Scheifele Loses His Father, Jets Lose 2-1 in OT to Dallas in Game 6

A Hard ENDING TO A WONDERFUL SEASON

From everyone at Game On Magazine, our deepest sympathies to Mark Scheifele and the entire Scheifele family on the passing of Mark's father, Brad.

There really are no appropriate words.

Mark Scheifele loses his father the night before the biggest game of the season, decides he’ll play in that game, scores his team’s only goal and then has to sit in the penalty box as the Dallas Stars score the winning goal in overtime.

What can anyone say?

The Stars beat the Jets 2-1 in Game 6 of the Divisional Final and with that victory, Dallas won the series 4-2. The Stars advance, the Jets clean out their lockers, the local fans just shake their heads and Scheifele goes home to grieve the loss of the most important man in his life.

After a remarkable season, the best in Jets history, the team bowed out of the Stanley Cup playoffs six games into the second round. The statistics, for the most part, will clearly show that the Jets were the better overall team, but as we all know, stats are for losers.

The Jets lost Game 1 of the series at home, 3-2, in a game they dominated, and they never recovered. In six road games in the playoffs, the Jets won none. Zero. Donut. If you can’t win on the road, you can’t win the Stanley Cup tournament, and the Jets could not and did not win on the road.

It's a hard way to go down. Scheifele and the team got the horrible news of the passing of Brad Scheifele, then Josh Morrissey is injured and once again, Winnipeg has to try and survive a playoff game with five D-men. They almost made it, too. They were just 12 seconds from killing off Scheifele’s penalty – a penalty he had to take and the only penalty of the game – but Dallas capitalized and like a piano falling out a window and hitting the pavement, the thud was deafening. It was over and it should not have been.

The best team in the National Hockey League this past season, will now watch the Stanley Cup playoffs from the comfort of their living rooms. Once again, a very good, a very promising Jets team, was eliminated long before the final game of the tournament. Once again, hope turned to heartache. It’s sad and it hurts, but it doesn’t hurt anybody more than it hurts Mark Scheifele.