Writing sports columns for more than 20 years has taught me a thing or two, not the least of which is that I get it wrong once in a while.
There’s a growing pile of evidence, along with his growing pile of goals, suggesting I was wrong about Winnipeg Jets centre Mark Scheifele.
Some might have argued all along that my opinion on No. 55 after last season was a steaming pile of something else. They’re probably smiling, even if it is a little early for an “I told you so.”
For those who don’t recall, I wrote Scheifele should be traded because his indifference towards playing defence was hurting his team more than his offensive prowess was helping it.
“The Jets have a significant mess to clean up, and it starts with the Freedom 55 plan,” is how I put it, after Winnipeg’s season of underachievement.
Scheifele’s selfish-sounding comments in his exit interview, wondering aloud if this backsliding team was best for him, was the stale icing on a cake well past its best-before date.
Fast forward nearly eight months.
Scheifele, at 29, is on pace for the first 50-goal season of his NHL career, while the injury-riddled Jets hold down second place in their division going into their New Year’s Eve tilt in Edmonton.
His hat-trick in Thursday’s 4-2 win over Vancouver gave him 23 goals in 36 games, tied with Alex Ovechkin for seventh in the league.
He’s just six goals shy of the 29 he scored in 67 games last season,
He keeps up this pace and stays healthy, he’ll score 52.
And we thought Kyle Connor would be the player on the half-century watch this season.
Scheifele’s latest outburst, his second hat-trick of the season, seventh of his career, couldn’t have come at a better time, too: the undermanned Jets were desperate for offence after scoring just four times during a three-game slide.
When depleted, your best players have to step up, and Scheifele did.
As importantly, he’s not killing his team with bad checks.
He still won’t cash in a Selke Trophy anytime soon, but at least he’s not a constant liability in his own zone, as he was last year with a team-worst, minus-17 rating. He’s currently a minus-1.
Of the Jets’ 36 games, Scheifele has been even or a plus in 23 of them.
That may be an imperfect stat, but it painted a perfectly appropriate picture of Scheifele last season.
How many times was he caught reaching for his check a step too late at the end of a shift, resulting in a goal?
Like his teammates, it seems he took last year personally and showed up for training camp with a block of I’ll show you on his shoulder.
When he’s on, as he was on Thursday, he’s become a force again, looking more like the scoring machine of the 2018 post-season. Without an aversion to his own zone.
“His overall 200-foot game is good,” is how head coach Rick Bowness put it, post-game. “He’s winning a lot of important faceoffs. A night like tonight, he’s looking at me like he wants to be out there. He’s feeling it. He looked at me a couple times and I said, ‘Ok, you go.’
“When the player is feeling it, let them go.”
He can’t just be feeling it once every few games, though.
Bowness is coaxing the good out of Scheifele more nights than not.
You can’t overstate, too, how much better teammates are playing around him in limiting downtown scoring chances, and how much more accountable they’re holding each other.
I guess I got part of last season’s final column right, when I said the Jets needed a hard-ass coach, too. One who tells it like it is and doesn’t shelter players from criticism.
Bowness has done that without wearing a constant snarl, and it’s working.
Nobody has received the message better than Scheifele.
Nobody needed it more.
No. 55 may not be making me eat my words just yet. There’s a lot of hockey to be played, after all, including the most important hockey.
But he’s set the table and handed me a napkin, as he cooks up a pretty impressive season.
Jets sign draft pick Zhilkin
The Russian is coming.
Moscow-born forward Danny Zhilkin, Winnipeg’s third-round pick in this year’s NHL Draft, has signed his entry-level contract.
The three-year deal is worth an average $913,333.
“I am incredibly proud and honoured to sign my first nhl contract with the @NHLJets,” Zhilkin tweeted on Friday. “Thank you to all of my family and friends who have supported me along the way. This is a dream come true, and I cannot wait to get started in Winnipeg!”
In his third season with the Ontario Hockey League’s Guelph Storm, the 19-year-old Zhilkin (6-foot-2, 185 pounds) has 11 goals, 14 assists, in 23 games.
Moving to Canada from Russia with his family when he was nine, Zhilkin suited up for Team Canada at the 2021 World U18 championship and helped his adopted country win the gold medal.
pfriesen@postmedia.com
Twitter: @friesensunmedia
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