Jets’ future is brighter, but still unclear

Opinion

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This article was published 22/12/2016 (3187 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER — He’s no longer the man at the centre of things.  Mark Scheifele got that job, as the Winnipeg Jets top-line centre, the day he signed the richest contract in franchise history last summer.

Bryan Little remains at the second centre of things. And what Little can provide right now that Scheifele cannot is a long view.

And that right there — some context and institutional memory — is a valuable thing at the moment on a Jets team where many of the key players cannot really tell you where this team is at because  they’re too young to know where it’s been.

What gets lost in that, of course, is the bigger picture. The games come and the games go, at least one every few nights over the course of a long NHL season. There is much celebrating and congratulating when things go well, much angst and promises to do better when they go poorly.

There’s been a little more of the latter than former this season and the result has been predictable.

Asked Thursday, for instance, how many times he’s had to explain his team’s chronic second-period woes to the media this season, Paul Maurice deadpanned, “Probably more than the number of goals we’ve given up, which makes it a big number either way.”

Forty-eight, if you’ve forgotten. The Jets had given up 48 goals in the second period this season heading into Thursday night’s contest at Rogers Arena against the Vancouver Canucks.

That’s a lot, of course. A ridiculous amount even. Nine more than any other team in the league. That’s worth talking about, over and over again.

But it’s also minutiae — noise — in the bigger picture of a franchise now in Year Six of its rebirth. And that brings us back to Little, who’s been a part of the resurrected Jets since the very beginning and so has a nuanced view of where this team is currently at and what they need to do if they’re ever going to get where they hope to be going.

And what Little sees is a Jets team that is, right now, at a critical point.

“I think some of the most important hockey is going to come in the couple weeks after the break,” Little told me Thursday. “We’re going to be in a position where we’re in the mix or we’re going to be chasing for a lot the rest of the year.”

It’s all very familiar ground right now for Little. Pick any moment in the five-plus year history of the Jets 2.0 and odds are they were pretty much right where they are right now — a .500 team, a little more or a little less.

But this .500 team feels a lot different than those. They’re still losing as often as winning, more or less, but there’s an optimism surrounding this version of the Jets that was missing in years past.

Now, part of that is clearly the flourishing of bright young stars such as Patrik Laine, Nikolaj Ehlers and Josh Morrissey, budding young superstars that make this franchise the envy of many general managers in the league.

But it’s also the bottom-six guys such as Joel Armia — who returned to the lineup Thursday — who have an upside to them that, let’s face it, Jim Slater never had.

The future is bright, in other words, even if the present is still a bit murky.

“It’s definitely still positive in the room,” Little said. “But we know we have to play better hockey than we have been… We’re still trying to fix things and get ourselves in a good position for the end of the year.”

A big piece of getting there will be the play of Little now that he’s back in the Jets lineup following a nasty run of injuries that ended his season prematurely last year and cost him another 23 games this season when he was hurt in the opener.

The good news is that now that he’s finally healthy again, Little appears to be thriving in his role as the Jets’ second-line centre, with nine points in just 11 games since returning.

After years of being “the guy” in the middle for the Jets, Little said he’s actually kind of enjoying his new supporting role.

“It hasn’t been hard (adjusting). Scheifs is a great player. And if anything, there’s a bit less pressure to produce because we’ve got so many offensive guys now,” Little said. “But I haven’t really changed the way I play. I’m still trying to be good defensively and on faceoffs and chip in offensively.”

Little things, in other words — upper and lowercase. And if the Jets can string enough of them together — up and down the lineup, night after night for the rest of the season — they just might have something.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The big picture of this franchise won’t change until all the snapshots this team takes night after night finally come into focus.

The little things, you see, really are the big things.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek