Jets author another masterful defensive effort, but fall just short as injuries mount

TORONTO — Had you waded out to poll those who filled the Scotiabank Arena stands 20 minutes into Wednesday night’s all-Canadian matchup, you’d have likely found a consensus: the visiting Winnipeg Jets beelining for a dominant win, the hosting Toronto Maple Leafs surely en route for a miserable trip to the back half of this home-and-home.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, the game boils down to a single moment, a single play. On this night, it was the very last one, the Jets putting on a defensive masterclass for 64 minutes only to get burned on their lone misplay of the evening.

Still, amid a dominant, resurgent season that’s silenced their doubters, amid a run of blue-line mastery that has them establishing a new identity, the Central Division-leading Jets can live with the loss, given everything else this game brought.

“I thought we did a great job,” defender Nate Schmidt said of the tilt after the final buzzer had sounded, his Jets coming up on the losing end of a 1-0 overtime nail-biter. “Our goaltender played fantastic — he was phenomenal tonight. But, you know, their goalie played well too. 

“It’s crazy that a long game comes down to just one shot.”

If there’s one flaw you could point to in the Jets’ approach on Wednesday, it might be what they did with all the shots that came before, the missed opportunity of not capitalizing on their early dominance.

Rewind to that opening period, and the eventual final score looked unimaginable. It wasn’t just that Winnipeg finished the frame outshooting Toronto 15-4 — it was what they’d done to them. So suffocating was the Jets’ defensive pressure, and so aggressive and decisive was their attack, the Maple Leafs were seemingly falling all over themselves. They’d become a comedy of errors in their own end of the rink, coughing up the puck seemingly every time they had it, struggling to get out of their own zone, or through the neutral zone, or into the offensive zone.

“I like the way our guys came out. We attacked the game early,” Schmidt said of that quick start. “And I don’t think we really let off the gas.”

“We were on top of them, we had lots of good chances,” his head coach, Rick Bowness, added. “Give their goalie a ton of credit tonight — he made a lot of big saves, he made a lot of timely saves. But I really liked our first period. That’s one of the best first periods of the year.”

It was in the middle frame that things started to go sideways for Bowness’s group.

The aggression started to work against them, the Jets escorted to the box three times in that second period, sending Toronto’s star-studded power-play unit over the boards. Winnipeg managed to kill all three — and even earn some thrilling short-handed chances of their own — but it was what was happening back on their bench, away from the action, during those stout penalty-kill displays that pushed the night off-track.

“We were playing great, and all of a sudden we take three penalties in the second — we lost our flow,” Bowness said. “You’ve got guys sitting on the bench too long. So that was disappointing. We talked before the game about staying out of the box — we ended up taking five, which is too many. 

“That had an effect on our offensive side of the puck as well, because we’re killing penalties so often, and the offensive guys are sitting on the bench.”

Making matters worse, by the time the Jets had navigated the period and gotten to the first intermission, they found themselves down one of their most important skaters, a blocked shot sending defender Josh Morrissey to the room with a lower-body injury. 

The Norris Trophy hopeful didn’t return to the bench for the third period — a devastating blow for a group that started this night already without two-thirds of its top line: leading scorer Mark Scheifele and winger Gabriel Vilardi.

But as these Jets have all year, they adapted. They rolled with the punches. And even without Morrissey, without Scheifele, without Vilardi, they kept pushing. 

“When you lose your defence early like that, you’ve got to rely on your forwards to help the defence out an awful lot,” Bowness said. “He’s obviously our most highly skilled defenceman, and it’s a hole back there. But you have to play through injuries in this league. And our team did a great job of that tonight. … Give the five (defencemen) a lot of credit. Our forwards did a great job supporting them — back-checking, back-pressuring, getting the puck out of their hands. 

“It was a great team effort defensively today. We didn’t give up very much 5-on-5, and the few chances we gave up, LB made some good saves.”

“I’m almost not impressed,” netminder Laurent Brossoit added. “Because I see it so consistently. Especially from the forwards too, with the amount of back-pressure that they give us, the D can be confident.”

It’s become the staple of this group’s identity, this stifling defensive presence. Wednesday night, it was all the more important, the Jets’ blue-liners tasked with holding off the high-flying Maple Leafs, behind an offence already stretched thin, and — for the latter portion of the night — without their defensive leader.

Still, even while navigating that stiff test, the Jets had their chances.

They had them early, in bunches, as Winnipeg missed out on the opportunity to bury Toronto in that dominant first period. They had them even during that messy second period too, the Jets managing a shorthanded 2-on-0 during their first penalty kill of the night, but coming up on the wrong end of a couple elite Ilya Samsonov plays. And they had them late, with everything on the line, all four of the Jets’ forward units rolling in the third period, stitching together a series of lengthy offensive-zone shifts, seemingly building towards something.

In the end, it came apart just slightly, and that was enough. 

In a game that seemed destined to come down to one shot, one bit of elite skill exploiting one timely error, the Jets found themselves without two of the leaders who could’ve swung it for them. And on the other end, after pouring everything into another signature defensive effort, the Jets slipped for just a moment, and it was over.

“We lost coverage,” Bowness said of the game’s final play, an Auston Matthews goal at the net-front with less than a minute left in overtime. “We were there, and we let the guy with 38 goals get behind us. We were there. We just lost coverage.”

You could put it down as a missed opportunity given how his club started the night, on pace for what looked like a runaway win before penalties and injuries and everything else got in their way. But already sitting atop their division, sitting second in their conference, third in the league, Bowness’s Jets are focused on the bigger picture.

The loss will sting, but they’ll take the point, and the approach, and keep pushing.

“I thought that was by far the best game of the road trip. We played really, really well,” the coach said once the final buzzer had sounded. “If we play like that on Saturday, I like our chances.”