'Hungriest I've ever seen': Jets take fuel from doubters, whiteout, into ...

Before tonight’s playoff opener against Colorado, Winnipeg Jets head coach Rick Bowness will take a stroll through the dressing room and take the temperature of his team.

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Looking to get a feel for their emotional level, he’ll adjust his pregame approach accordingly.

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“Are they tight? Are they loose? Are they wound up? I always go walking around the room talking to guys to get a feel for that,” Bowness said on Sunday morning. “And if we’ve got to calm them down a little bit, then we’ll calm them down. If we find anyone way too nervous, then we’ll just go up to them and, ‘Hey, it’s another hockey game.’ It’s ramped up a little bit, but we still know the way we want to play.”

One player who might need a touch of calming down is winger Mason Appleton.

“The adrenaline is pumping so much and you hear that crowd and you literally think you can run through a wall,” is how Appleton described the start of a playoff series at home. “The crowd is going to be unbelievable. We’re going to be super fired up so it’s just channeling that and growing into our game.”

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It’s been five years since Nik Ehlers experienced a Winnipeg playoff crowd, due to the pandemic and some injuries.

Ehlers played just one playoff game last year and it was in Vegas, where the Jets were eliminated in Game 5 of the first round.

He last played one at home when the Jets took on St. Louis, a first-round matchup they lost in six games.

“I haven’t played in the whiteout since 2019 so I’m pretty excited,” Ehlers said. “This is going to be a lot of fun. The guys are excited for it and I think the city’s excited for it, too. So we’re ready to go.”

There are teammates who’ll experience it for the first time, like in-season trade acquisitions Sean Monahan and Tyler Toffoli.

Others, like the three acquired from Los Angeles last summer – Gabriel Vilardi and Alex Iafallo, who’ll play, and Rasmus Kupari, who won’t – will also get their first taste of whatever lift a sellout or near-sellout crowd in full throat and wearing white can provide.

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Appleton says the Jets are also fueled from within.

“This is the hungriest I’ve ever seen this group,” he said. “We really have a lot of belief … and we’re coming into the playoffs with what we feel is one of the hottest teams in the league. Playoffs are a different animal, but we’re going to try to keep that rolling.”

The Jets won their last eight regular-season games to claim home-ice advantage in this best-of-seven.

The Avalanche went 3-4-1 over that same span, including an embarrassing, 7-0 defeat at the hands of the Jets just eight days ago that essentially cost them home-ice advantage in this series.

The matchup pits the NHL’s highest-scoring team, the Avs, against its stingiest, the Jets.

No line exemplifies Winnipeg’s smothering approach better than Appleton’s, with Adam Lowry and Nino Niederreiter. They’ll be tasked with shutting down Colorado’s top line, led by Nathan MacKinnon.

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“We trust them in any situation against any line,” Bowness said. “We talk a lot about their defensive responsibilities, but that’s one of the best forechecking lines in the league.”

Appleton says everybody’s mindset is the same now, individual goals replaced by the bigger team goal.

“Our mindset totally flips,” he said. “It’s the best time of the year, the most selfless time of the year. No individual accolades matter. It’s whatever you can do to help this team win. Nobody’s concerned about how they score or how they get assists. It all goes out the window.”

Ehlers, part of a second “scoring” line with Monahan and Toffoli, describes his trio’s role simply enough.

“Shut the other lines down and score some goals,” he said. “Pretty simple, when you say it like that. I think Toff, Mony and I have been able to create some good things and some chemistry, and we’ve played well. We’re going to try and keep improving every shift we go out there and work our asses off for this team.”

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As of 11 a.m., a few hundred tickets were still unsold.

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Unlike last year when the Jets snuck into the playoffs, they’re favoured to advance this time.

They have their doubters, though, most notably an unnamed NHLer dubbing them the “biggest frauds in the league” as reported by a podcast a month or so ago.

Fuel, meet fire.

“There’s been some talk obviously that maybe we aren’t where we’re supposed to be,” Ehlers said. “And we know that we are. We want to show ourselves and prove to each and every guy in here that we’ve got what it takes to be a Stanley Cup champion, and that starts tonight.”

[email protected] X: @friesensunmedia

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