In Winnipeg, the Jets needed two goals in the third period to gt even with the Colorado Avalanche on Friday night.
Nikolaj Ehlers and Mark Scheifele scored their second goals of the game in the third to force extra time at 4-4.
“The desperation level, and battling every night, no matter what the situation is for us, I thought we did that for a lot of this game,” the Jets’ Josh Morrissey said. “You’re fighting to try to tie it up and stay alive in the game. You obviously need everybody battling who’s out there, and fortunately we had some good plays and won some key battles.”
The Avalanche’s Cale Makar scored at 2:42 of the extra session to give Colorado a 5-4 win.
The loser’s point gave the Jets a small gain in their chase for the wild card.
“That’s exactly how we want to play,” Winnipeg coach Dave Lowry said. “That’s exactly how we’re going to have to play with this team moving forward. We did a lot of really good things. We defended hard. We kept a very good team, for the most part, on the outside.”
The Jets dropped to 33-28-11.
Pavel Francouz made 39 saves in the Avs win.
“I thought [Francouz] played well,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “I mean, he hasn’t played a lot of hockey for us here so it can be difficult getting a start every week to 10 days, but I think he’s been sharp, and he looked good again tonight. We gave up some dangerous chances, especially early in the game, some breakdowns that I didn’t love, and he came up big for us and gave us a chance to win the hockey game.”
Nathan MacKinnon and Andre Burakovsky each picked up a goal and two points in the win.
“We did some really good things tonight,” Bednar said. “First period [we were] careless with the puck, had a couple turnovers and a few decisions where we gave them some easy scoring chances and a couple easy goals, really. One on a turnover and one on a read on the forecheck where we gave up an odd-man rush. But for the most part got better as the game went on, our defending was better in the third period and we started to spend more time in the offensive zone as the game went on as well.”
Colorado took a 1-0 lead in the game off a goal from Nicolas Aube-Kubel in the first period.
“They pushed hard,” Burakovsky said. “They made it hard for us. They had a couple long shifts in our zone against us. They were shooting the puck and they were working hard. They were crashing the net. It was hard for us to defend against that. Really good job by us to find a way to win the game.”
The Avs improved to 51-14-6.
“Penalties hurt us at the end,” Bednar said. “We had one opportunity with the empty net in order to probably put that game on ice and we didn’t capitalize on it, and then we end up getting called for a penalty. I like the fact that our team stuck with it in overtime. You certainly don’t like to give up a lead, but the Jets are a dangerous team. They have some shooters over there.”
Connor Hellebuyck made 32 saves in the loss.
You must be logged in to post a comment.