It was in the minutes after the Winnipeg Jets had eliminated the Minnesota Wild in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs when I came across Jets chairman Mark Chipman.
There was still bedlam in the stands, fans celebrating a victory that was a long time coming in Winnipeg, and, to a lesser extent, bedlam in the press box, as reporters rushed to do their post-game thing.
“It’s a start,” I casually said to Chipman, over the din of the crowd.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a start.”
The analogy may sound a little corny, but this moment, this series, feels a bit like a passage, of sorts. A coming of age. Like a person moving into adulthood.
This franchise didn’t even have a personality when Chipman adopted it down in Atlanta and brought it home, to hockey country.
It’s matured before our eyes, but not without suffering growing pains along the way: forgettable player signings, the hiring and firing of a head coach, one playoff appearance in the first six years.
Today, weighing in at 114 points on the NHL’s regular-season scale, right up there with the big boys, it’s ready to take its first man-steps, playoff beard and all.
“You do take certain steps as a franchise,” Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff told me, Friday. “And when you have a team like we have, you have potential to continue to get better. If we were a band of 36-year-olds, I don’t know how much better we would have gotten. This is the next step for us.”
Cheveldayoff was referring to the youth movement, the rebuilding, that caused some of those growing pains. Pain that forced the GM, the coach, even Chipman, to face some tough questions.
“It goes back to when we did make the playoffs,” Cheveldayoff continued, referencing that four-game flameout in 2015. “And the young guys we had then are drivers on our team, now. They’re players that got some experience. Our veteran players that have stuck with us had that experience, but (they) also see the growth of a Scheifele and a Trouba and a Lowry — and now see that next wave of young players that are contributing on a regular basis.”
Like Nikolaj Ehlers. Kyle Connor. Josh Morrissey. Connor Hellebuyck.
And, of course, Patrik Laine.
But still on the same track, most likely.
“In this game you make your own luck in a lot of respects,” Cheveldayoff said. “But you don’t win the lottery and say you didn’t get lucky. To win a championship, lots of things have to fall into place. You’ve got to get some key bounces along the way.”
Cheveldayoff was reluctant to try to quantify how far this franchise has come in the seven years since it was reborn.
“It’s difficult to quantify,” he said. “Because then you’re putting an absolute measurement on it.”
And this GM abhors absolutes.
Even-keel is his mantra. Whether withstanding those first two awful games of the season or all the injuries that came later – it’s steady as she goes.
“And then when the bell rings and 82 games are done, you look up and you see the results,” he said. “Certainly the results are good. It is the first time, I was just reading here this morning, that all eight (playoff) teams have over 100 points. It’s a competitive, competitive environment.”
Looking at the Jets, the individual picture is a perfect reflection of the big one.
The young talent has grown into men, in the NHL sense. Just like the franchise has grown up.
Time to show the rest of the world what it’s become.
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