Jets grind it out against Flames
Push past Calgary wasn’t pretty, but Winnipeg won’t complain about taking the win
CALGARY — Nobody will mistake it for a Picasso, but in Paul Maurice’s world, the way the Winnipeg Jets won Saturday wasn’t far from a work of art.
NHL playoff-style art, that is, with all its imperfections.
The Jets tossed two points up on the canvas in a 2-1 shootout win over the Flames that could have easily gone off the edges, proving once again that patience is everything and drawing pretty pictures ain’t where it’s at for this team, as talented as it is.
“It’s going to be tight games, just like that,” Maurice, the Jets’ head coach, said of the race to the playoffs. “You’ve got to be real comfortable in that.
“So we get into that playoff mode now.”
With both teams coming off fiveday breaks, it wasn’t expected to be a clinic in playmaking. More of a dump, chase and grind, with the occasional colourful offensive burst thrown in.
“We got into a game in Chicago that was similar to that,” Maurice said. “And I don’t know that we handled it poorly, but we seemed frustrated.
“This was a real good upgrade from that. We seemed pretty composed on the bench.” Guess that view is relative. “Only a couple of guys were losing their minds on the bench, so that’s growth,” Blake Wheeler said. “We only snapped a couple of sticks.”
That might be the hardest part of keeping this team on track: reeling in the desire to score a ton of goals.
“It’s new for us,” Wheeler said. “This is new territory. I’m not talking about where we are in the standings ... but winning games like that and being OK playing games like that. Even if we lost in overtimes or a shootout, it’s still a point and those add up.”
It could have easily gone the other way Saturday, if not for an overturned goal that would have made it 2-0 Calgary just 12 minutes in.
Flames pest Matthew Tkachuk had caused Winnipeg’s Matt Hendricks to bump into goalie Connor Hellebuyck before Troy Brouwer put the puck in the net.
“That’s a big game-changer,” the Jets’ Mathieu Perreault said. “I kinda saw it right away. As soon as I saw the replay I told Paul to look at it.”
The way Mike Smith was playing in the Flames net, a two-goal lead would have been hard to overcome.
“It’s 2-0, that’s tough the first 10 minutes after a break,” Wheeler said. “When you make it back to 1-0, it’s almost like you scored a goal yourself. Matty Perreault was pretty adamant. Maybe some of us swayed Paul to challenge that.”
Maurice said he was going to challenge the goal if it was close, just to give his team the benefit of a timeout.
The coach wasn’t at all convinced he was going to win the review.
“I don’t know how comfortable coaches are in thinking they know what the call is going to end up being when you make that call, to be honest,” he said.
If we’re honest, it was borderline, although you wouldn’t know it by listening to Hellebuyck.
“I probably would have made the save to be honest,” he said. “I was held down, I can’t move, I can’t do anything, I can’t rotate, I can’t really prepare myself for the rebound.”
Like art, it’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
Given their reprieve, the Jets kept scribbling away and were finally rewarded midway through the second period, when Perreault tipped Bryan Little’s innocent-looking backhand past Smith.
The goaltenders started each other down from that point on, Smith in particular keeping things even, his most frustrated victim being Nik Ehlers.
“Sometimes they don’t go in and they didn’t today,” Ehlers said, allowing himself a grin because of the result. “You just gotta play the game. We’ve done the right thing I’d say 90 per cent of this season. Great experience for us, to stick with it and not open the game up.”