Jets find another way to lose

ST. LOUIS — This time around, the “Manitoba Miracle” would have been the Winnipeg Jets scoring even once.

A fragile hockey club that can’t seem to do much right these days found yet another frustrating way to lose on Wednesday night, falling 1-0 to the St. Louis Blues to kick off a critical three-game road trip.

“We’ve been kind of saying that for a while. That’s part of your job. That’s what you get paid for. Show up. Do your job,” an obviously frustrated Jets head coach Scott Arniel told the Free Press outside the Jets locker room.

Blues goaltender — and Winnipeg product — Joel Hofer stopped all 24 shots he faced, with his teammates doing a great job in front of him for much of the night. The Jets mustered 60 shot attempts, but a whopping 20 went wide and another 16 were blocked.

Suddenly, a team that is having trouble scoring can’t even shoot straight.

“To a man, we’ve got to step up and prepare better,” said Jets forward Kyle Connor. “It’s one shift on, one shift off it kind of seems like here. It’s been going on for like a long time here, almost a month, and it’s not the way we want to play. And it just keep going on. So we’ve got to find a way to get out of it.”

This was the first meeting of the Central Division rivals since their epic playoff series last spring, which ended with Cole Perfetti tying the game in the dying seconds of Game 7 and then captain Adam Lowry winning it in double overtime.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Winnipeg — which captured the Presidents’ Trophy last year with a record of 56-22-4 — is now an ugly 15-16-2. They got off to a hot start this year, going 9-3-0 out of the gate, but have just six wins in the 21 games since.

“We’re struggling right now to find it,” said Jets defenceman Dylan Samberg.

“We’ve just got to find a way to find it and get back on track. It’s just not easy right now going through it. But we have 49 games left. We’re kind of coming to the halfway point of the season. We’ve got to figure it out here.”

The Jets are now ahead of only five teams based on point percentage. One of those is St. Louis, which improves to 13-15-7 and actually passed Winnipeg in points (the Blues have played two extra games).

HOUSE OF HORRORS: This must have felt like an exorcism for Connor Hellebuyck.

The Jets goaltender started three playoff games in St. Louis last spring — and finished exactly none of them. He got the hook every time, serenaded by jeers from the Blues faithful after giving up 16 goals on 66 shots.

Wednesday was an entirely different story, with Hellebuyck the best player on the ice and the only reason this wasn’t a blowout.

Midway through the first, with the Jets under siege, the Blues had a 9-1 shot advantage.

“He was solid all game for us and the reason that it was a 1-0 game,” said Samberg.

According to Natural Stat Trick, the Blues had 18 high-danger chances on the night, with the Jets registering 10. St. Louis had 4.01 expected goals based on the underlying metrics, which means Hellebuyck stopped 3.01 goals-above-expected.

That, folks, is sensational, and, given the result, a complete waste of an outstanding performance.

“There were spurts where it’d be five minutes where we were doing the right things. Five, six minutes and then all of a sudden, man we weren’t,” Arniel said of his Jekyl and Hyde club.

“There were five or six, eight minutes where St. Louis just took the game over. In the first period, we gave up eight chances on one shift.”

Sure, the Jets mounted a bit of a push in the final 20 minutes, but it was too little, too late.

“At the end of the day we didn’t get enough pucks through,” said Arniel.

“St. Louis did a good job of getting in lanes but we didn’t do a good enough job, especially when it got to the top, our D finding a way to get that down to create some of that chaos around the net front.”

BATTERED BLUES: To be clear, this wasn’t exactly the 2019 Stanley Cup champion Blues staring down the Jets on Wednesday night. Heck, it wasn’t even the ideal 2025 version of the team.

St. Louis has been decimated by injuries so far this season, with forwards Jordan Kyrou, Dylan Holloway, Jimmy Snuggerud, Nick Bjugstad and Nathan Walker all currently sidelined. You’d likely see most, if not all of those players in the top nine if they were healthy.

To help fill the gaps, St. Louis had two players make their debuts against Winnipeg. Otto Stenberg, the 25th-overall pick from 2023, played his first ever NHL game while Jonatan Berggren, picked up off waivers Monday from the Detroit Red Wings, was thrown right into the lineup.

Despite that, a Jets team that is completely healthy couldn’t find a way to get it done.

The closest they’d come to scoring was a Perfetti deflection off the crossbar in the second period, which sums up the way things have been going for the slumping winger (and almost all of his teammates, many of whom are in extended offensive droughts).

This is the fourth time Winnipeg has been blanked this season.

“We got ourselves in a one-goal game on the road and you have to find a way to score goals,” said Arniel. “You can’t win games without scoring goals. We talk about defending and doing the right things. Well, offensively we’ve got to do the right things as well and we’ve got to do it more consistently.”

KEY PLAY: Dylan DeMelo turned the puck over in his own zone, resulting in Robert Thomas feeding a wide-open Justin Faulk who wired a shot past Hellebuyck at 13:17 of the second period.

THREE STARS:

1. WPG G Connor Hellebuyck: 25 saves.

2. STL G Joel Hofer: 24 save shutout

3. STL D Justin Faulk: Game-winning goal.

EXTRA, EXTRA: The Jets went 0-for-2 on the power play, which has really gone cold as of late. While the struggling penalty kill had a perfect night — going 3-for-3 — the fact Winnipeg once again took more infractions than their opponent was seen by Arniel as a momentum-killer.

That was especially the case with 41 seconds left in the third period. Defenceman Logan Stanley drilled St. Louis forward Pius Suter from behind after the whistle, putting his team shorthanded for the rest of the game and essentially killing any chance of a comeback.

“There’s frustration there for sure,” said Arniel.

Stanley was also slapped with a 10-minute misconduct on the play. He took the first penalty of the game, too, an iffy holding call earlier in the first which didn’t help Winnipeg’s slow start.

Arniel made one in-game line switch, putting Alex Iafallo up on the top line with Connor and Mark Scheifele and moving Gabe Vilardi down to play with Lowry and Morgan Barron for the third period.

Winnipeg’s three healthy scratches were defencemen Colin Miller and Haydn Fleury and forward Tanner Pearson.

The Jets flew to Denver following the game and are set to practice Thursday afternoon in the Mile High City. They’ll meet the league-leading Colorado Avalanche on Friday night, then finish up this road trip Sunday in Salt Lake City against the Utah Mammoth.

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