The Winnipeg Jets got crushed 4-1 against the Boston Bruins on Saturday night and head coach Paul Maurice did not have to look far to find who was to blame.
By the end of the game, Tuukka Rask only had to make 11 saves to pick up the win as the visiting Jets looked lifeless all night long.
Maurice pointed the finger squarely on himself.
“I have two jobs. One is to prepare my hockey team and the other is to run the bench, and my team wasn’t prepared to play,” he said to reporters after the game. “There’s a lot on me. I didn’t see it coming, I couldn’t make enough adjustments to make it change.”
The 12 shots were a season-low for the Jets, and Maurice is chalking a lot of it up to a lack of preparation.
“I’m not looking at that room, I’m looking at what I did to get this hockey club ready because it was not good enough for this league,” he said.
Nine players on the team registered a plus/minus in the negative and Nikolaj Ehlers led the team in that department with a minus-three.
“There isn’t a piece of that game that we were good at,” Maurice said. “If we have to sit here today and get a silver lining: if you’re going to be bad, you might as well be bad in all parts of your game so you can write that one off.”
Winnipeg has now lost two straight but still hold on to third place in the Central Division.
Maurice and his Jets will play again Sunday night when they head to Carolina to take on the Hurricanes.
“I gotta get my act here together because we weren’t ready to play.”
