Ugly wasn’t enough

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This article was published 21/11/2014 (3968 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They did greasy, just as planned. They did ugly, by design.

But what the Winnipeg Jets didn’t do Thursday night in a 4-3 loss to the Detroit Red Wings was stick to the defensive blueprint they had religiously followed through most of the first quarter of the 2014-15 NHL season.

 

The Jets gave up a two goals in the span of 130 seconds in the final seven minutes — as well as a 2-zip advantage in the second — in dropping just their third game in their last 14 to the lickety-split Wings.

The result drops the Jets to 10-8-3 on the season, with the St. Louis Blues here Sunday afternoon in the finale of a three-game homestand.

The Wings, playing without Pavel Datsyuk and with Petr Mrazek making his first start of the season start in goal as Mike Babcock opted to give Jimmy Howard a break, improved to 10-4-5.

 

HEART WILLING, LEGS WEREN’T

 

THE Jets took a 3-2 lead into the third period and had been 6-0-1 in those situations… until Thursday night. Justin Abdelkader and Tomas Tatar rallied the Wings with two goals in the third, taking advantage of a Jets squad that had lost its zip.

“To be honest with ya, I think it was 15 games in 28 days and twice off the east coast,” said Jets coach Paul Maurice. “The bench didn’t get quiet out of anything but they were breathing pretty good. We just didn’t have the fight on some pucks, hit a post and they came down and made good.

“We had some strange things happen to us on the ice that ended up in the back of our net, plays that you haven’t seen… you get those aberration plays every once in a while. We normally don’t feed pucks up the middle or fall down or lose a guy back door. We’ve been good on those things. It’s not systemic of what we’ve seen of our team. I just didn’t think that we had a lot of push back in that third.

“We weren’t sitting back, I just didn’t think we had enough gas to go forward.”

 

TWO GOALS, TWO GAFFES AND A HON CANDIDATE

 

AFTER a scoreless first, the Jets and Wings served up an erratic but entertaining middle frame. The Jets would break out to a two-zip lead as Dustin Byfuglien and Adam Lowry both broke 14-game goalless streaks, but then two defensive lapses — the first by Toby Enstrom, the second by Mark Stuart — directly led to superb goals by Tatar and Johan Franzen as Detroit pulled even again in the span of 3:20.

The fifth goal of the wild period featured Mathieu Perreault circling the Wings net, backing out in front before beating Mrazek for his second goal in as many games.

All of which was moot with the tank empty and the Jets operating on fumes in the final period.

“We’ve been good all year with the lead, but couldn’t get it done tonight,” said Perreault. “It’s unfortunate, but we’ve got to move on. They put a good push on, but I think its on us. We didn’t execute as well as we’ve been doing. They came hard at us, kind of took us by surprise a little bit and got the win.

“It’s hard to put the finger on one thing. A couple bounces here and there, a couple plays we weren’t strong enough and it ended up being in the back of our net.”

“A couple bounces here and there,” added Dustin Byfuglien, “and that’s the game of hockey.”

 

TWO SCARY NUMBERS

 

1. The Jets were 0-for-3 on the power play, extending their ineptitude with the man advantage even further. Winnipeg is now 0-for-its-last-six-games on the PP, whiffing on their last 21 chances.

2. Detroit dominated the faceoff circle, winning 61 per cent (39 of 64) of the draws.

“They were able to large stretches of the game and I think that comes down to faceoffs,” said Adam Lowry, who lost all four of his draws. “Any time a team wins that many draws they’re going to have the puck and they’re going to make some plays.”

 

SOME REST FOR THE WICKED

 

THE Jets will not be on the ice Friday and that’s perfectly cool with Maurice, who leaned heavily on the fatigue factor after the game.

“The first two periods were some pretty fine hockey,” he said. “We spend a lot of energy doing what we do in the first two periods of that game. It takes a lot. There’s a lot of finished checks, there’s a lot of back pressures. There’s a cost to playing as hard as we do and that’s why we try to keep our team off the ice and not practising a whole lot.

“I was more fearful you were going to see that version in the last game just because the back-to-back in Nashville and Minnesota cost a lot. We got through five periods surviving it and didn’t get through the sixth.”

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @WFPEdTait

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