Why this year’s Winnipeg Jets are different heading into Stanley Cup Playoffs ...Middle East

WINNIPEG — A meeting between Mark Scheifele, Josh Morrissey, Adam Lowry and Scott Arniel last summer set the course for this season.

A few months after being hired as the Winnipeg Jets’ head coach, Arniel called his captain and two assistants — all of whom reside in Calgary for most of the off-season. He wanted to fly out and sit down..

The foursome gathered at a fine-dining Italian restaurant, Mercato’s, for a lengthy lunch in mid-August. The conversation was centred around how this Jets team, fresh off consecutive years of strong regular seasons and disappointing first-round exits, could go from a bubble team to a legitimate Stanley Cup contender. 

Scheifele, Lowry and Morrissey — three players who have each spent over a decade with the organization  — delivered a unified message to Arniel. 

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“The message from us was ‘hey, we are all well into our careers, we’ve got a great team, a great leadership group and great players. We want to be pushed to try to take that next step,” Morrissey recounted. “The expectation was that he coaches us as if we’re pushing to be a championship team.”

The players believed that execution had to be demanded at a higher level.

“Looking back now and when you look at all the steps we’ve taken, I think that meeting is where it all really started,” Lowry told Sportsnet.ca 

If you’ve listened to Jets players and coaches speak publicly this season, you’ll notice that they often discuss their habits. Their non-negotiables are painted on one of their dressing room walls. 

Structure. Embrace hard areas. Win 50/50 battles. 10 per cent more. 

“The 10 more per cent more idea, it applies to everything we do,” Lowry explained. “Whether it’s a workout or a recovery, it’s like what can you do to try and make you a better player, better teammate and better part of this organization?” 

They’ve rallied around the sentiment.

“We’re not driven by results. We’re driven by the process,” Dylan DeMelo told Sportsnet.ca. “It’s easy in an 82-game season, when you win four or five games that you maybe deserved to lose and be all smiling and happy. But it’s like well, did we really play a good game? And vice versa. Maybe you lose 2-1, but you had a great game and you just couldn’t score. Well, what are you going to do… sulk about it? Or are you going to break it down for what it was, take the positives out of it and move on?”

That line of thinking explains DeMelo’s noteworthy comments during the team’s winning eight straight games to start the year. 

“It’s great that we’ve got a great start but we really haven’t done crap, to be honest with you,” DeMelo said in late October. 

Eight straight wins is impressive, but Winnipeg’s players knew they weren’t consistently sticking to their identity.

“There were times during those long winning streaks where we were getting absolutely ripped apart by our coaching staff because we weren’t playing good hockey,” DeMelo said. “We were playing loose.”

After that winning streak ended, they responded with seven straight wins and started to inch closer to that ‘stingy’ — as they call it — brand of hockey. 

“We went 15-1 to start the year, and I don’t think we even really appreciated how impressive that was,” Morrissey said. “We were just kind of in the moment, rolling, looking at it like ‘hey, the end goal is for us to have a championship-calibre hockey team. And obviously, the ultimate goal is to make that happen but day in and day out — what you do, how we prepare, how we push each other — that’s where our focus has been all year.”

During training camp, Winnipeg’s coaches organized focus groups to facilitate team-building discussions. Arniel was taken aback that every group came back and said that part of their identity, first and foremost, was going to be how they defended as a team. It was clear that everybody was pulling on the same rope.

“To be in hockey games, we had enough skill to score goals but everybody knows that when it comes to Game 83 and on, the teams that defend the best are the ones that usually end up at the end of the day holding (the Stanley Cup),” Arniel said on Wednesday after Winnipeg won it’s second straight William M. Jennings Trophy. 

Mind you, it’s not just the team’s defensive players delivering.

Scheifele and Kyle Connor have taken great strides in their work away from the puck, while also getting a sprinkle of penalty kill time added to their workload. Nikolaj Ehlers demonstrated an ability to simplify his game when he played alongside Adam Lowry on the team’s shutdown line. Cole Perfetti evolved into an asset defensively.

Having your top offensive weapons buy in like that is a recipe for success. 

“My first year with San Jose, we went to the Cup Finals and it’s because of the buy-in from our group and from everybody,” DeMelo said. “It wasn’t just the third and fourth lines playing stingy. It was Joe Thornton, Joe Pavelski , Patrick Marleau and Logan Couture leading the charge and playing just as hard and as detailed in the D-zone as they were in the offensive zone. Everybody was buying in to the way you have to play in order to win.”

Not only has Winnipeg’s defensive metrics improved from last season, but they’ve also consistently improved throughout their Presidents’ Trophy campaign.

“Adding Luke (Schenn) and (Brandon Tanev) at the end added more to that grit style of play,” Arniel said. “The games aren’t fancy and wide open in the playoffs, they’re tight and they’re heavy, and we like to feel that we’re built for that. We’ve gone into the games this year at different points of the season where we’ve run into those games that are heavy, and our response has been really good.”

Last spring, the team’s defensive structure dissipated in the first round. They were never able to get into a rhythm, even during their Game 1 win — a 7-6 game that was far from the template of ‘Winnipeg Jets’ hockey. 

But this time around, they’re not only a better version of themselves on the ice — but off of it as well. They’re going to take it one day at a time. 

“Win or lose, you have to stay even-keeled, especially in the playoffs,” DeMelo said. “You’re playing the same team. Things happen. You might be up 1-0. You might be down 1-0. There are injuries. Ebbs and flows of series’. How are you going to react? You’ve got to stay in the moment and focus on what you’ve got to do to be the best version of yourself.”

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