Maurice eager to meet playoff expectations with Jets

WINNIPEG -- He's sleeping better, a welcome discovery for Winnipeg Jets coach Paul Maurice as he heads into uncharted territory for the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
The Jets play the Minnesota Wild in the Western Conference First Round, with Game 1 at Bell MTS Place on Wednesday (7 p.m. ET; SN, CNBC, TVAS).
Maurice, in his 20 NHL seasons, has 648 wins (648-589-111 with 99 ties), tied with Alain Vigneault and Ron Wilson for 10th most all-time among coaches. He has been to the Stanley Cup Final; the Carolina Hurricanes lost to the Detroit Red Wings in five games in 2002.

RELATED: [Complete Winnipeg Jets vs. Minnesota Wild series coverage]
But until this season, his fourth full season in Winnipeg, he had never reached 100 points.
The Jets (52-20-10, 114 points), finished second in the Central Division, Western Conference and League standings, three points behind the Nashville Predators.
It's a 27-point improvement on last season, when the Jets (40-35-7, 87 points) missed the playoffs, seven points behind the Predators, who were the second wild card in the West and went all the way to the Cup Final.
"The truth is, you sleep better," Maurice said about this season. "You have fewer nights where you're up all night trying to fix a problem you don't know how to fix, trying to get to a different place."
Maurice, 51, was hired by the Jets on Jan. 12, 2014. General manager Kevin Cheveldayoff and Jets ownership gave Maurice the option to leave after that season if he didn't want to stay with the Jets.
He stayed. It's easy to see why.

"From the very first conversation I had with Kevin, exactly what he said is exactly what's happened," Maurice said. "He's never wavered from it. Ever. He said, 'I want you to come in, put some structure into this team and we need to see what we have in terms of veterans.'
"And then he said, 'Paul, we're going to get really young really fast, but we think we'll be able to stock this team with really good young players.' Look at the draft-pick run they're on here with first-round picks alone. They've done exactly that."
The Jets are the only NHL team with its first pick from the first round of each draft from 2011 to 2016 in the lineup, and it's an impressive list: forward Mark Scheifele (No. 7, 2011), defensemen Jacob Trouba (No. 9. 2012) and Josh Morrissey (No. 13, 2013), and forwards Nikolaj Ehlers (No. 9, 2014), Kyle Connor (No. 17, 2015) and Patrik Laine (No. 2, 2016).
"Probably thought it would have taken a little bit longer," Maurice said. "They've all covered more distance than I thought you would normally expect young players to cover in a shorter period of time. I thought it would still be another year, that this year we would be really tight to the line, especially in this division."
Maurice said it would be arrogant to claim he knew how the draft-and-develop plan would turn out, and when. But he admitted there was one other reason he wanted to try.
"I thought there's a better chance for a home run here, a grand slam," he said. "So if this was it, this was the last run, I wanted to make sure I at least got one pitch with the bases loaded.
"I also wanted to be a part of building it, feeling like you want to be a piece of that. I like Mark (Chipman, Jets executive chairman) and Kevin, and I thought if I'm going to go all-in, I'll go all-in with these guys."
Similar thinking was important, but Maurice has also been a fit with the Jets because he has made himself a Winnipegger. That is currency in the Prairie City, the NHL's smallest market.
"I knew when I got here that Winnipeg was my kind of place," he said. "And my family and my three kids would fit here."
Maurice said the schools for his kids have been "awesome," though he chastised himself for uprooting his family so much.
"My daughter (Sydney) went to three high schools and that should be against the law for a father to do that," he said.
Wherever he has turned since arriving, Maurice and his wife Michelle, have found a caring community that resonates with their past.
"When I went fishing down at Lake of the Woods the last two summers, there may not be a more beautiful place in the world," he said. "Spectacular. The people are like us. The people I've met in this area are kind of like the guys I went to high school with, like my brothers. It's a really good place to live. People are great.

"It's nice to work in an area where what you do is appreciated. I don't mean my job, I mean the game. I don't have to explain the game to anybody. I loved living in North Carolina. That was fun. But the passion for the sport in Canada makes working here special."
The passion comes in all varieties, including displeasure and criticism in the previous two seasons when the progress of the build wasn't fast enough for some. Maurice called that kind of passion both welcome and essential.
"The noise about what things weren't going right or what players should have been in the lineup instead of others, that's a really important part of all this," he said. "You have to have that. You need people calling into the call-in shows and saying, 'Paul Maurice is a buffoon because my favorite player isn't getting enough ice time.' That has to be there and it's not as negative here as you think."
The more personal fan feedback has been mostly positive, Maurice said.
"Not through the radio, but at Tim Horton's or Starbucks," he said. "It's because people understood what we're doing, what we're trying to do."
It has led to more new ground for Maurice; in his previous five trips to the playoffs (his series record is 5-5), he said he has never coached a favored team.
"Never went into one where it was remotely close," he said.
The Jets had 114 points, the Wild 101. It's a new kind of playoff pressure for Maurice.
"The smart guys take pressure of their team and deflect it," he said. "But any team that's been good has dealt with it. All of a sudden, everybody's going to have an opinion on why we're great, and yet we haven't won a playoff game. I'm aware we're going to have to navigate this a little bit, but we've pointed ourselves in that direction, so we can't [whine] and complain when we get there, 'What's all this media attention?' "
The plan, the fit, these are the central threads to Maurice's story in Winnipeg. His one-day-at-a-time-only focus has permeated his team, but it doesn't mean he's oblivious to the bigger picture.
"The enjoyment of the playoffs for me is the thing that … they always say coaches need to get fired to recharge their batteries," he said. "For guys like me, having coached the teams I have, you need to be in the playoffs to charge your batteries because you realize how much fun it is."