DENVER — Rick Bowness has said this team is different.
Before Game 3, the Winnipeg coach talked about how the Jets came into not just this series against the Colorado Avalanche but the entire season with a chip on their shoulder. Something to prove.
Now, after the Jets scored the go-ahead goal — again — and proceeded to collapse — again — as self-inflicted wounds took them out of a game they controlled, Bowness is still urgently trying to solve a familiar problem: how to bounce back from a playoff loss.
Advertisement
The Jets fought harder in the middle of the ice in Game 3. They boxed out better. Cleared pucks out of the slot. Their goaltender played better, stopping 27 of 28 shots through 40 minutes, giving the Jets a 2-1 lead heading into the third period. Winnipeg even spent more time in Colorado’s zone in Game 3 than at any point in the series. With that opportunity to break the series open in Winnipeg’s favour, the Jets imploded for the second straight game, losing 6-2 and falling behind 2-1 in the series.
Winnipeg took 10 minutes’ worth of minor penalties in the first 10:34 of the third period. The first call was questionable — with Mason Appleton’s stick catching Miles Wood as Appleton followed through on a shot — while the next several were obvious and unmissable. The Colorado power play vs. Winnipeg penalty kill is the only mismatch for which the Jets don’t have an answer, so Nathan MacKinnon scored. Of course he did. It was inevitable.
But a game-tying goal is just a game-tying goal. A veteran, composed, elite team would shake it off and pour it on all over again.
Winnipeg followed MacKinnon’s goal with an offensive zone double-minor for high-sticking when Gabriel Vilardi’s stick caught Devon Toews in the face. It was a call that the referees missed but the linesman caught — likely waiting until he was sure that the high-stick drew blood (linesmen cannot stop play for minor penalties). Double-minor high sticks are reviewable by video, which confirmed Vilardi’s four-minute penalty.
That sequence of officiating, plus the Jets’ struggles to win faceoffs, clear the puck, take away seams, or pressure Colorado’s star players, created the perfect storm for Valeri Nichushkin’s 3-2 Avalanche goal.
This is where the problem lies. Appleton’s penalty was questionable but it was called. Winnipeg’s players were irate — and justifiably so, given that Appleton was following through on a shot and it looked like Miles Wood embellished the play. Vilardi’s high stick was careless and necessary to call but, even then, in a story about an elite Jets team, there would be a major sidebar about how Colorado failed to score on the power play.
Advertisement
Instead, there was an absolute shooting gallery: Nine of Colorado’s 40 shots and 15 of its 74 shot attempts came on the third-period power plays. By the time Nichushkin scored, Hellebuyck had taken himself out of the play, losing his balance trying to stop a cross-seam pass with the paddle of his stick. Thus Winnipeg’s implosion wasn’t about things going wrong; it was about its inability to cope after things went wrong.
The Jets put together three shifts’ worth of pushback before Mark Scheifele gave the puck away at the blue line, Dylan DeMelo stumbled, and Casey Mittelstadt took full advantage, feeding Artturi Lehkonen a cross-ice pass for a counterattack tap-in into a gaping net.
Lehkonen from Mittelstadt and Ball Arena is going crazy. Avs take the 4-2 Lead!!! #GoAvsGo
— Drew Livingstone (@ProducerDrew_) April 27, 2024
A veteran, composed, elite team gets Scheifele’s puck deep. It makes DeMelo’s turn cleanly. It doesn’t give away a goal for free at five-on-five at a time it’s positively reeling on the penalty kill. And it doesn’t follow that up with David Gustafsson’s clear tripping penalty or Neal Pionk’s clear over the glass to give Colorado a five-on-three for free. The Avalanche have proven to be tough enough to beat without Winnipeg’s help. Ross Colton scored the 5-2 goal one second after Pionk’s penalty came to an end.
It’s not just the players. Bowness seemed to want to counter MacKinnon’s Game 2 dominance, wherein MacKinnon played nearly half the second period via a series of double shifts, with a Scheifele game of the same ilk. He double-shifted Scheifele in the first period, giving his star centre extra shifts with Vladislav Namestnikov and Alex Iafallo, then Nino Niederreiter and Mason Appleton, and in various combinations with Sean Monahan. Scheifele ended up leading Jets forwards with a completely sensible 19:34 of ice time, but it was a curious beginning from the Jets coaching staff.
Coaching is also partly to blame for Winnipeg’s penalty kill — a shooting gallery against Hellebuyck that we knew would be a shooting gallery — although Colorado deserves credit for running an elite power play all season.
Advertisement
Winnipeg’s most risky loss of composure came at the end of the game. Colorado had added a short-handed, empty-net goal during a Jets power play that looked a world away from dangerous, despite a good start to the game and Josh Morrissey’s 2-1 goal that set the table for the third period. Down 6-2, Winnipeg’s focus seemed to turn toward setting the tone for Game 4. Adam Lowry fought Miles Wood, defeating him handily but doing nothing to change the scoreline.
Then, as the final buzzer sounded, all 10 Jets and Avalanche skaters got involved in a lengthy scrum, leading to a dogpile in the Colorado zone. Brenden Dillon’s hand was badly cut, sending him off the ice in a hurry, leaving his teammates shaken — and perhaps his team without one of its top-four defencemen heading into Sunday’s pivotal Game 4. It’s difficult to imagine Winnipeg coming back from a 3-1 deficit. It would be harder, still, without Dillon’s steadying presence on Winnipeg’s second pair. If Dillon misses time, Winnipeg could bring Logan Stanley back into the lineup or give trade deadline acquisition Colin Miller a shot, but neither brings Dillon’s five-on-five game or penalty killing ability. Bowness didn’t have an update after the game, saying Dillon was still being examined at the time.
What are the Jets meant to do now?
They’ll start Hellebuyck in Game 4. This much is expected. They may be forced to dress another defenceman, pending Dillon’s status. Is Cole Perfetti is going to play any games in the postseason? It seems far from guaranteed, but I suspect Gustafsson’s tripping penalty cracks the door more open than it’s been. We can also get into various combinations and permutations of Winnipeg’s lineup — the old Ehlers/Scheifele/Vilardi and Perfetti/Namestnikov/Iafallo debates, based on their tremendous analytics.
Bowness will focus on puck management, execution in the offensive zone, and coping with Colorado’s speed.
“You slow them down with better puck management in their zone and making sure we don’t get our forwards trapped deep,” Bowness said. “Their D are coming. … If it’s a four-on-three, we can live with that. But they had a couple of four-on-twos. They do an excellent job of pushing our D back and gaining the blue line and turning up and finding that second wave.”
This is supposed to be a resilient Jets team capable of pushing back with a much higher floor in quality of play compared to last year. I believe those things are true — or at least that they have been true for much of the season — but this is the worst time of year for those qualities to fade.
Advertisement
The offence appears stuck in second gear.
“I think we still pass up too many shooting opportunities for sure,” Bowness said. “We’ve got to stop looking for that extra play and just do what they do — throw it at the net. Even when we did that, they were getting the retrievals and coming out. We’ve got to be careful watching that too, because that’s where they’re so strong, off the rush. We can’t waste shots. We’ve got to make sure they’re on a good chance.”
So, the Jets need to shoot more often, but also less wastefully. That seems like a philosophical problem.
Meanwhile, there are the MacKinnon problems and the overall problem of Colorado’s depth. All four Avalanche lines are forechecking with such pace that Winnipeg goes long stretches without being able to string consecutive breakout passes together. During Game 3, it got so bad for a while that Winnipeg made several stretch passes from its own zone to Avalanche players in the neutral zone.
That kind of pace is part of Colorado’s game from top to bottom.
“The forecheck has been the key to our team for years now,” said Avalanche veteran Andrew Cogliano. “With our team, it seems like our bottom lines, their identity is the forecheck. When you start forechecking hard, you start putting teams on their heels and then our big guys come out and sometimes teams back up and give them more respect.”
It has to be exhausting to play against a team like that. Mind you, I also remember when the Jets were a team like that. So I asked MacKinnon how Colorado was taking Winnipeg’s time away.
“Just trying to forecheck as hard as we can,” he said with a smile. “That’s really it. I mean, skating as hard as we can with the puck and trying to get active sticks. Obviously they’ll make some adjustments and we’ll have to be ready for it but our team is built on forechecking with the forwards we have. We have to keep that going.”
Advertisement
Does it take a special kind of grit to play that way?
“Yeah … It’s also just awareness,” MacKinnon said. “You can’t even let up for half a second against these guys or anybody in the playoffs.”
It turns out that Winnipeg’s half-seconds are adding up.
The biggest reason for concern for the Jets is that they played a lot better in Game 3 than they did to start the series — and they still lost. Hellebuyck put together a 40-minute highlight reel, including five saves on MacKinnon alone heading into the second intermission — and they still lost. The second line scored, via Tyler Toffoli from DeMelo and Nikolaj Ehlers — but Winnipeg still lost.
It’s getting harder to see the Jets establishing enough of an edge at five-on-five to overcome their beleaguered penalty kill.
The Jets have to dig deeper, again, and give themselves a chance to get back into the series, again, lest we start talking about a one-and-done postseason for a much-improved team.
Again.
The trouble is teams develop a past. Winnipeg is a good team that hasn’t responded to a playoff loss with a playoff win of its own since the qualification round against Calgary in 2020.
This is a much better team than any the Jets have iced between those years and now.
Now, the Jets need to overcome their own history — and to stop beating themselves. Colorado is good enough all on its own.
(Photo: Michael Martin / NHLI via Getty Images)
