Jets Nation Recap: Poor Second Hurts Jets In 5-3 Loss Against Wild

While the NHL GMs meet in Toronto, perhaps Kevin Cheveldayoff can request that second periods be considered optional and we go straight to the third period.

It would have helped tonight as a decent road first period by Winnipeg was followed up by an absolute stinker of a second period and doomed the Jets to an eventual 5-3 loss against the Minnesota Wild.

Despite a bit of a rough start to the game that saw the Wild jump to a 1-0 lead after a Nino Niederreiter goal, the Jets played a pretty even first period that actually saw them outshooting the Wild 8-7  and eventually knotting up the game at 1-1 after Bryan Little made a nifty one handed tip of a Dustin Byfuglien shot.

The second period is where it went all kinds of wrong for Winnipeg. 4 goals against in the span of 8:14 and they were as follows:

A Thomas Vanek breakaway slapshot goal

A Erik Haula breakaway goal scored while the Wild were shorthanded.

A second Vanek goal where he skated around Paul Postma like he was a Paul pylon and at the same time chased Ondrej Pavelec from the game.

And because perhaps the Jets weren’t feeling bad enough, a Chris Porter tipped in goal past Michael Hutchinson.

Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.

The third period was a bit better as score effects had it’s magical moment helping the Jets get a couple back with Wheeler and Little picking up the goals, but after 40 minutes the damage had been done.

Defense? What Defense? We’ll leave Byfuglien and Enstrom out of this because they were pretty solid all night, but the other four (Trouba, Myers, Postma & Stuart) were varying degrees of ‘bad’ to ‘awful’ and repeatedly missed defensive assignments, were out of position and gave up far too many odd-man scoring chances.

Going postal. We counted at least 4 times in the first two periods that Wild players had beaten jets goaltending but rang shots off the post. If you’re looking at the score and thinking “that doesn’t seem so bad”, just know it could have been worse.

Top line the best line. Ladd, Little and Wheeler continued to play well, accounting for all the points tonight while racking up some tough zone starts. They remain the one true reliable constant for the Jets at the moment.

Winnipeg Jets individual statistics:

Shot attempt chart for all minutes:

Shot location for all minutes:

(Charts courtesy War-On-Ice.com)

GIF RECAP

That sucked.