Jets’ season ends in familiar fashion, with many questions lingering

01/05/2024

WINNIPEG — It was a wipeout in front of the whiteout. One more to flush a once-promising season down the drain.

For it to have all gone wrong for the Winnipeg Jets in front of these fans, who pushed the decibels to deafening levels at Canada Life Centre, felt ominous.

Will they continue to flood through the gates next season after this one ended in such disappointing fashion? You can’t help but wonder, with sellouts only coming late through a campaign that saw the Jets collect 27 of their 52 wins in this building but only one in the three games that mattered most.

For a second straight year, this team was dispatched from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in five games. It looked a little different against the Colorado Avalanche than last time against the Vegas Golden Knights, but the outcome was the same.

It left fans perplexed.

Why couldn’t their team assert itself? Why did its best players fall so woefully short? How did they — the best defensive team over 82 regular-season games — become the first team in NHL history to allow at least five goals in each of the first five games of a series?

This last one, which ended 6-3 for the Avalanche, plunged Jets fans deep into their seats — and into mourning.

To think they’ll only be brought back to the edges of them over an off-season that’s sure to once again be drama-filled is so heavy.

Josh Morrissey knows.

When the Jets’ best defenceman was asked how he felt after this series, on the precipice of yet another summer that’ll be longer than he and his teammates were anticipating, he said “terrible.”

Morrissey didn’t want to be too elaborate in dissecting it, but he was pointed in what the Jets should take from it.

“We win as a team and lose as a team and we all need to look internally this summer and find ways that we can get better,” he said. “We just played a recent Stanley Cup-winning team. A lot of the winning pieces are there and they brought it, and it should be a learning experience for us. As much as it stings and kills right now, we have to be better, we have to find another gear as individuals. It’s impossible for that to set in right now, but we need to take the lessons from what they did out there because they were the better hockey team and we need to find a way to get to that level.”

Morrissey’s was up all the way through, notching three goals and four points and matching the intensity he played with all season.

But the Jets needed more from him and everyone else.

They didn’t play their best until this last game, and they still lost by three goals. It was a flop that put so much into question.

Sean Monahan and Tyler Toffoli were acquired to fill out a second line that was great down the stretch of the regular season but got crushed by the Avalanche’s second unit of Artturi Lehkonen, Casey Mittelstadt and Zach Parise. They’re both pending unrestricted free agents who’ll be hard to replace if they don’t end up signing with Winnipeg.

Nikolaj Ehlers, who started the series with them and ended it being shuffled around the lineup, finished with zero goals and two assists in five games after putting up 25 goals and 61 points in the regular season.

He’s under contract for one more year at $6 million, but you wonder if he’ll be playing it with the Jets after once again not managing to show he has what it takes it succeed in the playoffs.

“It’s the intensity,” said head coach Rick Bowness, who pointed out he’s been to four Stanley Cup Finals.

“The playoff intensity goes way up, and you can talk about it all you want,” Bowness added. “The teams that have won know how to get there. They got there tonight, they got there this series. They flipped the switch…

“At the end of a series, if you’re not wearing an icebag, you’re not playing hard enough. It’s as simple as that.”

Jets captain Adam Lowry probably needed one for his right hand, which was busted up earlier in the series, and Connor Hellebuyck probably needed one for his ego, which took a barbaric beating when all was said and done.

He declined an opportunity to address the media after allowing another five goals on Tuesday. The leading candidate for the Vezina Trophy didn’t want to talk about how the Avalanche beat him 24 times in the series, leaving plenty of questions on the table.

Hellebuyck will have time to get to them before starting the first year of his seven-year, $59.5-million contract, but he’ll only be able to truly answer them next time the Jets are playing games as meaningful as these ones.

There are no guarantees it’ll be next spring, with the second line perhaps needing to be completely replaced, with defencemen Dylan DeMelo and Brenden Dillon due new contracts and potentially leaving a defence that desperately needs them, and with Bowness possibly on the outs.

He coached them into tying their franchise record for wins during the regular season but couldn’t quite coach them into finding their best game until it was admittedly too late.

Even if the Jets pick up the option on the 69-year-old’s contract, he wouldn’t comment on whether or not he’d return.

“We just lost in the playoffs,” Bowness said. “We’ll figure that out.”

The Jets will have so much more to resolve as their fans, who stayed to cheer them off the ice, stew in the disappointment of this all-too-familiar ending and await the many changes surely on the horizon.

The players who remain have all of that — and much more — to ponder.

“The only way that there is any good from this is that we learn from it and we actually look at how we can improve as individuals and as a group,” Morrissey said. “Because they brought that Stanley Cup-winning class to this series, and we didn’t return it for three or four of those games. We have levels that we need to find this offseason. I hope it stings for all of us into the summer and we use it as motivation.”

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