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Jets season comes to an end with Montreal Sweep

June 8, 2021, 10:44 AM ET [42 Comments]
Anthony Travalgia
Winnipeg Jets Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
The Jets had hope, they had a chance.

Behind a pair of goals from Logan Stanley the Jets took the Canadiens to overtime, a scenario where a single shot could have extended the Jets’ season and sent the series back to Winnipeg for Game 5.

Instead, Cole Caufield dug the puck out of the corner, glided to the net and sent a crisp tape-to-tape pass to Tyler Toffoli.

Series over, season over.

"I think it's all bitter right now. In the playoffs, it doesn't matter who scores. You win as a team and you lose as a team,” said Stanley. “I'm glad I got a couple by him to try and help the team, but at the end of the day we lost to the team, so it stings right now."

The postseason saw a tale of two Jets teams: The one who did the sweeping and the one who got swept.

Maybe it was the nine-day layoff between round one Game 4 and round two Game 1, or maybe it was an instance of a red-hot Canadiens team simply executing their game plan perfectly, outplaying the Jets from start to finish.

“They’re just playing at a really high level right now. You just have to give them all the credit. They’re playing a really good game,” said Blake Wheeler.

“With the goaltending that they have, any breakdowns they have, he’s putting out those fires. And we just couldn’t get the first goal, all series. That played right into their hands. They’re playing unbelievable right now.”

While everything went right for the Jets in the first round against Edmonton, nothing went right for them in the second round against Montreal.

Montreal was by far the better team.

"It was extreme, the story of the year. You roll through four games against a team with the two best scorers in the league and you like the defensive game, and then you get beat four straight times,” said head coach Paul Maurice. “(The Canadiens) were good. They were better than we were in this series and they deserved to win."

In all four games, Montreal got the first goal of the game, made life in the offensive zone difficult for the Jets and then where scoring chances were created, they executed.

The Jets had no answers.

"They’re such a good team when they get the lead that they play a frustrating brand of hockey. They don’t give you a lot. They make it tough to get to the net," said Adam Lowry. "Obviously, that was a big difference in the series was scoring first. Part of our game plan was to come out and get off to a good start.”

The Jets scored four times five-on-five in the series, two of those coming from Stanley in Game 4.

There’s no dancing around the fact that the Jets missed Mark Scheifele who was tied with Nikolaj Ehlers for second on the team with 13 five-on-five goals during the regular season.

Because the Jets were unable to extend the series to a fifth game, Scheifele will miss the Jets first game of the 2021-22 season, serving the final game of his four-game suspension.

“You can’t describe the impact of losing (Scheifele),” said Wheeler. “He’s a top-10 player in the NHL. I’m not saying that we would win the series in five games because he was in the lineup. But it just changes our team. He makes me better, he makes (Kyle Connor) better. It just makes our team look a lot different, so it’s a damn shame.”

Their playoff series with the Canadiens continued a frustrating trend. The Jets have been one of the better regular season teams over the course of last three, four seasons. Other than an appearance in the Western Conference Finals, they have nothing to show for it.

Given the landscape of what has happened in the world in the last 15 months, the Jets had hoped to give their fans more to be excited about. They welcomed 500 health care workers to Games 1 & 2, and had they pushed the series further, or even advanced to the next round, maybe there would have been more fans in attendance.

“I think this is the second time in franchise history we got out of the first round and you want to share that with your fans. It’s a fantastic home building and the crowd is different there than anywhere else. So, you feel like you missed out on something,” said Maurice.

“I would imagine there’s been a tremendous amount of sacrifice from a lot of people over the last year and a half. It would have been nice to give something back and to have the crowd. It’s not just the Jets and the coaches and the players, it’s the fans too, it’s a painful loss, a painful thing to go through.”

Paul Stastny, Mathieu Perreault and Derek Forbort are just three of several key unrestricted free agents who enter the summer without new contracts. That, combined with the looming expansion draft could result in a vastly different Jets hockey team come October.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing?
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