A Night to Remember in Downtown Winnipeg

Call it a Night to Remember. After all, it's not every night in the boutique hockey arena in downtown Winnipeg that you get a broken down Zamboni machine, a fight in the stands that results in two fans being handcuffed and forcibly removed by police, blood on the fans side of the boards, a disallowed Jets goal that no one could explain (it was called goalie interference, but everyone who saw it is still looking for the interference part), a hat-trick by Blake Wheeler and a shutout of the defending Stanley Cup champions. The 15,000 in attendance (minus the two who got dragged out by the cops) got all of that and more on Tuesday at Canada Life Centre. The Jets were brilliant. Wheeler scored three and had an assist, Josh Morrissey had a goal and an assist, Cole Perfetti was magic with three assists, Connor Hellebuyck looked like a Vezina Trophy winner, Mark Scheifele had a goal and two assists and the Jets penalty-killing unit was perfect As an aside, is it me or do NHL officials appear to make up the rules as they go along these days? Are betting apps the cause of this year's horrendous NHL officiating? Has it always been this bad? With a 5-0 shellacking of the defending Stanley Cup champs on Tuesday night, the Jets improved to 14-6-1 on the season and after one-quarter of the 2022-23 campaign are still a point behind first-place Dallas in the Central, but with two games in hand. As hockey people with an actual understanding of the game know, the Jets have a very good team when it's well-coached and right now, Rick Bowness, Scott Arniel and the rest of the staff have an entire locker room on the same page for the first time in a while. The shifts are short, the back checking is evident and while the defence will always make mistakes in their own end, that goaltender is freaking tremendous. Hellebuyck was flawless -- again -- on Tuesday night recording his third shutout of the season. The Jets were outshot 40-24 and Hellebuyck never seemed out of position. In the dying minutes he stopped a clear-cut breakaway by Colorado's Anton Blidh to put a big red bow on his 40-save whitewashing of last spring's champs. A couple of interesting statistics demonstrated how much better the Jets are this season than they were last year. A team that never won an important face-off against a good team last year, won a whopping 63 per cent of the face-offs against the Avs on Tuesday. And a team that could neither kill penalties nor score when it mattered on the power play last year, went one-for-two with the man advantage while it kept Colorado off the board despite the Avs three power-play opportunities. This is a much different hockey team under Bowness than it was under Maurice and Lowry last year. Winnipeg has now beaten Colorado twice this season (they beat the Avs 4-3 in overtime in Denver on Oct. 19) and have now beaten the two best teams in their division -- Dallas and Colorado -- twice already in 2022. And all this happened on a night when the Jets paid tribute to five beautiful young cancer fighters whose stories made your gut wrench. It was Hockey Fights Cancer Night and the kids the Jets brought out to meet the fans quickly made anyone with a beating heart forget any minor problem one might have had during the day. There were plenty of tears, too. In all, it was a splendid night at the rink.