JN Recap – The Jets Are Bad And They Should Feel Bad

Us to the Winnipeg Jets: Nothing this season can be as bad as that New Years Eve game against the Islanders where you guys got smoked at home, right? That night you looked like you couldn’t compete against the Brandon Wheat Kings let alone an actual NHL club. Nothing gets worse than that night.

Winnipeg Jets to us: Hold my beer..

Let’s get the final score out of the way first.. Habs win 7-4. Honestly that “4” flatters the Jets but we’ll get into that in a moment.

All anyone is going to talk about after this game was Paul Maurice’s epic tirade after the Canadiens scored their fifth goal – a pretty end to end rush by Philip Danault which was his second of the game – where it seemed line every Jet on the ice had cement bricks for skates. It seemed to be the final straw for Maurice.

After seeing his team fall behind 2-0 less than five minutes in and then battle back to tie things in the next ten minutes afterwards only to see the Habs reclaim the lead..

After seeing the first five minutes of the second period start off the same way as the first five minutes of the first period did…

Paul lost it. Who could blame him? He likely saw his job flash before his eyes and finally couldn’t take it any more.

As you watch and rewatch the GIF above, the thing you note (besides the veins sticking out or lack of glasses as if he wished he was some sort of Cyclops from XMen wanting to just remove glasses and laser beam everyone to death) is his constant looking back and forth. The message didn’t have just one or two targets, everyone wearing blue on that bench was to understand his wrath because honestly he probably didn’t even know where to begin.

Bad goaltending? Plenty of it. Hellebuyck was bad and fighting the puck from the first shot on and Hutchinson wasn’t a whole lot better

Blown defensive assignments. Check. I’m still trying to figure out where Toby Enstrom was skating to on the first Habs goal where he completely left his man and went for a free skate around the net while the guy you would imagine he was supposed to cover just stayed parked at the side of the net.

Poor powerplay work? They had a 5 on 3 advantage for almost a full minute in the first period and didn’t muster a single shot.

Standing still while Montreal players buzzed around them? Plenty of that.

Trying to make one too many passes or dekes around a net and not simply shooting the puck on Al Montoya who didn’t exactly have a strong game himself? Of course.

It was every single thing that’s been wrong with the Jets at one point or another, rolled up into an unbelievable pile of… well is was Paul Maurice who used the term “horseshit” to describe his team tonight, so let’s go with that.

And against a Canadiens team missing seven of their regulars and having started their backup goalie and not the all-world one where getting more than two goals against him in a game goes to the Vatican for consideration as an act of a miracle.. The Canadiens didn’t do anything overly spectacular other than keep the game simple, throw almost everything at the net and hustle more than the Jets seemingly wanted to.

Do all the fancy advance stats you want, but when one team simply out-works the other like the Canadiens did to the Jets tonight, this is the result you get.

The Jets did score right after Mount Saint Maurice erupted which made us wonder for a brief moment if a fire had been lit, but it was on the power play given to the Jets after a bonehead Canadiens penalty and manufactured by the two guys – Ehlers and Scheifele – who seem to be the only thing worth watching on this club right at the moment. After that goal, they spent the rest of the 15 minutes left of the second period managing a mere two shots on goal.

I’m typically not one of those “the fans should get a refund for that” type of guy, but seriously Jets you owe the fans a refund for that “effort” if you feel safe calling it that. It’s three hours none of us will get back. It’s not likely going to spark a roster move or a coahing change or anything of that sort. It’s just another in a long list of Jekyll and Hyde performances from this club.

But at least we got video of a raging Paul Maurice out of it. Hardly seems worth it to get it, but we have it.

Charts coutresy of

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