Meet the Winnipeg Jets, the NHL’s most mercurial team by the length of Dustin Byfuglien’s stick shaft.
They’ve got it all, as I often say, and they’ve always got nothing to show for it.
Canvass the Penguins’ locker room a few hours before facing these guys — puck drop at PPG Paints Arena is at 7:08 p.m. Thursday — and you’ll hear bona fide raves.
"So much talent," Carl Hagelin was saying after the home team's morning skate. "You look at all the skill they have, especially up front, all the speed they come at you with, how big they are ... it's a challenge."
"They're bigger and physical, but they can also score," Conor Sheary said. "Really a dangerous team."
That might come across as the pandering that’s common in professional sports. Except that it isn’t. Trust me on that. Because the Penguins are plenty aware of the exceptional blend of skill, speed and size of Winnipeg captain Blake Wheeler, of the shooting touch of young Patrik Laine that’s been compared to Alexander Ovechkin’s, of how Mark Scheifele is considered by serious hockey evaluators as among the sport’s top five centers, not to mention Byfuglien, Jacob Trouba and Toby Enstrom offering beef and talent on the blue line.
The Penguins are also aware, at times painfully so, that the Jets come at them as hard or harder than any team in the NHL. That’s odd, of course, given that they’re in opposite conferences and, thus, meet only twice per season. But all the nastiness of the two games last season, both here and in Winnipeg, reinforced the point.
"It's always a battle against Winnipeg," Cole said. "Every time."
So the Jets have all that, and yet, they’ve made the Stanley Cup playoffs once in the six years since the relocation from Atlanta. And that one occasion was a four-game first-round sweep by the Ducks in 2015. For the city that invented the Whiteout crowd concept exclusively for playoff usage, that’s a whole lot of darkness.
True to form, they opened this season with two hideous losses, coughing up 13 goals, but have since won four of five, including this 4-3 win over the Wild in their most recent game Saturday night:
Lots to celebrate after last night's game!
Watch the full highlights now...#MINvsWPG pic.twitter.com/oT3im1qVDQ
— Winnipeg Jets (@NHLJets) October 21, 2017
What’s wrong, then?
What’s missing?
I've gotten to know Wheeler from his time with the Jets, but also from speaking with him extensively when he represented the United States at the Sochi Olympics, and he's always been honest and blunt. So I started with him on this morning.
"Really, we just need to learn how to play hockey," Wheeler replied. "We can't lose our minds if we get down a couple goals. It's mostly maturity."
That point would be made frequently in this room. It's a fairly young roster.
"There are teams that are younger than us who made the playoffs last year, though, so that's not a good excuse. It's just a matter of finding an identity as a group and playing that way every night."
What identity?
"I think we're a fast team. When we're playing our game, we're on the puck, we allow our defensemen to pinch on the walls, keep plays alive for us, transition quickly, all those details. I think with so much talent in this room, sometimes the Achilles' heel is that you want to try to score a goal every shift. We don't have to do that. Just do things right."
Hm. That sounded familiar. Could the team down the hall possibly serve as a template?
"They are the template," Wheeler interjected before I could finish the question. "They're the best at what we're trying to do. That's why they've won back-to-back Cups. You've asked me about us playing better defense. Well, those guys play good defense in part because they've got the puck all night. That's what we want to be."
"I think it's really just a matter of putting it all together," another veteran, center Bryan Little, said. "It's following the same program, the same systems. And yeah, that's learning. We really are a young team. Some of our best players are the youngest players in this room. And once guys mature and get their games going, we're going to have success."
Here's Paul Maurice on that:
OK, but maybe it really isn’t all that intangible. Because when discussing all of this roster’s virtues, both now and in recent years, the one position that’s been consistently omitted has been the goaltender. The franchise has suffered through, among others, an overpaid Ondrej Pavelec, an overrated Connor Hellebuyck, and now ... a Flyer?
Oh, it’s true. Kevin Cheveldayoff, the GM responsible for adding all of the above talent, somehow has pulled that off while wearing blinders when it comes to the game’s most important position. And true to form, he went out this past summer to spend the little money he’d been granted by the Jets’ notoriously stingy ownership for two years and $8.2 million of Steve Mason.
The same Mason who’d underachieved for half a decade with the Flyers.
The same Flyers, incidentally, who haven’t had quality goaltending since their current GM, Ron Hextall, was threatening to behead Robbie Brown.
The goaltending topic always seems to be taboo in Winnipeg, I’ve found over the past few years, and that’s strange in and of itself. The same holds true early in this season, based on some conversations at this rink. It’s always something else. Lack of structure. Lack of discipline. Lack of camaraderie. But even though it’s seemingly the consensus of the entire hockey world outside Manitoba's borders that the problem’s always been goaltending, you’ll seldom hear that come from anyone close.
Well, I have a hard time buying it, especially after Mason opened this season in matador form, with 16 goals in three games to open his Winnipeg tenure. Since then, Hellebuyck, who’s at least capable of getting hot, has won four in a row while all the team did in front of him was benefit from actual NHL-caliber goaltending. That’s how the team could look, should look on a regular basis.
Like I said, it’s a weird team. The Jets could pulverize the Penguins tonight, or they could lose their 17th game in a row in our city’s limits, and it wouldn’t be a surprise either way.
