The Jets' five games were seen as a harsh but good warning

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Hoping it's all behind them, the Winnipeg Jets, who look to the future with a cushion of victory separating the past and the present, saw their recent five-game slide as an opportunity to learn.

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Lesson?

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They cannot allow standard deviation.

“I'm not going to sit here and say I'm happy that we've lost five in a row,” Nikolaj Ehlers said Monday after practice at the team's practice facility. “We want to win games. We want to play well.

“But when you get away from a certain way that you've been playing and you've been playing really well, and you start to get away from it, and then you go into a five-game slump, that tells you that you're wrong.”

Ehlers didn't feel panicked during the slide. Even in the midst of it, no one was to be seen.

The team scored four goals and failed to score in those five games alone. They all thought it would come back at some point.

Ehlers' on-ice performance to open Mark Scheifele's scoring streak in the Jets' 2-1 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday was a key performance for a team that needs to feel good again.

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“You score the first goal in a game after losing five in a row, you feel a little bit of pressure, like, 'OK, we don't need to look for a goal now, we've got one,'” Ehlers said.

A regrouping team has helped, leading them to 30 wins and first place in the standings before the slide.

“There are always tough warnings to get back on track during the season,” head coach Rick Bowness said.

If that one guy tried to force a few plays into one game, the next there were three, and by the fourth or fifth game — see last Thursday's first period in Philadelphia — the structure was completely unrecognizable.

“We've got to realize we've got to double down on our structure and our style of play, and obviously we've struggled when we've gone away from that,” veteran linebacker Dylan DeMelo said.

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“It's a good reminder for us lately.”

The fan base has seen the team return to what it witnessed last season, right around the time the epic slump began.

The team does not like to talk much about last year. That case is closed.

Because? Not because it's an understandable pain point. It is incomparable in their eyes.

“This year is completely different, we have a completely different team,” Ehlers said. “Every year it changes. Yes, you have key pieces on your team that are six, seven, eight, nine years old. But when you bring in new guys, it creates a new team atmosphere.”

Another change, as Bowness noted Monday, is that their relative performance has changed.

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“The difference between this year and last year is the comparison with this year,” he said. “It's not like they used to play.”

Ehler agreed.

“We showed everyone and ourselves what we can do when we play as a team,” he said.

It's a standard, and the team knows it's lacking, and more importantly, why they did it.

THINKING THE POWER GAME

Speaking about Winnipeg's strong performance on Monday, Ehlers turned the calendar back to his rookie season.

In the 2015-16 campaign, he went through a miserable 13-game stretch when the Jets landed in San Jose on a night in early January.

“I slid one into the empty net,” he said. “It's an empty line, you know what I mean? There is no one around. But then “boom” I was walking again.

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In the next 11 games, he scored six times.

His point? He only gets one. And it doesn't matter how it is evaluated.

Only one was a tough ask for a team that had scored twice in their last 37 attempts.

The Jets, ranked 26th on the power play, haven't hit an extra man in seven games, going 0-for-22.

Using Winnipeg's trip to Pittsburgh last week as an example — the Penguins' two goals were on a power play and came off pucks and some rebounding — Ehlers said the bounce was deserved because they held on. .

“Recently, we have done enough to meet the target,” he said. “Now, it's just a matter of getting it out of line.”

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