The youngsters might get Jets to the playoffs, after all
Much like the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Winnipeg Jets committed to playing their young players last year.
And while the accolades flew league-wide for Toronto’s management team and coaching staff when the Leafs earned an unlikely playoff berth, the same wasn’t true in Winnipeg. Head coach Paul Maurice and general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff took a fair bit of heat when the Jets failed to make the post-season.
The strategy — give the players ice time and let them learn from their mistakes rather than punish them — is paying dividends this season.
The Jets, to this point, are Canada’s best team.
“There’s a maturity that comes with going through the rigours of the National Hockey League,” Cheveldayoff told the Star in a phone interview. “Lots of our young players got opportunities last year and are better for them.”
The Jets have an intriguing core of young players, with an overall roster average of 26.2 years, well under the 27.7 league average. Patrik Laine is their youngest, still 19, and is tied for the team lead with 17 goals. Nikolaj Ehlers is 21and also has17 goals. Kyle Connor (19 points) is 21, and emerging defenceman Josh Morrissey (five goals, nine assists) is 22.
At 24, Mark Scheifele (15 goals, 22 assists) looks as if he’s hitting his stride as he enters the prime of his career. Older free-agent signings like defenceman Dmitry Kulikov (27), winger Matt Hendricks (36) and goalie Steve Mason (29) have balanced out the maturity level.
It wasn’t exactly by design that the Jets went with youth.
“They were the best option,” Cheveldayoff said. “Josh Morrissey is a great example of opportunity-taken-and-ran-with. Ehlers, Laine are still very young players. Connor is a rookie this year.
“There’s still a lot of growth in their game. With young players, where they start is not where they finish in the regular season. There is tremendous potential for a lot of growth.”
The Leafs and Jets aren’t the only teams to have committed to youth. The Arizona Coyotes, Buffalo Sabres, Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes are in that group too. Winnipeg and Toronto seem to be further ahead in large part because of goaltending.
The Leafs’ Frederik Andersen is among the league’s top goalies in most statistics across the board. The Jets stumbled early in the season when Mason struggled, but sprung to life when Connor Hellebuyck — just 24 —found his groove.
“It’s an integral position, a very technical position,” Cheveldayoff said. “For a hockey team to have suc- cess, you need strength in that position.”
The commitment to youth doesn’t always work if the goaltending isn’t up to snuff.
The Hurricanes have an average age 26.2, two 21-year-old defencemen — Noah Hanifin and Haydn Fleury — and an emerging star forward in 20-year-old Sebastian Aho. The ’Canes brought in goalie Scott Darling from Chicago to take over from Cam Ward, but neither Darling nor Ward has gotten the job done in net. The same is true in Buffalo and Arizona, as well as Edmonton, though Cam Talbot is showing signs of life again with the Oilers.
“You want to be able to play your guys, and they are going to make mistakes, and if they do, they have to know you have their back and you’re going to put them back out there,” Hurricanes coach Bill Peters said. “The goaltender is the great eraser. He can erase all those mistakes so they don’t show up on video the next day.
“Goaltending is so good right now, not only do you have to have a good goaltender, you really — if you want to be an upper-echelon team — you have to have a great goaltender. The teams that have it are very fortunate.”
Cheveldayoff’s Jets are getting that kind of goaltending, though Cheveldayoff isn’t getting too far ahead of himself.
“It’s a long season,” he said. “We’re looking at it game by game. It’s a tough league. You certainly take the points, or you grind it out, or do whatever you can. And you learn from every game.”