DENVER — The Winnipeg Jets are down 3-1 in the playoffs, they’re facing elimination in five games, and it all feels so shockingly familiar.
They meekly tucked tail and bowed out without a fight against the Vegas Golden Knights a year ago, and they appear to be doing it again now against the Colorado Avalanche.
Last spring, the Jets lost in four straight after winning Game 1, leaving head coach Rick Bowness disgusted.
“We have to push back,” he said once the Jets were eliminated. “There has to be a push back. There has to be pride. You have to be able to push back when things aren’t going your way. We had no push back. Their better players were so much better than ours tonight. They deserved to win. They were the better team in the regular season, they were the better team in this series.”
It feels like we’re a game away from hearing Bowness repeat himself.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way this time around — with the Jets proving to be a 52-win juggernaut in the regular season and entering the playoffs on an eight-game winning streak — but here we are again.
The Jets did some good things but were essentially gifted Game 1 by Alexandar Georgiev. And since the Colorado goaltender steadied himself in Game 2, the Jets haven’t done nearly enough good things to win.
In Sunday’s matinee at Ball Arena, in which they had to come up with their very best, the Jets were at their worst. They surrendered 13 of the first 14 shots and an early goal to Artturi Lehkonen, and by the time Cale Makar morphed into the second coming of Bobby Orr to make it 3-1 Avalanche, they were down 27-13 on the shot clock.
Connor Hellebuyck kept them afloat up until that point of the game, but he couldn’t walk on water to save them.
The Jets offered him no help. They were undisciplined — both in their structure and in avoiding penalties — and hung Hellebuyck out to dry and left him helplessly watching from the bench as the third period of Game 4 ended with Valeri Nuchushkin finishing off his first career hat trick to give the Avalanche a 5-1 win.
He took the shot that chased Hellebuyck from the game at the end of the second period, and he took the final one that officially sunk the Jets into a canyon in this series.
They lost hard after losing 6-2 in Game 3 and 5-2 in Game 2 and offered nothing to anchor hope to and reinforce belief that things will change in Game 5.
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“The problems are self-inflicted,” Bowness said. “You want to take penalties? Want to play a three-quarter ice game? You’re playing right into their hands. Our issues are self-inflicted.”
The Jets practically blew their own feet off with a shotgun last spring, and they’ve cut their own hands off so far during this one.
Things weren’t supposed to go this way for this edition of this team. Before the series started, Nikolaj Ehlers fell a breath short saying the suggestion they didn’t deserve to finish where they did in the regular season — fourth in the NHL, three points ahead of the Avalanche in the Central Division — was laughable.
“There’s been some talk obviously that maybe we aren’t where we’re supposed to be, and we know that we are,” he said. “We want to show ourselves and prove to each and every guy in here that we’ve got what it takes to be a Stanley Cup champion… There’s a lot of belief in this room and we want to go out and show that.”
Bowness believed the Jets were capable of doing exactly that. That they were capable of being different than the team he was so disappointed in after the Vegas series.
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“We go back to the first day of training camp, our players came in with the right frame of mind and they knew they had something to prove, they knew they had to be better,” he said before Game 3. “And that’s the attitude we played the whole year with. When things didn’t go our way, we lost a couple in a row, we bounced back pretty quickly because of that resiliency and because of that commitment. So the team’s far more committed for 82 games, playing the right way, how we want to play, than we were last year. Far more committed to that. And it showed, so that when we got into a couple of bad spells we came out of it, a little quicker than normal. And sometimes you come out of it but you’re still not playing well, but we always came out of those bad spells playing well. So that goes back to the commitment the players have had from Day 1.”
Where was it on Day 200 of this Jets season?
Nowhere to be found in a third period that saw them notch just 10 shots on net in this crucial game.
That might seem like a good number over 20 minutes, but it’s not nearly good enough when you have two power plays and a couple of extra minutes of six-on-five advantage to play with while chasing a three-goal deficit.
Over 60 minutes, Josh Morrissey had just one of Winnipeg’s 26 shots on net. Ehlers and Kyle Connor each had three, though none of them were particularly threatening. And Mark Scheifele, who led the Jets in scoring during the regular season, had zero.
They are the Jets’ best players, and all of them were held off the board in Game 4, just like three of four of them were in the game that saw them eliminated from the playoffs last season.
Scheifele insisted after this one that there were no parallels to draw between both experiences.
“It’s completely different,” he said.
But it feels identical.
From top to bottom, the Jets are running out of answers.
Bowness didn’t come up with any that made sense for this game. Inserting Axel Johnson-Fjallby to kill penalties but not using him for one second in that capacity was perplexing. Assembling his middle six in a way he hadn’t at any other point this season was a head-scratcher, too. And Logan Stanley coming back in for injured defenceman Brenden Dillon certainly wasn’t going to — and didn’t — solve the Jets’ puck-moving deficiency coming out of their own end.
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Not even pulling Laurent Brossoit to give the Jets a six-on-four advantage when they were down by three goals and headed to the power play with 6:51 to go in the third period felt like something else entirely from Bowness. It felt like a lack of belief it would make a difference, even if he said he had hope at that point the players on the ice would score at five-on-four and give the team a better chance to come back without risking an empty-net goal against for any longer than they had to.
None of it matters now.
As Scheifele said, the Jets must take Game 4 and “flush it down the toilet.”
They have major adjustments to make and even if Dillon returns, it appears doubtful they’ll have Vladislav Namestnikov available after a slapshot from the Jets’ lone-goal scorer in the game, Nate Schmidt, hit him in the head and sent him to the hospital.
“Sometimes the adjustment is just be better at what you do,” said Colorado coach Jared Bednar.
The Avalanche have done that and looked every bit like the team that won the Cup in 2022.
The Jets haven’t, and they’ve looked exactly like the team that went gently into the night in 2023.
