Before embarking on a six game road swing through the Eastern United States, the Winnipeg Jets have one more home game to play in and it’s against an old friend that has seen better days.

There are two ways to look at the loss the Jets suffered at the hands of the Nashville Predators on Tuesday, One way is to see it as an epic collapse where the Jets gave up three unanswered in the third period in a game where they blew two two-goal leads. The other way is to see it as lessons learned by a team that is still without their top defenseman, top defensive center, a top four defenseman and suffered through a very bad night by their goaltender, all while trying to keep pace and doing well against the defending Western conference champions. We prefer the latter. This is a team that is still 6-4-0 in it’s last ten games and things are still good – especially on offense. At home against Detroit is a good chance to right the ship for the Jets.

Detroit is in the middle of a rebuild which got a bit of a boost when they received three draft picks from Vegas for Thomas Tatar. That’s the good news, the bad news is the Red Wings are one of the worst offensive teams in the league this season and Tatar was one of their better offensive players. Now the Wings have to lean even more on the likes of Dylan Larkin, Anthony Mantha and the ghost of Henrik Zetterberg. For long time fans of hockey, it’s still a bit of an adjustment to see Detroit in such a sad state of affairs as much as it is to see the Winnipeg Jets as a Cup contender.

It was recently brought up that the Red Wings were a possible landing spot for John Tavares. Thomas Williams though thinks the Wings should focus on in-house affairs before trying to land possible the biggest free agent fish available this summer…

Back on December 5th, the Jets walked into the brand new Little Caesars Arena in Detroit and got had their asses handed to them by the Wings via a 5-1 score. They were stymied by a time traveling Jimmy Howard who came from 2010 to work his magic and done in by a pair of goals to open the third period led by Gustav Nyquist who had two goals in the game.

One hates to bring out the “automatic win” phrase, but against a team like the Wings – if the Jets are serious about wanting to contend for the top of the Central division – this has to be considered not only a must win, but almost an automatic… The Jets should tighten things up defensively against a less that offensive club and get a 4-1 win over Detroit.