In Winnipeg, for all their recent troubles, the Jets clinched a playoff berth on Thursday night with a 5-2 win over the Calgary Flames. 
Connor Hellebuyck made 31 saves in the win,
The Jets moved to 46-24-6 off their second straight win.
“There was never any doubt in my mind that we’d make the playoffs this year,” Jets coach Rick Bowness said. “We’ve got a good team here. And we’ve got a good bunch of guys. So there was never any doubt. It’s nice to put that behind us. And now we push forward.”
The Flames took a 1-0 lead at 4:35 of the opening stanza on a power play strike by MacKenzie Weegar.
“It [stinks]. I mean, everybody wants to chase the Cup, that’s what it’s all about,” Weegar said. “Some teams are ramping it up right now to go on a big playoff run and some teams are looking out, which is disappointing.”
The Jets responded with a double in less than two minutes.
Vilardi potted his first of the night at 12:59, scoring off a power play.
Nikolaj Ehlers made it 2-1 at 14:56 for a 2-1 lead to Winnipeg.
“We did a lot of good things,” the Jets’ Josh Morrissey said. “You’re going to need both (power-play) units down into the playoffs now so it’s nice. We didn’t execute as well as we probably could have on the five-minute power play, but I don’t think that killed our momentum at all. Yeah, I felt like it’s nice to see a couple go in and we’ll keep working on it to keep trying to make it a strength of our team.”
In the middle frame, Daniil Miromanov knotted the game, 2-2, midway through the period.
“Penalties killed us, for sure,” Miromanov said. “These guys are the best players in the world and if you get a penalty, they’ll punish you. … Our discipline was slipping away from us. It’s really frustrating and everybody’s battling so hard and it just [stinks] to lose those games, and I feel like most of the game we have it, and it slips away from us. We have to keep building on that.”
The Flames dropped to 34-36-5.
“I thought the effort is what we want to see,” Flames coach Ryan Huska said. “Five-on-five, I liked our game. I thought their power play was good tonight. They had a lot of chances off their power play, but I was pleased with the way we came out and played tonight. And it was really a total opposite of our last game (4-2 loss to the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday) so that’s what we need to see.”
Tyler Toffoli hit off the power at 15:35 of the second to restore the Jets lead, 3-2.
Vilardi picked up his double at 8:44 of the third for a 4-2 lead to the Jets.
“I’m not the coach but I’d say we’ve got to clean up things,” Vilardi said. “We are having breakdowns where I feel we’re getting outworked for not a few shifts, but for the whole period and we can’t have that. There’s definitely parts of the game where we are dominating. You can see it. And then we just kind of lose it. We have to find a way to narrow that down. We’re not going to have a perfect 60 minutes but we can’t have 20 minutes of having [Hellebuyck] stand on his head. Definitely got to clean things up. We know how good we are when we play to our standards. Gotta clean things up too.”
He collected his hats at 18:56 with an empty-net marker for the 5-2 final count on the scoreboard. 
Dustin Wolf made 40 saves in the loss.
“[Wolf] played amazing. He plays his heart out every single night,” Miromanov said. “We have to help those guys and be ready in the defensive zone.”
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