In Winnipeg, it got ugly, and then the Edmonton Oilers broke a bigger stick and made it just awful for the Jets on Monday night.
Connor McDavid had a hat trick and four points for the Oilers in a 6-1 win over the Jets.
“It’s good for our confidence,” McDavid said of the Oilers’ 6-2-0 record against the Jets this season. “But the playoffs is a different animal. We’re obviously jostling for position and kind of leaning that way that we might play them, so we want to finish ahead of them and have home-ice advantage. We’ll see what happens moving forward.”
It was his third hat trick of the season.
Edmonton had a 5-0 lead before Winnipeg got a goal from Mark Scheifele in the middle frame.
Alex Chiasson opened the scoring with a strike in the first period for a 1-0 lead to the Oilers.
“I think our team just seems to play well against them,” McDavid said. “We know it’s going to be a tough game every time we play them. They have some of the best forwards around the League and their goaltender is coming off a Vezina season, so they’re as good a team as you’re going to find. We come in and we’re prepared for a great game each and every time, and we seem to play them hard. So I think it starts with the whole group.”
After McDavid scored twice, Leon Draisaitl made it 4-0.
“Obviously [Sturm], Christian Ehrhoff, [Marcel Goc], those kind of guys, those are the guys I looked up to,” Draisaitl said. “We’ve had some really, really good hockey players in Germany and there’s more and more coming. It means a lot to me to be at the top of that list.”
Darnell Nurse added a third goal in the second period for a 5-0 lead.
“Obviously it’s frustrating losing four in a row,” the Jets’ Andrew Copp said. “We’re not playing up to our potential. So there’s no way around it. There’s no easy fix. You’ve just got to go straight through the adversity and straight through the wall and just dig in and work through it.
“If we dig deep, we can kind of revert back to some of the positives we’ve had over the course of the season and kind of trick ourselves into feeling good. I think temporarily shaken but definitely not broken.”
Connor Hellebuyck got the start and surrendered, and made 17 saves before getting the hook.
“It was enough,” Jets head coach Paul Maurice said. “I didn’t want Connor skating off the ice in that game because he’s made a bunch of saves. I didn’t have him [responsible] for any of them. I didn’t want him coming off the ice during the period and making the skate so, after two, he had had enough work.”
Laurent Brossoit came in to mop up the mess in aisle three, he made seven saves.
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