Jets won't change approach for potential Game 5 clincher vs. Wild

WINNIPEG -- The Winnipeg Jets have a chance to eliminate the Minnesota Wild in Game 5 of the Western Conference First Round at Bell MTS Place on Friday (7:30 p.m. ET; USA, SN, TVAS2, FS-N), and coach Paul Maurice wants little or nothing to change in how they approach the game.
The Jets, who lead the best-of-7 series 3-1, have never won a playoff series since entering the NHL as the Atlanta Thrashers in 1999-00, but Maurice has plenty of experience closing out an opponent. As coach of the Carolina Hurricanes, Maurice's teams got to three wins in a series five times and won all five, though not always in the first try. He has a 5-3 record in games when his team has had a chance to eliminate an opponent, so he knows what to expect.

RELATETD: [Complete Jets vs. Wild series coverage]
"Certainly each game has its own feeling, by the number, whether it's (Game) 1 through 7, but the ability to not change your game, not feel like you have to do something different because there's more impact on the game," Maurice said Wednesday when asked what advice he might give the Jets before the game. "We can anticipate a certain style by opponents. Teams that are potentially in their last game, so you know that certainly they'll come with all of their speed as well as they can and we're going to have to be right and ready."
Maurice said in his 20 seasons as an NHL coach, he's found that teams facing elimination can find a freedom in their game, and that if they get down they won't be afraid to start pushing back earlier than usually would.
"So we would be aware of that, but the hockey part of that itself, most importantly, can't change," he said. "The game that you play has to be the same."
Winnipeg's 2-0 win in Game 4, which followed a 6-2 loss in Game 3, saw the Jets return to a faster, sharper game, Maurice said.
"We got right back to fast, and it was on both sides of the puck," Maurice said. "I thought we actually got better as the game went on."

The Jets took a 1-0 lead at 19:32 of the first period on a goal by Mark Scheifele. He scored an empty-net goal with 11 seconds remaining in the third period.
"It's important when you're going into the third period and you have the lead that you have the template of how you want to approach it," Maurice said. "We've never talked about changing things or playing a simpler game all the way through, that's the game that we're playing. But we do talk about trying to score the next goal."
Maurice said the Jets, who didn't fly to Minnesota until the morning of Game 3 because of a snowstorm in the area, looked fresher later in Game 4.
"Certainly defensively in the third, there was not a lot of easy ice to play on. I don't think that we moved the puck as well as we did in Games 1 and 2 and [that] may be true for both teams, but we looked like we hadn't been on a plane in the morning," Maurice said of his team's play in Game 4. "We looked like our pace and our speed was really strong."
Maurice gave no update on the status of forwards Matthieu Perreault (upper body) and Matt Hendricks (lower body), and defensemen Toby Enstrom (lower body), Dmitry Kulikov (back) and Tyler Myers (lower body), who all missed Game 4.
The Jets will not have defenseman Josh Morrissey, who was suspended one game by the NHL Department of Player Safety for cross-checking Minnesota forward Eric Staal in the first period of Game 4.