JN Gameday: Jets Look For A Goal Or Two As They Host Minnesota

Lost in all the commotion between Patrik Laine causing a ruckus with his comments to a Finnish newspaper and the possibility of Dustin Byfuglien retiring, is the fact that the Winnipeg Jets are still preparing for the 2019-2020 NHL season. That preperation continues tonight as the Jets will host the Minnesota Wild in pre-season game number two of sev…

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Gawddamnit, cancel the season already.

Since the National Hockey League seems so intent in actually going through with this whole ordeal, we may as well give you the possible lines for tonight’s game..

And here are the lineups for both the Jets and Wild…

Still crazy to see Bill Guerin as an NHL General Manager while Tom Kurvers is the assistant. Nepotism is alive and well in the National Hockey League.

The Wild roster is closer to Iowa than it is Minnesota as it is with most teams when they hit the road in early pre-season action in sending a bunch of rookies and AHL established players out while the more established players stay home. To that end, being that they are at home the Jets will get both Blake Wheeler and Mark Scheifele in the lineup tonight which should provide a boost.

Here are three other things to look for tonight during the game…

Much like the Wild tonight, the Jets sent an AHL heavy club to Edmonton on Monday and promptly got shutout by the dynamic duo of Stuart Skinner and Dylan Wells. Tonight should be different with established players like Scheifele, Wheeler, Copp and Perreault in the lineup, although we’d love to see some offense from Andrei Chibisov (who again looks to be getting top six forward minutes tonight much like he did in Edmonton) or Kristian Vesalainen.

While we’re all still stinging from the Byfuglien news, we can take solace that we still have Josh Morrissey and he’s not only quite good, but he’s going to remain a Winnipeg Jet for quite a long time. With him tonight will be Sami Niku who also should be worthy of some hype and hope for the future. Together they could be Winnipeg’s top pair as early as the start of this season and that could have been a possibility even if Byfuglien was still in the lineup. You can also look forward to watching Ville Heinola as well who we’ve been saying for a while is closer to being NHL ready than a lot of people thought when the Jets drafted him just three months ago.

If nothing else, seeing the reports of Blake Wheeler working on him have been somewhat encouraging.

Again given the Byfuglien issue, the early returns on Heinola are very encouraging.

Tucker Poolman had himself a pretty decent night in Edmonton save for a couple of mistakes in zone exits. Anthony Bitetto had a quiet game on Monday that I think that is fair to say was neither great nor truly awful. The Jets will need to continue to see improvement from those two who are easily competing for a spot on the bottom pairing of the Jets roster. Meanwhile Dmitry Kulikov has two jobs tonight, remain healthy and start to show he’s ready for a bigger workload as he stated he was a few days ago to the Winnipeg Free Press. It turns out, the Jets may need him more than they realized.