Jets put sloppy spell behind them with convincing win over Senators

WINNIPEG — It turns out the best way to deal with a tough night at the office is to quickly put it behind you.

For Mark Scheifele, it was an uncharacteristic outing on Thursday night against the Toronto Maple Leafs, when two of his glaring miscues ended up in the back of the net.

But given his excellent play throughout the course of the season, it should come as no surprise that Scheifele quickly returned to form, scoring twice as the Winnipeg Jets cruised to a 5-1 victory over the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night.

Scheifele wasn’t about to let a couple of tough plays get him down, leaving the rough outing in the rearview mirror as he collected his team-leading 27th and 28th goals of the campaign as well as an assist to complete a three-point night that moved him to 43 points in 48 games this season.

“We liked our game in Toronto a lot more than the score showed,” Scheifele told reporters in Ottawa. “We gave up a little bit too much off of the rush play, some breakaways, two-on-ones. That was a stepping stone in terms of offence and kind of dialled in a few more things defensively and the way our team activates in the O-zone, and today was a great showing of that.”

With the win, the Jets rebounded nicely after dropping consecutive games to open a season-long five-game road trip, improving to 30-16-1 in the process as they head into Sunday’s tilt against the Philadelphia Flyers.

“A good recipe is you get great goaltending, you’re good on the power play, you’re good on the PK and you’re solid five-on-five,” Jets defenceman Josh Morrissey told reporters. “That’s what we did and that’s a good recipe to win.”

Morrissey was bang-on.

The Jets followed the recipe for success perfectly.

After being held to just one even strength goal — and four total — during the previous three games, the Jets scored three times at five-on-five, added a pair of power play goals and were a perfect four-for-four on the penalty kill.

“Yeah. We haven't had that for obviously the last couple of games but we talked to the players before the game,” Bowness told reporters. “We need a greasy goal here from our forwards and (Blake Wheeler) goes to the net, Neal (Pionk) puts it around there, and it hits us and goes in. We haven't had one of those for a while. You just need one of those sometimes to get you going five-on-five.”

The Jets also got rock-solid goaltending from Connor Hellebuyck, who made 25 saves, improving to 22-12-1 on the season while lowering his goals-against average to 2.39 and raising his save percentage to .924 in what was his 36th start in 47 games.

“You watch some of those saves, they’re timely saves. He made some big ones,” said Bowness. “I love his attitude, his enthusiasm. He’s a great goalie and a great competitor, but I love his attitude. He comes to the rink every day and he enjoys it and he works his butt off and he’s just a great kid to be around.”

David Rittich is set to make his 12th start of the campaign on Sunday in Philadelphia.

Jets right-winger Blake Wheeler had a goal and an assist to hit the 900-point mark for his NHL career, which is another impressive milestone for the Minnesota product.

Jets left-winger Kyle Connor chipped in an assist to hit 400 points for his career, reaching the mark in 431 games.

Staying on the topic of individual achievement, Jets forward Nikolaj Ehlers tallied a goal and two assists and now has points in six of eight games since returning to the lineup. His first period goal made him the all-time leading goal scorer among Danish players with 168 goals in 489 games, passing Frans Nielsen.

The return of Ehlers, who is up to four goals and 16 points in just 11 games this season, has been a massive boost for the Jets team as a whole and the forward group in particular.

“It’s awesome,” said Scheifele. “He's a fantastic player for us. He played great for us, too. We're still only a few games in from coming back, so we still have more and more to come.”

In short, the Jets best players delivered the goods in this one.

“We challenged them this morning because we needed a little bit more out of them,” said Bowness. “They responded, all of them. I'm very happy with all of them.”

While Bowness continued to tweak the line combinations, he eventually settled in on trios that included Scheifele between Wheeler and Ehlers and Pierre-Luc Dubois between Connor and Cole Perfetti, who snapped a 15-game drought late in the third period to round out the scoring.

After dropping consecutive games to the Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens, this was an important return to the sound defensive structure that has been foundational to the Jets' resurgence this season.

Finding a way to follow this effort up on Sunday against a Flyers team that defeated the Detroit Red Wings 2-1 on Saturday is the latest challenge on the horizon for a Winnipeg team that has five games to go before the arrival of the NHL All-Star break.

“That's more how we want to play,” said Bowness. “The Toronto game wasn't that bad, other than a couple of clearly missed assignments. A couple of mistakes. The team game wasn't that bad. (On Saturday) the team game was really good. The specialty teams were outstanding again, so yeah. We'll take that.”