Masterful muckery

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This article was published 11/12/2019 (2135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was towering centre Adam Lowry on Sunday afternoon at Bell MTS Place, settling a bouncing puck in the Winnipeg end and moving it north, lurking as the trailer, accepting a pass in the slot and zipping a shot through a narrow cranny between Anaheim Ducks goalie John Gibson’s left shoulder and the crossbar.

It was old-time Lowry, a glimpse of the fashionable goals he produced with relative ease in junior.

And there he was at home again Tuesday night, stationed in the blue paint, banging away at the partially smothered puck beneath the blocker of Detroit goalie and former teammate Eric Comrie before finally knocking it in. And then awaiting validation from video review before celebrating his fourth goal of the 2019-20 season.

It was quintessential Lowry the NHLer, doing the muck work with the Jets shorthanded.

And that’s exactly the effort that keeps the 26-year son of Brandon Wheat Kings coach and former 19-year NHL veteran Dave Lowry, everlastingly, in head coach Paul Maurice’s good graces.

The trust factor was established early on between bench boss and player.

“I had gone to see (him) play in the American Hockey League (in 2014) and he had a really good defensive stick, and that is as much a talent as a guy who can pass or a guy who can score. You can kind of steer a player to be in the right spots but there are guys who have the talent of knowing where they’re supposed to be and knock an awful lot down with that stick and break passes up. So, he had that,” Maurice recalled this week.

He had replaced Claude Noel behind the Winnipeg bench in mid-January 2014 while Lowry was in his first full pro campaign with the St. John’s IceCaps, the Jets’ minor-league affiliate. By the fall of that year, Lowry was cemented on the NHL roster just as Maurice was settling into his first full campaign in the Manitoba capital.

“Big man that was going to grow into his size, grow into his feet in terms of speed, and he gets going at a fairly big rate and he’s a big, powerful man. With Adam, he’s a Winnipeg Jet. He likes being here, he likes playing here, and we value that greatly,” acknowledged Maurice.

Lowry, listed at 6-5, 210 pounds, has just six points in 29 games — he served a two-game suspension a month into the season for boarding Calgary Flames defenceman Oliver Kylington during the Heritage Classic in Regina — but isn’t someone on Winnipeg’s payroll whose merits are gauged on offensive production alone.

Now in his sixth season, he’s a well-established, defensively reliable, rough-and-tumble third-line centre routinely tasked with matching up against the opponent’s best. He’s Winnipeg’s busiest and heaviest hitter, kills penalties and handles most of the crucial faceoffs in the vicinity of goalies Connor Hellebuyck and Laurent Brossoit.

“It’s different here in the NHL. Everyone has a role on this team and it’s important that you accept it. We have a lot of dynamic guys offensively, and it’s important that we can take some of the load off them defensively, whether that’s working on the penalty kill or at five-on-five and getting a lot of defensive-zone starts so that they can flourish in the offensive zone,” said Lowry, selected in the third round (67th overall) of the 2011 NHL Draft.

“You never just give up the offensive part of the game. It’s still there. This year, my offensive numbers are pretty poor but our team is doing extremely well, and you look at the way the (penalty kill) has played the last month-and-a-half (84 per cent efficiency since Nov. 1). There are definitely other areas of the game where… our line (with wingers Andrew Copp and Mathieu Perreault) are having an impact on.”

The former Swift Current Broncos star, who fired 45 goals and added 43 assists in 72 games in his last of four Western Hockey League seasons, accepted the reality that his job description would change dramatically at the pro level.

While Lowry possessed elite hockey IQ and an interminable work ethic, he was a fraction of a gear slower and didn’t quite have the finish at the big-league level, limiting his opportunities to hit the scoresheet.

“Different role, right? A lot of the time in Swift Current I’d play on two lines. We were dressing 11 forwards and I’d double-shift. Playing close to 25 minutes a night, I’m on the power play staying out the whole two minutes if I want, plus the penalty kill and five-on-five,” Lowry said.

“Sometimes, it’s frustrating. You go back to your junior years and you put up pretty good numbers and you’re like, ‘Why can’t you replicate that at the NHL level?’ But you look across the board and pretty much everyone could score in junior but now it’s about adapting and finding that niche and finding that role where you’re going to be successful. There’s different ways that you find to become a useful NHL player. For me, that was the defensive side of the puck and being hard to play against, and that’s something I’ve tried to get better at.”

Lowry credited former ex-IceCaps coach Keith McCambridge, a Thompson product, and veterans on the AHL squad with a patient approach to teaching the value of playing responsibly without the puck.

“Keith did a good job of instilling that in me, and I got a big role on the penalty kill there with Patrice Cormier. For most of the year, I played with JC Lipon and Jerome Samson, and then later with Cormier, and we started going more into that checking role. So, I was starting to get groomed for it early. The sooner you recognize it’s an area you can excel at, the sooner you can get better and perfect that craft.”

It’s not like Lowry hasn’t enjoyed abbreviated scoring streaks before. He’s fired goals in back-to-back NHL contests five times, including twice in the 2016-17 season, but has yet to stretch the run to three in a row.

The opportunity to change that comes Thursday at 6:30 p.m., at Little Caesars Arena in midtown Detroit, as the surging Jets (19-10-2) hook up with the lowly Red Wings (7-22-3) to complete a home-and-home series.

Overall, Lowry has accumulated 57 tallies — including a career-high 15 three years ago — and helped set up 62 others in 388 games for the Jets. He’s also had five two-goal games in his career, including a pair last season, but is still seeking a hat trick.

“You’d like to be on the scoresheet and score goals. There certainly has been chances this season and I think I could have more goals,” he said. “Sometimes, when you’re slumping you try to find a softer area rather than going to the areas where you’ve scored goals in the past.”

Such as invading Comrie’s personal space Tuesday to fetch the game-opener in an eventual 5-1 romp.

“Everybody wants to score goals. So, when Adam scores everyone jumps about three inches higher on the bench,” Maurice said. “Yeah, we’re happy when Patty (Patrik Laine) and Scheifs (Mark Scheifele) score. We’ve seen that, everybody enjoys the goal. But when a guy like (Lowry) scores a goal — because you know it means something to him, and he blocks shots, and he drops the gloves if he has to, and he’s done all the heavy lifting — you’re cheering harder for him.”

jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPJasonBell