Winnipeg Free Press http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/hockey/jets/hope-chevy-has-been-keeping-up-his- spring-session-studies-421064723.html Hope Chevy has been keeping up his spring-session studies By: Paul Wiecek It’s one of the oldest tricks in the hockey coach’s playbook — send an under-performing player to the press box for a night so he can watch the proceedings from afar and maybe learn a lesson or two by seeing the big picture unfold 30 metres below. Well, for the second consecutive year — and fifth time in six seasons — the Winnipeg Jets are once again that player, watching the Stanley Cup playoffs instead of playing in them. Are there lessons the Jets can learn from the post-season thus far? Quite a few, as it turns out: • The value of a bold trade / the value of a stay-at-home defenceman: This is really two lessons, but Edmonton Oilers D-man Adam Larsson is making the case for both, and doing it dramatically. There were howls of protest and derisive laughter last summer when Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli shipped high-scoring winger Taylor Hall to the New Jersey Devils straight-up for a relatively unknown right-shot defenceman in Larsson. Hall, at the time, was the third-highest scoring left-winger in the NHL since 2013-14, behind just Alex Ovechkin and Jamie Benn. Larsson had been averaging two goals and 12 assists through five previous seasons and was on a modest $4.1-million annual contract that seemed roughly commensurate with his abilities. People wondered if Chiarelli had lost his mind. People are not wondering any longer. On a team full of young, prodigious and very offensively minded forwards, Chiarelli figured out the Oilers would never win, no matter how many goals they scored, unless they figured out a way to keep the puck out of their own net. Sound familiar, Jets fans? The Jets were tied for sixth in goals scored this season but are nevertheless presently watching the playoffs on TV because they also gave up more goals this season than all but three other teams. How good would Larsson have looked in a Winnipeg jersey this year? How much of a difference would a stay-at-home, physical blueliner who can wreak havoc with the other team’s cycle have made to the club's defensive woes this year? How much better would young netminder Connor Hellebuyck have performed with a guy like Larsson playing in front of him every night? And how good would Larsson’s contract, with four more seasons on it after this one, have looked to the small-market Jets? We’ll never know, because Chiarelli pulled the trigger and Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff didn’t. By universal acclamation — his teammates, his opponents, the game’s so-called experts — Larsson has been a difference-maker this season for the Oilers, both during the regular season and again in these playoffs (Larsson’s two third-period goals against the Anaheim Ducks the other night basically won Game 1 of the second-round series for the Oilers). Yes, the Oilers gave up a lot to get Larsson, but who’s laughing now? It’s certainly not Hall or the Devils, who are watching hockey on TV, as well. • Strong goaltending can make even a marginal team a bona fide contender: The Nashville Predators were wildly inconsistent all season long, posted a losing record on the road and were hard to take seriously for huge swaths of the season. But they did just enough to make it into the playoffs as a wild-card team and then once they got there, goaltender Pekka Rinne put the team on his back. Rinne is a polarizing goalie — the stats crowd hates the guy. But he is a former finalist for Vezina and Calder trophies and the worst thing you can say about him is he gives the Preds a chance to win more nights than not. And when he’s hot — as he was in the first round against the Chicago Blackhawks — Rinne makes a middling Nashville team a real Stanley Cup contender. When it mattered most, he posted a .976 save percentage — and two shutouts — to carry his team to a four-game sweep of the 'Hawks. And if a good goalie makes an average team such as Nashville a contender, the other thing we’ve learned from these playoffs is a good goalie can make a great team like Pittsburgh almost unbeatable. One year after rookie netminder Matt Murray led the Penguins to a Stanley Cup championship, it’s cagey vet Marc-Andre Fleury who is carrying the load this time around. Fleury has two years left on his $ 5.75-million annual deal and is almost certainly going to be traded at the end of this season because the Pens can protect only one goalie in the Las Vegas expansion draft and Murray is the man of the future. I’ve been reading stories about how the Calgary Flames and Philadelphia Flyers could be going all-in on Fleury. And the Jets? Well, if a team as starved for a veteran goalie presence as Winnipeg — and with money to spend now that Ondrej Pavelec’s $4.75-million yearly salary is off the books — isn’t in on the Fleury sweepstakes at season’s end, we’ll just have to wonder what playoffs they’ve been watching over at the MTS Centre. • Youth is no excuse: All season long we heard how the Jets were young and this thing is going to take time and we all just need to be more patient. And it is true that with an average age of 26.4 to start the 2016-17 season, the Jets were the fifth-youngest team in the NHL. But if youth explains why this team once again missed the playoffs, then why did three of the four teams who were younger than the Jets to start this season — Toronto, Edmonton and Columbus — all make the playoffs? If there’s nothing else that has emerged from the playoffs — and the wildly exciting Team North America at last fall’s World Cup of Hockey — it’s that youth in today’s NHL is an asset, not a drawback. There were lots of reasons the Jets missed the target this year, but the overwhelming available evidence from this post-season suggests the oft-cited excuse of "youth" wasn’t one of them. • The Jets need to be "in it to win it" in 2017-18: Chris Johnston at sportsnet.ca had an interesting read on the Toronto Maple Leafs the other day in which he argued that for all its youth, there is an urgency right now for an upstart Leafs organization that came within a couple of bad bounces of knocking off the Washington Capitals in the opening round. "This is a time for ambition, a time to be bold," wrote Johnston. And then, referencing the Leafs' trio of rookie phenoms: "They have one more year of William Nylander playing well below market value on an entry- level deal and two more of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner doing the same… "Here’s a hypothetical that shouldn’t be lost on any of the men running this team: The task of building a winner in the next two seasons may end up being easier than three years down the road, when the Matthews-Nylander-Marner trio will probably be accounting for north of $20 million in payroll." Substitute the names Matthews, Nylander and Marner in Johnston’s Leafs analysis with Laine, Ehlers and Morrissey, and you have precisely the same situation on Portage Avenue. Yes, the Jets have a bright future. But like the Leafs, they also find themselves in a unique present and the time to push for the summit is now, not three years from now. All of which is why the question people should have been asking after last weekend’s draft lottery wasn’t who can the Jets draft next month with the 13th overall pick, but rather, who could the Jets trade that pick to for someone who can help them right now? The Jets, like the Oilers of the past, have a roster overflowing with prodigious young talent. They don’t need any more of that. What is needed at this critical point in the franchise’s development is a couple of key veterans who can help put them over the top next season. A stay-at-home defenceman like Larsson. A quality veteran goaltender like Fleury. You can see for yourself on TV what a difference they’ve made to their respective teams — and so can the Jets. The lessons from this year’s playoffs should be clear. The question is whether the Jets have been paying attention. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/mts-centre-introduces-no-re-entry-policy- 421197253.html No going back at MTS Centre No re-entry policy comes into effect this fall By: Scott Emmerson The MTS Centre has closed the door on its re-entry policy. Starting Sept. 1, people attending events at the downtown Winnipeg arena will no longer be allowed to re-enter the building after exiting, True North Sports and Entertainment Ltd., the corporate entity that owns the MTS Centre, the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets and the AHL’s Manitoba Moose, announced Wednesday. The directive is aimed at providing greater security, decreasing the heavy pedestrian flow from people crossing the streets around the building during games and events and stabilizing building air temperature, True North said.