Hellebuyck, Jets shut out Sharks, 1-0 Barron scores game lone goal in win

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In Winnipeg, if you attended the Jets match with the visiting San Jose Sharks, you might well have been able to enjoy a full Valentine’s Day dinner, AND caught all of the scoring and excitement on Wednesday leaving before the end of the opening stanza. Morgan Barron was credited with the game’s lone strike at 17:47 of the first.

“[The Sharks] play hard,” Barron said. “They’re one of those teams, you see it a lot on the rush, they backtrack really well. It kind of eliminates a lot of our rush chances. We had to try to create off of the cycle tonight, and as the game went on I felt we did a better and better job of that.”

The puck was deflected once, by Adam Lowry, before deflecting in off Barron.

“I wasn’t sure if it hit me, but that one hit me,” Barron said. “It kind of bounced off my glove and I saw it trickle in. … We didn’t give up too much, and when we did, [Hellebuyck] was there to make the save. It was a tight checking game for the most part.”

That was it.

Connor Hellebuyck made 17 saves, there was no real excitement or tension, in the win.

“He didn’t have a lot of work, but he had some timely saves,” Winnipeg coach Rick Bowness said. “Early in the third there, they had a couple of really good chances that he stopped. In the second period, their chances weren’t very many, but they came in little bunches there, in a hurry, and he made big saves.”

It was Hellebuyck’s third shutout of the campaign.

The Jets moved to 32-14-5.

“We had 84 shot attempts. We had more than enough scoring chances to score more than one goal,” Bowness said. “Give their goalie a ton of credit. Huge saves. We were all over the net. Just keep pushing. If we can create that much offense, the puck will have to go in soon.”

The Sharks dropped to 14-33-5.

“Frustration, really. Obviously, we’ve been off for a while here,” San Jose coach David Quinn said. “You could see there were a lot of missed opportunities for us to generate way more offense than we did. It looked like we tried to do the right thing, but we just weren’t. Our timing was off for sure, and obviously Kaapo played well, but we just weren’t efficient with the puck tonight.

“A lot of our problems were turnovers. I thought structurally we were pretty good defensively. It’s tough to be in great structure when you turn it over as much as we did tonight, but there was definitely some positives to pull out of tonight.”

Kaapo Kahkonen made 38 saves in the loss.

“I think maybe we passed up on some shots coming into the O-zone,” the Sharks’  Luke Kunin said. “We weren’t moving our feet as much as we could have to generate some more offensive-zone chances. But first game back, maybe that’s the reason why. I thought there were good areas of our game, and obviously a good team we played against, but we’ve got to find ways to get more looks, more second chances on pucks to the net.”