With Dubois, Jets can roll four lines regularly
WINNIPEG — The first look at the Winnipeg Jets with newly acquired centre Pierre-Luc Dubois on the ice suggests the team will start rolling four very strong lines as they return to action this week.
Dubois, acquired in a trade for forwards Patrik Laine and Jack Roslovic on Jan. 23, practised for the first time with his new team Sunday at Bell MTS Place.
He was on a line with the team’s leading goal scorer, Kyle Connor, and veteran winger Trevor Lewis, who has been a fourth-liner for most of his career.
The line was designed as part of head coach Paul Maurice’s plan to balance things out among his four forward units and it has the potential to make the Jets one of the toughest teams in the league to defend against.
“It felt good to finally get out there,” Dubois said. “Just two weeks of working out in your living room keeps you, to a certain extent, in good shape, but there’s nothing like skating out there. Today was a good practice.
“I felt good out there, skating with (Connor) and (Lewis), two amazing players. K.C. is one of the most under-rated players in the NHL and Lewie brings that experience, just helping me with all the systems and everything. He can pass the puck, he works really hard, so it felt really great to be out there with those two.”
Maurice left two of his lines together — Mark Scheifele is still centring Andrew Copp and Nikolaj Ehlers and Adam Lowry is still between Mathieu Perreault and Mason Appleton — but he created a new line with Paul Stastny between captain Blake Wheeler and rookie leftwinger Kristian Vesalainen.
Scheifele remains the team’s top centre — for now, we’ll call Dubois the No. 1A centre — so his unit is clearly the first line, but you’d be hard pressed to say which line you’d label No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 right now.
Maurice has promised balanced ice times for the four, ideally ranging between 17 minutes and 13 minutes. He’ll get his first chance to try that out on Tuesday when the Jets visit the Calgary Flames.
“We didn’t want to disrupt the combinations that were having some success,” Maurice said. “So, we left the lines that have produced and played well together. Then it’s about balance. We felt it’s easier, at the starting point, to leave everybody at their natural position and give an opportunity to Trevor Lewis and Vesalainen to play with a different style of players than they have been playing with, because they’ve looked good in their games.
“Then there’s balance. So, we’ve got four lines that we should be able to play and spread minutes around. That concept, get that solidified in your bench, run short shifts, run at a high level, to prep us for a March to the third week in April that will be the most hockey that any of these guys have ever seen.”
Dubois, a 22-year-old twoway centre who has scored 66 goals and 159 points in his young NHL career, had to complete a full 14-day quarantine after arriving from Columbus on Jan. 23.
He skated on his own for the first time in two weeks on Saturday then practised for the first time Sunday and said he’s ready to make his Jets debut on Tuesday.