Late swoon a costly one

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This article was published 19/03/2012 (5009 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The cost for this result figures to be high.

“This one will stick in there for a long time,” said Winnipeg Jets coach Claude Noel, grimly confessing to his team’s failure to seize the day and vault into a tie with the eighth-place Washington Capitals in the NHL’s Eastern Conference standings.

The words came not long after Chad LaRose scored with 1:22 left in regulation time to give the Carolina Hurricanes a 4-3 victory over the Jets.

It let all the air out of the 38th sellout of the year at the MTS Centre, which had been pumped up with wins earlier in the week over Dallas and Washington.

The Caps had lost earlier Sunday evening in Chicago but the Jets remained two points back of Washington for that final Stanley Cup playoff berth, 78-76. Each team has 10 games remaining.

Noel made note in the post-game deriefing that his team was in scramble mode almost from the outset.

It trailed 1-0 and 2-1, yet with the first two goals of his season, Antti Miettinen had lifted the home team to a 3-2 lead through two periods.

But even that wasn’t enough, as the Jets blew a 40-minute lead and lost outright for the fourth time this season.

“To me, the bottom line with this game, if we don’t make the playoffs, we don’t deserve to make the playoffs,” Noel said. “There’s a price to pay to win games and there’s a price to pay to get in the playoffs. And it’s not a sometimes thing.”

Maybe the most damning thing said after the game contradicted everything the Jets, to a man, had been saying since taking down the Capitals 3-2 on Friday in an important, intense affair.

“Maybe we’re happy and too busy being happy that we won on Friday, that we can just show up on Sunday,” Noel suggested. “You can say the right things but it’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”

Part of what the Jets were trying to do, goalie Ondrej Pavelec said, was score. It’s not normally a point for criticism, but recent successes at home — 43 goals in the last 11 home games, way above their season average — might have distracted his team.

“We didn’t play the right way,” Pavelec said. “Do you want to win the game or score the goals? It’s 3-2 and things didn’t go well. We were still up. It doesn’t matter if we deserved it or not.

“It’s 3-2, 10 minutes left, play smart, play intense and wait. We wanted to score the goals. Every game we want to score six, seven goals. It doesn’t work like that. At 3-2, that’s enough to win the game. We just didn’t play the right way.”

Eric Staal, captain of the caffeinated Canes, scored on a breakaway at 10:24 of the final period to tie it.

“Two games in a row when we came from behind in the third period,” said Staal, who had two goals. “That doesn’t happen often in this league and our guys showed a lot of resilience and a lot of fight and we stayed with our game plan and were rewarded.”

The Jets got their just reward, too.

“I think we got exactly what we deserved,” Noel said. “Our best players were not our best players and theirs were.”

Fielding a question about his team’s execution on Sunday, the coach said it’s all symptomatic.

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“It has everything to do with what’s above your shoulders,” he said. “I think the players and coaches have to be accountable. We’re all in this thing together.

“There’s no doubt that the emotional level we were at wasn’t enough. The problem was you couldn’t stop the bleeding. That’s sad because we came so far. To do this to each other, to disrespect each other like this was silly. We only had to play 20 minutes in the third and yet we couldn’t do that.”

And now a three-game road trip — it starts Tuesday in Pittsburgh — for a team that’s 11-19-4 away from home stands as a major challenge.

“These next games are going to identify who we are,” Noel said.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca.