Saturday April 4 - Winnipeg Jets 5 - Vancouver Canucks 4

The Winnipeg Jets came hard out of the gate, establishing the momentum that would lead them to a 5-4 win in a wide-open affair on Saturday at the MTS Centre. Here are your highlights:



After a quiet week, the top line took care of business offensively. Daniel Sedin led the way with a goal and two assists—tying him for ninth place in the NHL scoring race with Steven Stamkos and injured Vladimir Tarasenko at 71 points. Henrik tallied a goal and an assist of his own and is tied with Ryan Getzlaf for 19th at 68 points. And Alex Burrows scored twice to bring his total for the year up to 18 goals—barely half of the 35 goals he scored in his best year in 2009-10, but still a big improvement over last season's snake-bitten five-goal performance.

With a super-skilled assist to set up Henrik's goal, Radim Vrbata is also now one point off his career high, with 61 points.

The news was not so good at the defensive end of the ice.

I thought the difference in the game was not just a desperate Jets team fighting to keep its playoff hopes alive, but also a well-rested one. They'd been sitting at home with three days off while the Canucks were completing a tough four games in six days on the road—and only had a day and a half between their game in Chicago on Thursday and the noon start in Winnipeg on Saturday.

Early games have generally been Vancouver's friend this year—most notably, the 4-1 win in Los Angeles on March 21—but the odds were stacked against the tired Canucks, who started out a step behind the energetic Jets. Despite getting back in the game at 2-2 and answering back quickly when Winnipeg went up 4-2, they ran out of time to engineer another comeback.

The Jets outshot the Canucks 36-30 and schooled 'em in the face-off circle—46 to 26. Nick Bonino actually had a solid day, winning 60 percent of his draws, but Henrik was a dismal 37 percent and Bo Horvat was even worse—4 and 11 for just 27 percent success.

Here's hoping Bo's not losing his magic touch now that he's becoming an old man. Today is his 20th birthday.

Adding newcomer Sven Baertschi to the Horvat line proved—well—interesting in its first look. The group had a few chances over the course of the game, but wasn't quite able to convert. Most noticeably, Baertschi got whistled for two minor penalties in the game—one for holding Drew Stafford late in the first period and the other for a hook on Adam Pardy midway through the second. Both were rather ticky-tack calls during a game when plenty of more violent interactions went unpunished but if Baertschi has a tendency to put himself in position to let the refs make those calls, he's going to have a hard time earning the trust of his coach.

Baertschi finished the night with just over 10 minutes of ice time. In addition to his two penalties, he tallied one shot on goal, one missed shot, a giveaway and two blocks.

Also worth noting—even without Ronalds Kenins, the Canucks out-hit the "heavy" Jets by a margin of 27-25. Baertschi's good friend and fellow Swiss native Luca Sbisa led the way with five hits.

I don't want to read too much into this game. At the end of a tough road trip, it's easy to understand why the Canucks didn't look their best. I'll grant Baertschi the same get-out-of-jail-free card for now, but Vancouver doesn't have much more wiggle-room to experiment or let players grow into the lineup.

In a nutshell, everybody else won on Saturday night. Well, not San Jose, who had crept within three points of the Kings and Flames and were looking to make an unexpected late push, but fell 5-3 to Arizona.

But Calgary overcame a first-minute injury to Karri Ramo and had Jonas Hiller step in to backstop their team to a 4-0 shutout win over Edmonton, while the Kings have brought back their playoff-lockdown style, allowing the Avalanche just 10 shots on goal in a 3-1 win.

Nobody's playoff odds have changed much, but Vancouver's now just two points up on Calgary and three points ahead of Los Angeles. The Kings have a game in hand—and are Vancouver's next opponent, on Monday night. Pretty tough to overstate the importance of that game!

For now, the Canucks are home to spend Easter with their families. No rest for the wicked, though—they're practicing at 11 a.m. today at Rogers Arena.

Though this team has impressed us in many ways this season, it should come as no surprise that they're taking the hard road to securing a playoff spot. They've shown that they can rise to the occasion in tough situations and will need to do that a couple more times in order to lock in their postseason berth.

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