The Winnipeg Jets punched their playoff ticket on Thursday night with a 5-2 win over the Calgary Flames in their 76th game of the season. That’s four games earlier than last season, when it took them until game 80 to clinch a postseason berth.
The Jets still have six games to go before their quest for Lord Stanley’s Mug commences and the Whiteout arrives. The Jets cannot rest easy until then, though, because the final half-dozen on the schedule still have meaning for three reasons.
1: To Maintain Or Improve Central Division Placement
The Jets, after wrapping up a five-game homestand by going 2-2-1, have a 26-24-6 record and 98 points, good for third in the Central Division.
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They currently trail the Colorado Avalanche for second by four points. The Jets would certainly like to overtake them to finish second and get home-ice advantage in the first round; they have a better home record (24-11-3) than road record (21-13-3) and in a seven-game series would prefer to host at Canada Life Centre four times rather than three (even though the Jets 2.0 playoff home record is only 7-15 and they haven’t won a home playoff game since 2021.)
If the Jets and Avalanche are tied in points by the end of the regular season, whoever has more regulation wins will get second. The Jets currently have 41 and the Avalanche have 40. If the Jets and Avalanche are tied in regulation wins, the tiebreaker is regulation plus overtime wins; the Jets and Avalanche both currently have 46.
The Jets only have one game in hand over the Avalanche, so they don’t control their own fate in surpassing or tying them. However, if they want any shot at second, the teams’ final matchup on April 13 is a must-win. The Jets are 3-0 against the Avalanche this season.
At the very least, the Jets want to maintain their position in the Central’s top three so they don’t have to face the Dallas Stars, who have won eight-straight and look like a massive wagon right now, in the first round. The Jets are currently six points up on the Nashville Predators, who own the first Western Conference wild-card spot with 92 points and had an 18-game point streak prior to losing three of their last four. The teams face for the final time on April 9. Going 4-2 would be enough to maintain that spot even if the Predators go 6-0.
2: To Clean Things Up Defensively
There’s no doubt the Jets’ attention to defensive details hasn’t been as sharp through the second half of the season as it was in the first. Since mid-January, in their fall from first in the entire NHL, they’ve had more breakdowns and haven’t stuck to their stifling structure — one that allowed them to limit opponents to three goals or fewer in 34-straight games — consistently for 60 minutes. In the 31 games since that 34-game stretch ended on Jan. 22 with a 4-1 loss to the Boston Bruins, the Jets have allowed four-plus goals 11 times.
Recently, they are prone to looking like a completely different team from not only game to game, but from period to period or even within periods. Focusing on tightening things up over the final six could go a long way to playoff success.
“I’m not the coach, but I’d say we’ve got to clean up things,” Gabriel Vilardi said after the victory over the Flames. “We are having breakdowns where I feel we’re getting outworked for not a few shifts, but for the whole period and we can’t have that. There’s definitely parts of the game where we are dominating. You can see it. And then we just kind of lose it.”
“We have to find a way to narrow that down. We’re not going to have a perfect 60 minutes but we can’t have 20 minutes of having (Connor Hellebuyck) stand on his head. Definitely got to clean things up. We know how good we are when we play to our standards.”
3: To Affirm Ideal Lines
Head coach Rick Bowness and company have been loath to split up Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele despite the pair being out-shot and out-chanced together through the first five games of the season-long six-game losing streak.
Bowness, who took some criticism from this publication and others as a result of his stubbornness, finally split the pair up to start the game against the Los Angeles Kings. Vilardi returning from his enlarged spleen issue allowed the bench boss to reunite the Nikolaj Ehlers/Scheifele/Vilardi trio that dominated in December and is an analytical darling from possession and scoring-chance perspectives.
Related: Bowness’ Player Usage & Lines Subpar During Jets’ Losing Streak
Against the Flames, Bowness ran that line and a Connor/Sean Monahan/Cole Perfetti line to begin the game. However, in a case of “old habits die hard”, he reunited Scheifele and Connor late in the first period despite the Jets beginning to control play after a sleepy start.
Apparently, Bowness does not understand that putting the two together is not a “break glass in case of emergency” option like Edmonton Oilers’ head coach Kris Knoblauch has by Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl together when things aren’t going their way in a game.
With Connor and Scheifele together, things almost immediately went off the rails. The Flames dominated most of the middle frame and hemmed the top line in when they scored to knot the score 2-2. Bowness switched the lines back thereafter, and the Jets scored three straight.
Bowness needs to avoid sabotaging his team and commit to keeping Connor and Scheifele apart for the rest of the season. He also some tough decisions to make about his two middle lines when Nino Niederreiter returns from the laceration he suffered to his leg against the Kings. Niederreiter is a stalwart on the shutdown third line with Adam Lowry and Mason Appleton but Tyler Toffoli, who had been playing on the second line Monahan and Ehlers since joining the Jets at the trade deadline, filled that spot against the Flames. Perfetti’s recent resurgence after an extended scoring slump will make him difficult to take off the top six.
Bowness also needs to lock down his defensive pairings. During the losing streak, he split up Dylan DeMelo and Josh Morrissey, who have been together all season and complement each other nicely, and placed Neal Pionk with Morrissey and DeMelo with Brenden Dillon. However, Pionk has struggled badly for most of this season and should not be playing first-line minutes in the playoffs regardless of opponent because he gets burned too often. Bowness should reunite DeMelo and Morrissey as soon as possible.
The third pairing has also been in flux, but would be better off if the two best remaining defenders were on it from now on so they can build chemistry. One of the two best is obviously Dylan Samberg, who despite being analytically the Jets’ premier shutdown defenseman and thriving in a third-pairing role for much of the season, has been scratched a couple times recently.
The final slot should be between Colin Miller and Nate Schmidt. When Miller came over at the trade deadline, the idea was he’d be an upgrade over Pionk on the second pairing, or at the very least, Schmidt and/or Logan Stanley on the third pairing, but has played just four games, registering one assist.
Schmidt has played 62 games this season, registering two goals and 11 assists. His possession numbers are better than Miller’s and he’s been Samberg’s main partner, which potentially tips the scales in his favour.
The Jets are back in action on Saturday, April 6 as they face the Minnesota Wild in a matinee to begin their final road trip of the season, which sees them play four-straight against Divisional opponents.