Feverish anticipation in Winnipeg
ANAHEIM, CALIF. — Not long after the Winnipeg Jets arrived in Southern California last week, Paul Maurice was asked about hockey in Canada, and in Winnipeg in particular.
The Jets head coach is a thoughtful guy. If he doesn’t want to answer a question, he gives nothing. If he’s in the mood, he will deadpan a joke. On the subject of the place he now calls home, he went deep.
“I do think that the Winnipeg experience is different,” Maurice said, comparing it to the other Canadian markets. “It’s a small town, and they lost their team and it came back to them.”
It came back to them. This is why anticipation for Monday in the Manitoba capital has been so feverish. The Jets have been back for four years now, but the return of playoff hockey is like passing through the final gate.
You are only really back when you are in the spring chase for the Stanley Cup. Maurice says the sense of pride from the citizenry has been palpable.
“There is a — this may be a lousy analogy and I clearly haven’t thought it through — but it’s kind of like, for me, being a teacher at school where you’ve got their kids. This is their team,” he said. “So the kids are getting good marks right now and the parents are coming up (to me) and they are so stinking happy, but you never lose sight of the fact that it’s their team. These are their kids. So there’s an ownership beyond (what’s normal), a parental caring about this team that is really special.”
But to continue Maurice’s analogy, the parents are now very nervous about their little fellers. With two tough losses in Anaheim to the Western Conference’s top seed, many of the upbeat predictions of a long playoff run for the Jets have been quickly tempered.
The Jets themselves do not yet sound like a worried bench. On Sunday morning at their Anaheim hotel, they talked about how two losses by one goal, both in games they led by a goal at the second intermission, were proof that they belonged in the dance.
“Hockey’s a cruel game sometimes,” centre Mark Scheifele said. “It sucks, but we know we can play with these guys.”
“We know we can beat this team,” defenceman Mark Stuart said. “It’s just a matter of closing out games.”
Maurice said dropping two games wasn’t a time to sound the disaster alarms.
“There’s a long history of going home down 2-0 and coming back to win the series,” the coach said.
He’s right about that. The Los Angeles Kings went down 0-2 on the road last year to San Jose, and even lost Game 3 at home before coming back to win not just the series but the Stanley Cup.
The Jets can also look no further than their present opponent for proof that a two-game hole is not insurmountable. The Ducks won both games at home last year in their first-round series against Dallas, before dropping Games 3 and 4 to the Stars. The Ducks would win that series in six games, but lost the first two in the second round against Los Angeles before coming back to win three in a row. Then they lost the last two.
In the playoffs, momentum is a slippery bar of soap. You have it, and then it’s gone.
The Jets know they were close to coming back to Winnipeg with home-ice advantage, painfully close, but they say they just need to withstand the inevitable late push from the league’s best thirdperiod team and they will be fine.
Maurice, earlier in the week, said the atmosphere in Winnipeg should be something else.
“I drive to the rink, and I get there early, and for the last three weeks it was Winnipeg Jets hoodie after hoodie after sweater,” he said. “It’s just that they’ve fallen in love with it. I’ve coached in U.S. cities and when we’ve gotten into the playoffs they are as passionate and rabid about their team. But it wouldn’t necessarily be the entire city. The focus on that is just very special.”