GAMEDAY: Blues at Jets

WINNIPEG – For the first time this season the Winnipeg Jets will face a Central Division rival when they host the St. Louis Blues at 7:45 CT tonight at Canada Life Centre.

The Jets will be without head coach Rick Bowness who is taking a leave of absence from the team. Associate coach Scott Arniel will be handling the interim head coaching duties starting with tonight’s divisional battle with the Blues.

Jets captain Adam Lowry took a maintenance day on Monday and was back out on the ice today for the morning skate with his linemates Nino Niederreiter and Mason Appleton.

Alex Iafallo will once again lineup with Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele after joining them midway through the first period in the Alberta capital.

“It was good. They are pretty agile moving pucks down low there so I’m just trying to get open, find spots to get the puck to them,” said Iafallo this morning.

“They’re fast so, just keeping up and you know, pushing the pace.”

Iafallo played in the top six forward group when he was with the Los Angeles Kings and in particular, with Anze Kopitar and Dustin Brown.

“Alex has a pretty good idea of what he needs to do with it,” said Arniel on Monday.

“Knows what Scheifele and KC are doing. Has experience up there. We will just keep it as is right now.” 

PROJECTED LINE-UP

Connor-Scheifele-Iafallo

Perfetti-Namestnikov-Ehlers

Niederreiter-Lowry-Appleton

Barron-Kupari-Gustafsson

Morrissey-DeMelo

Dillon-Pionk

Stanley-Samberg

Connor Hellebuyck will start in goal tonight.

PK IMPROVEMENTS

Saturday the Jets surrendered another power play goal against one of the best units in the National Hockey League in the Oilers. But to the PK’s credit, they really buckled down and ended the night killing three of four Edmonton man advantages.

“We just felt we knew how dangerous Edmonton could be, we’ve seen it in the past and we just felt we had to get on them a little bit more and I thought we did a good job of that,” said Arniel of the penalty kill.

“Try to get down there and not give them second and third chances. But at the end of day, I know we gave up one early, but I thought the second period we did a great job of limiting Edmonton and kind of limiting their movement, their motion that they like to get into.

MORRISSEY IN MID-SEASON FORM

Jets defenceman Josh Morrissey played one of his best games of the young season in Edmonton the other night with a goal and an assist with over 27 minutes of ice time. The big challenge coming in was building off a career season in 22-23 and five games in, he has done just that.

“Not only did he score a goal and make a play on the overtime goal, he had some great other looks for him, but he went against (Connor) McDavid and (Leon) Draisaitl the whole game, and that’s another challenge,” said Arniel.

“That’s the thing we talked about this summer. You want to go to the next level, we know what you can do offensively, it’s also doing it defensively. That’s the challenge, that he wants to be able to do it against the best player every night.”