Hellebuyck.

MacKinnon can make even the best blue-liners in the league look foolish at times, but that’s a play that someone in Stanley’s position is likely going to wear, fair or not.

“Logan had a really solid game. Listen, he was at the end of a shift and all of a sudden you’ve got Nate MacKinnon coming 100 miles an hour. He’s going to do that to any defenceman in this league,” said Bowness.

“It’s not just Logan Stanley, it’s any defenceman in this league would get caught flat-footed. He’s an elite player with elite speed and he took advantage of it. Good on him. He made a great play.”

4) Back and forth they went: To their credit, the Jets didn’t sag after what could have been a momentum shift and kept coming, eventually getting rewarded at 15:13 of the second period.

Morrissey found a seam through traffic and fired a perfect seeing-eye shot that eluded Alexander Georgiev. It was the fifth of the year for Winnipeg’s All-Star blue-liner, who now has 22 points in 25 games after a career-high 76 in 78 games last year.

Back came the Avalanche, as MacKinnon made a great play to elude Brenden Dillon then reached back to find teammate Joel Kiviranta, who beat Hellebuyck high on a shot that officials initially didn’t realize went in the net at 19:29. It was confirmed following video review, and Winnipeg’s lead was down to 3-2.

“I think the second one is goaltender interference,” said Hellebuyck of a play the Jets considering challenging, but ultimately didn’t.

“The guy comes through my skate and i don’t think I ever let that goal in if the guy doesn’t do that. But we might have taken it down. I know I was pretty furious at the moment but I thought we played pretty well other than that.”

5) PK was more than OK: Winnipeg’s penalty kill has been a problem for much of the season, but they flipped the script on Thursday by going a perfect 4-for-4 against a pretty potent Colorado power play. That included 47 seconds of being down two skaters early in the third period.

Hellebuyck gets plenty of credit with some terrific saves, but the players in front of him made life miserable for the Avalanche by routinely getting in shooting lanes, stepping in front of pucks and swatting away any second and third chances.

“I think it’s something that we’ve been continuously working on,” said Lowry.

“Earlier in the year we said numerous times, we feel like we’re a foot off or we were close to getting back to where we want to be. To be in that upper tier, where we think and where we expect (to be), where we can be the difference in a game. Tonight you saw that we didn’t really give up any Grade A chances (on the PK).”

Connor then sealed the deal with an empty-netter in the final minute of play, ensuring there would be no comeback on this night. With 17 goals, only Brock Boeser (18) of the Vancouver Canucks has scored more this season.

6) Extra, extra: Bowness made a mid-game lineup tweak, moving Nino Niederreiter to play with Cole Perfetti and Gabe Vilardi, and Alex Iafallo to skate with Lowry and Mason Appleton. The lines then were flipped back to normal for much of the third.

“The Cole line was in our zone all night. That’s the bottom line,” said Bowness. “I think they had one shift in the o-zone and the rest of the shifts in our zone. So I put Nino out there just to give it a different look. It helped, obviously. That line, again, they had a tough night. It’s as simple as that.”

Vlad Namestnikov missed a third straight game with a lower-body injury but is getting closer to a return. He participated in most of the morning skate and Bowness said the next test will be Saturday’s practice in Anaheim. If he can get through that, playing Sunday against the Ducks is an option.

The Jets flew to southern California following the game and will enjoy a day away from the rink on Friday, with some golf in the forecast.

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

X: @mikemcintyrewpg