LAS VEGAS — The Wet Wheeler incident from Game 3 of the Western Conference final drew an appropriate response from the captain of the Winnipeg Jets.
“This league’s getting weird.,” Blake Wheeler said Friday, ahead of Game 4 between the Jets and Vegas Golden Knights.
In case you missed it, during a scrum in the second period of Game 3, Golden Knights goalie Marc-Andre Fleury reached over and tickled the inside of Wheeler’s ear. Some people compared it to the licking incidents involving Brad Marchand of the Boston Bruins earlier in the playoffs, but this seemed more playful.
So was Wheeler’s response.
“I didn’t clean my ears that day so the joke’s on him,” Wheeler said.
“I had no idea it happened. At breakfast yesterday, somebody showed it to me.
“It doesn’t bother me. I thought it was funny. Like I said, things just keep getting weird.”
Apparently, Fleury, who was outstanding in the Game 3 Vegas win, found it humourous as well.
“I did that?” he said. “There’s cameras everywhere.
“I was just sitting there, and people, they were fighting. And trying to have a little smile by myself. That was it.”
UNCONVENTIONAL FLEURY FRUSTRATES
Speaking of Fleury, his 33-save performance — 15 of them were on high-danger chances — was a huge part of Vegas getting an upper hand in the series.
The 33-year-old has been ridiculously good throughout these playoffs, putting up a 1.70 goals against average and .945 save percentage, both well above his career numbers for both playoffs and regular season.
He’s unconventional and acrobatic, but ahead of Game 4, the Jets still believed they can get to him.
So, do they come at it with creative ways to beat Fleury or is just about putting as many shots as possible toward the net and creating traffic in front of him?
“Keep shooting, keep getting at it,” Jets winger Mathieu Perreault said. “I missed a glorious chance last game where he was laying on his stomach and it hit his pad. We’ve just got to keep going and eventually all those things are going to bounce our way.”
While most NHL goaltenders play similar styles, using their big frames to square to the puck and holding their positions, Fleury’s style seems to change all the time, which sometimes makes him hard to figure out.
“His style is a bit different,” Jets centre Bryan Little said. “A couple of the saves he’s making — on our line, particularly — you don’t see goalies do that much. I came down on him on a breakaway, and he completely went sideways. It kind of threw me off.
“He’s a guy who, when you think you have him beat — when he looks like he’s down and out — he manages to get a piece of it. It’s really important that we get a lot of traffic in front of him and have guys around him for those second and third chances.”
BUFF’S BRUTE STRENGTH
Other than Fleury’s ear tickle on Wheeler, likely the most watched clip from Game 3 shows Jets defenceman Dustin Byfuglien yanking two Vegas players out of a scrum and dragging them, by the collars, along the ground like sacks of potatoes.
It was another display of the unbelievable strength of Byfuglien, who basically broke up the scrum all by himself, by pulling Tomas Nosek and Colin Miller out of the pile.
Nosek was asked if he’s ever had something like that happen to him before.
“No, probably not,” he said, with a laugh.
“When I saw the replay, it was like 5 or 6 people in the scrum. He pretty much pulled everyone off. I was laughing when I watched it.”
Nosek, of course, wasn’t particularly happy about being manhandled that way and was eager to engage whoever grabbed him. At least until he saw who it was.
“Yeah, he’s a big guy,” Nosek said.
“If somebody grabs you from behind like this, you stand up, you look at them. He was calm. So that was pretty much it.”
ROSLOVIC SHOWS WELL
With Nikolaj Ehlers sick for Game 3, the Jets inserted rookie Jack Roslovic into the lineup and coach Paul Maurice was impressed with his work.
Roslovic played 11:30 on a line with Bryan Little and Mathieu Perreault, had one shot on goal, one shot attempts and was minus-1.
Those aren’t exactly numbers to write home about but Maurice saw other things in his game that pleased him.
“He was on the puck and fast,” Maurice said. “That’s the player he’s going to become. The game you saw is what he can do. Younger players have a wider band of consistency in their game. They don’t want to make mistakes. For lack of a better term, you’ve kind of got to beat it out of them that, ‘You’ve got a game that you can play and we want it now, not three years from now. Take all the fear out of your game. You compete on pucks, and you can make plays.’ So he brought all of that into the game. He played a fantastic game.”
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