Another rough outing for Mason
Winnipeg goalie gets little help from teammates in defensive disaster
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2017 (2354 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Nothing good ever comes from your best players playing their worst.
The Winnipeg Jets’ top trio of centre Mark Scheifele and wingers Nikolaj Ehlers and Blake Wheeler struggled mightily Tuesday night — so badly, in fact, that head coach Paul Maurice broke up the band — and the visiting Columbus Blue Jackets took full advantage of the situation.
Dreadful giveways by Ehlers — the NHL’s first star of the week — and Wheeler led to second-period goals by Cam Atkinson and Nick Foligno, and the visiting Blue Jackets posted a 5-2 NHL triumph over a soundly outplayed Jets club.
Ehlers’ slick hands failed him on the first shift of the period when he was stripped of the puck at the Blue Jackets’ blue line with the Jets on a rush. Atkinson was sent in alone on Jets goalie Steve Mason and slipped in his third goal of the season.
Just more than 10 minutes later, Wheeler coughed up the puck to Foligno just inside the Jets’ blue line and the Columbus captain moved in, outwaited Mason and then steered in his first of the season.
The Jets and Blue Jackets are similarly designed, relying on speed, a hard forecheck and puck possession. However, only the Metropolitan Division squad flashed those attributes to win its fourth-straight contest.
“They’re incredibly quick. If you’re not on the puck like we normally are, it’s going to look like 5-2,” said Wheeler. “You have to be on your toes against these guys to give yourself an opportunity to be in the hockey game. We survived the first period and just made a couple of bad plays in the second, in our net, and we just couldn’t recover.
“There’s going to be nights like this, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We know we’re better than that.”
A modest three-game winning streak for Winnipeg (3-3-0) was abruptly halted by Columbus (5-1-0).
Jets head coach Paul Maurice extracted no positives from this debacle.
“The game is really simple, but it’s really hard. And if you’re not going to play it simply, then you really gotta play hard. And if you don’t do either, then you’re going to have a night that looks just like that,” said Maurice. “We don’t want to shoot the puck because they have to go get it back if it doesn’t go in the net. And we didn’t skate hard enough to give ourselves a chance to even battle on some pucks.
“We’re missing the two key ingredients to the game of hockey. And the game of hockey is also very fair. There’s a handful of nights you think you deserve a better fate or you get lucky, but for the most part you get what you earned. And we earned that one. You don’t skate, you can’t play.”
Mason is now winless in three starts to begin his era as the Jets’ go-to goalie. He’s allowed 16 goals, and his goals-against average (5.96) and save percentage (.846) are ghastly. In contrast, the perceived backup, Connor Hellebuyck, owns all three of the club’s victories, a 2.11 goals-against average and impressive .937 save percentage.
The Jets host their closest rivals, the Minnesota Wild, on Friday night, and then are idle for five days before venturing to Pittsburgh on Oct. 26 and Columbus the next night for their first back-to-back games of the season.
Maurice indicated he’ll go with Hellebuyck against the Wild to avoid an extended period of inactivity for him.
Earlier in the day, Mason told reporters he was looking to “have some fun” in his return to the crease. But he wasn’t in his happy place fending off the Blue Jackets time and time again.
He was solid in the opening period, stopping 11 shots to keep the game scoreless. He made a couple of miraculous stops with his club trailing in the second but looked fallible on Lukas Sedlak’s goal to give Columbus a 4-1 lead, the result of a pass to the crease that banked off his back and bounced in behind him. Defenceman Zach Werenski’s simple wrist shot that beat him high to the glove side in the third period was a weak one, too.
He finished with 34 stops, while Joonas Korpisalo had 24 saves in the Columbus net.
“It’s not an ideal situation. But all you can do is work hard,” said Mason. “It started in the second period. Any time you give up four in one period, it’s usually not a good sign. It wasn’t good.
“When we come back and look at it, there are going to be some areas that we can improve upon.”
While tightening up defensively propelled Winnipeg to wins over Edmonton, Vancouver and Carolina, some bad habits — the kind on display in defeats to Toronto and Calgary with Mason between the pipes — crept back into their game.
Winnipeg defenceman Josh Morrissey said the veteran puckstopper, in his 10th NHL campaign, was left out to dry far too often.
“A lot of those goals are defensive errors on our part,” said Morrissey. “He’s a professional, he’s been around, a veteran guy, he handled those first couple of games awesome and there’s no issue there. We know that Steve can play and the type of goalie he is, we just need to do a better job of helping him out.
“I don’t think we were right off the start of the game,” he said. “We weren’t at the same level we’ve been at the last three (games) and that’s not what we want to look like. For us, turn the page and get back to that work and that detail and intensity that made us effective.”
Kyle Connor and Joel Armia scored their first goals of the season, with Armia’s tally being the Jets’ third short-handed marker of the campaign.
Connor switched spots with Ehlers on the top line and fired his first of the season in the second period to trim the deficit to 2-1, but Columbus blue-liner Jack Johnson replied less than two minutes later. Sedlak padded the lead before the second period was done, benefiting from some fine corner work by Pierre-Luc Dubois, who stripped the puck from Jets defenceman Toby Enstrom.
Connor was recalled from the Manitoba Moose on Monday after the club announced Mathieu Perreault (lower body) was placed on the injured-reserve list and could miss a month.
jason.bell@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @WFPJasonBell
Jason Bell
Sports editor
Jason Bell wanted to be a lawyer when he was a kid. The movie The Paper Chase got him hooked on the idea of law school and, possibly, falling in love with someone exactly like Lindsay Wagner (before she went all bionic).
History
Updated on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:40 PM CDT: fixes typo in headline
Updated on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:54 PM CDT: Full write through
Updated on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:19 PM CDT: Final edit
Updated on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 7:53 AM CDT: Minor changes