DENVER -- For the Winnipeg Jets, Sunday was more of the same, and not in a good way.
Once again, they struggled to find offense. Once again, they took too many penalties. Once again, they couldn’t kill off enough of those penalties.
And for the second consecutive season, the Jets find themselves on the brink of an early exit from the Stanley Cup Playoffs ahead of Game 5 at Canada Life Centre in Winnipeg on Tuesday (9:30 p.m. ET; CBC, TVAS, SNW, ALT, ESPN).
“The problems are self-inflicted,” Jets coach Rick Bowness said after a 5-1 loss to the Colorado Avalanche in Game 4 of the Western Conference First Round on Sunday.
“Want to take penalties? Want to play a three-quarter ice game? You're playing right into their hands. Our issues are self-inflicted. You saw us play the right way for 10 minutes in the second half of the first period. You take four penalties, you turn the puck over, that's exactly how they want to play. The issues are self-inflicted.”
Forward Mark Scheifele has repeatedly said that the Avalanche have made adjustments from their three regular-season meetings, all of which the Jets won, and Winnipeg hasn’t.
“They're a fast team. They keep you on your toes and clearly they've made those adjustments from the regular season, and we just let that get away from us and lost our composure a little bit in that second period and it cost us,” Scheifele said.
Perhaps it was apropos that the postgame comments came up more than once because the same problems arose for the Jets in Game 4 as in Game 3. For the second consecutive game, the Jets committed too many penalties in one period. On Sunday, the Avalanche got four power plays in the second period after getting five in the third in Game 3. The result was the same: once again, the Avalanche scored two power-play goals to break open a close game and take control.
Sure, the Jets missed defenseman Brenden Dillon, who sustained an injury to his left hand in a scrum after the Jets’ 6-2 loss to the Avalanche in Game 3 on Friday. But much of what the Avalanche did against the Jets on Sunday happened with Dillon in the lineup the previous game.
Asked how close the Jets are to playing their best game, forward Nino Niederreiter said, “very far.”
“We always have some stretches where we play very well, and then we get stretches where we don’t play the way we should be playing,” he said. “They came out better out of the gates than we did and that’s something we need to change.”