You Ain’t Seen Nothing Jet at BetLM

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Jet

Claude Noel isn’t going to jump to any knee-jerk, panic-button type con­clu­sions after one per­for­mance by his Win­nipeg Jets.

And, real­is­ti­cally, nei­ther should any­one else, know­ing there are 81 encores sched­uled — and more if this col­lec­tion can morph into a play­off squad.

All that said, on the day after the his­toric night before — a 5–1 loss to the Mon­treal Cana­di­ens that instantly moved the team from in the spot­light to under the micro­scope — the Jets’ head coach has already learned one thing about his team that he likes:

They’re not exactly cool with what hap­pened in their 2011-12 debut.

Fact is, they’re down­right steamed about it.

“One thing I know,” began Noel on Mon­day — a day off for the play­ers and staff — “I don’t have to worry about get­ting these guys back up. If they care, they’ll get back up. And they care. We talked after the game for a few min­utes… they’re dis­ap­pointed, we’re all dis­ap­pointed and we would have liked a bet­ter outcome.

“It’s one of 82 games. That’s how you have to look at it and that’s how you have to judge your team. Our job, the play­ers and the coaches, is sim­ple: it’s to get to our ‘A’ game. We iden­tify what our ‘A’ game is and we strive to get bet­ter every day. When we don’t, when it’s below the stan­dard, it pisses peo­ple off… mostly me. We’ll get there.”

The opener out of the way, the Jets now embark on a dif­fi­cult part of their sched­ule that — in many ways — could be exactly what this team needs. Win­nipeg will play 11 of its next 14 on the road, includ­ing games Thurs­day in Chicago and Sat­ur­day in Phoenix. But get­ting away from the glare in Win­nipeg might be the per­fect tonic for a team still try­ing to under­stand itself and get com­fort­able with Noel’s system.

“You’re going to run into these sched­ule issues some­times dur­ing the year,” Noel said. “I think it’s good for us. We’re going to find out a lot about our­selves. We can play at home because we have fan sup­port. When we’re on the road, some­body else has that support.

“The biggest thing is you want to know your team and this team knows itself. We know we’ve got Chicago on Thurs­day and they’re a tough oppo­nent. How can they not be? They won the Stan­ley Cup a cou­ple of years ago and we’ve got play­ers who were on that team (Andrew Ladd and Dustin Byfuglien). We know what the task at hand is here.”

Finally, given the gift of hind­sight, Noel did admit some­thing he at first brushed off after Sunday’s game — per­haps his squad was a bit too caught up in the moment. There were obvi­ous signs of nerves, some sticks were squeezed too tight and enough gaffes to fill a week’s worth of games.

“They weren’t over­whelmed, but they were… you know what I mean?” said Noel. “The peo­ple that have seen us play through­out train­ing camp and every­thing else, they knew that wasn’t the ‘real’ team, that some­thing wasn’t con­nect­ing. As much as you’d like not to say it, it didn’t func­tion for us.

“All in all, I think they know we’ve got more game. We know that. We know we’ll get it.”

A look at what’s next for the Jets, who play 11 of their next 14 on the road:

Thu., Oct. 13 – @ Chicago, 7:30 p.m.

Sat., Oct. 15 – @ Phoenix, 6 p.m.

Mon., Oct. 17 – vs. Pitts­burgh, 7:30 p.m.

Wed., Oct. 19 – @ Toronto, 6:30 p.m.

Thu., Oct. 20 – @ Ottawa, 6:30 p.m.

Sat., Oct. 22 – vs. Car­olina, 6 p.m.

Mon., Oct. 24 – vs. New York Rangers, 7:30 p.m.

Thu., Oct. 27 – @ Philadel­phia, 6 p.m.

Sat., Oct. 29 – @ Tampa Bay, 6 p.m.

Mon., Oct. 31 – @ Florida, 6:30 p.m.

Thu, Nov. 3 – @ New York Islanders, 6 p.m.

Sat., Nov. 5 – @ New Jer­sey, 6 p.m.

Sun., Nov. 6 – @ NY Rangers, 6 p.m.

Tue., Nov. 8 – @ Buf­falo, 6 p.m.

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