It’s not about Atlanta. Not even a little bit, really.
Yes, the return of the Winnipeg Jets to the Stanley Cup playoffs is a lot about history, and Game 3 on Monday against the Anaheim Ducks will be one of the most important days in Manitoba sports in years.
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Strange. A series that has so many already anticipating Game 3 before it even begins.
The whiteout Monday at the MTS Centre will be part redemption, catharsis, fairness and celebrating the game where the game is celebrated most.
What it won’t be about, at least not very much, is the Atlanta Thrashers team that was transferred north in 2011, and that this is the first playoff game in Winnipeg since that historic transfer. That seems a minor detail as the franchise that was built around Ilya Kovalchuk really doesn’t feel, at least, like a vibrant part of this feel-good story, even if there are players who skated for that Atlanta franchise still on the Jets roster.
No, this is about closing the circle, about losing a team in 1996 and getting it back and getting to this place in 2015, and the fact the original team went to Phoenix and this one came from Georgia is more of a footnote, really, than an important part of this story.
Sorry, I just don’t embrace the storyline that these are the old Thrashers, and don’t bother spouting the statistics of a 15-year-old franchise to me. They’re the Jets 2.0, a team returned to Winnipeg in the righting of an old wrong, more related in spirit to the team that Barry Shenkarow sold off to southern interests than to the club that went largely unloved in Atlanta but left mostly because of a disastrous ownership situation.
Yes, the spirit of the thing. That’s why everyone’s talking about it, about this, about Game 3. That’s why Game 3 tickets in the upper bowl are being sold on StubHub for upwards of $700. This is a story about the beginning (the loss of the Jets) and the end (the return of the Jets) and the precise details of the transaction and how David Thomson and Mark Chipman actually made it happen just don’t seem to matter.
This team was frozen in time in 1996. It wasn’t born in 2011.
The dream of every Jets fan, needless to say, is that their heroes will line up for Game 3 already ahead two games on the Ducks, which seems fanciful, if not altogether impossible. Anaheim is the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference and has home ice advantage, starting with Game 1 Thursday at The Pond, and the romance and exhilaration of the Winnipeg hockey story doesn’t change the fact that the Ducks are the favourites here, not the Jets.
So why does it feel like the Jets are the team with the swagger?
Anaheim, after all, is still the team with memories of winning a Cup eight years ago, with players who were on that team and beat the Ottawa Senators at a time when Winnipeg was home only to the AHL Moose and didn’t dare imagine the NHL might return.
The Ducks are a franchise that calls Teemu Selanne a hockey saint just as much as the City of Winnipeg with a clutch of die-hard committed fans who would argue their passion is just as great as any fans in the Great White North.
But if you’ve been there, through the good times and the bad in Anahaim, through the Paul Kariya days and the deletion of “Mighty” from the team nickname, you know there’s just no way sprawling Anaheim will ever conjure up the civic hockey pride of Winnipeg as it emerges from winter’s cold grip.
True, hockey is growing in southern California like never before, and in 10 years, there will be players in the NHL who learned to play the game solely in the L.A. area, just as the presence of the Coyotes in Phoenix inspired a young Auston Mathews, a Scottsdale boy, to learn the game to such a degree he may be the No. 1 pick of the 2016 NHL draft.
There will be an entire AHL division in California next season, which will accelerate the number of former pros and college players who settle in the area and teach the game. The Western Hockey League, mindful of the talent available in the region, holds an annual combine in Anaheim for the entire U.S. southwest. The Los Angeles Jr. Kings and Anaheim Jr. Ducks are formidable minor hockey organizations despite the fact the costs of playing the game in that part of the world are sizeable and ice time, says prominent player agent Pat Brisson, is like “gold.”
“The only challenge we have is financial,” says Brisson, whose boys have played minor hockey in southern California, coached by ex-NHLers like Rob Blake and Nelson Emerson. “We’ve got 30 million people. We’ve got the athletes.”
So to say Winnipeg is hockey territory, the place when Scott Young’s fictional high school teams battled it out in Scrubs on Skates, while Anaheim doesn’t care about the game would be patently unfair. They’re just very, very different homes to hockey, and the meaning of the Jets to Winnipeg just can’t be compared to the day-to-day existence of the Ducks in Anaheim.
So what about the series itself? The curious thing about the Ducks is that on paper, they aren’t that intimidating, particularly if you look past the individual accomplishments of Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry. They’re 11th best in goals scored and goals allowed, have a dreadful power play that wallows at the bottom of the NHL and in a era when possession matters, they sit in the middle of the league.
They’ve lost Game 7 at home in the last two playoff seasons without getting past the second round. They lack a definitive No. 1 goalie and their coach, Bruce Boudreau, has an NHL resume filled with strong regular season results and disappointing playoffs. What these Ducks do very well is win one-goal games, but beyond that, the stats themselves don’t necessarily indicate a champion-in-waiting.
Winnipeg? All the indicators are up, particularly since a major trade brought Tyler Myers and Drew Stafford into the fold from Buffalo. In a season when the team was essentially forced to move the closest thing it had to a franchise player to the Sabres, the result has been a team that’s better and bigger and seems to respond to Paul Maurice’s every command with military readiness.
You have to love the formal handshakes after every Jets win. What you worry about is the team’s penchant to cross the line on the physical stuff, and Winnipeg is 9-10-5 this season when it allows five power plays or more in a game. Dustin Byfuglien’s late-season suspension for trying to rearrange J.T. Miller’s vetebrae was a warning of sorts that the Jets have to keep it together and not let the overwhelming emotion of all of this get to them.
But then, isn’t that what this is really all about? The emotion of it? The Timothy Eaton statue in the rink that speaks to history, to changing times and things that get left behind?
Forget Atlanta. Winnipeg is different but the same since the Jets lost in six to Detroit and then left town, and that’s the primary narrative that’s in play here. That they play a Ducks team that would tell you the Anaheim market is also very different from the time Michael Eisner (with Bruce McNall’s assistance) convinced the NHL to put a team there further underscores the theme of how the game evolves to fit the places it calls home.
Tonight, the Jets return to the playoffs for the first time in 19 years, and that in itself is a story worth telling.
But it will be Monday when the full expression of the tale is heard, spoken by Winnipeg hockey fans wearing white within and without the MTS Centre, folks justifiably filled with pride that the game came back to them because it had to.
