Before the Jets hit the ice this morning at the hockey for all centre on day 12 of training camp the team announced that they have placed five players on waivers for purposes of assignment to the Moose. That move brought the number of players in camp to 35.
Once skate got underway at 11 AM there were a few players missing as both Kyle Connor and Gabe Vilardi were missing for a second straight day as per Ken Wiebe of the Winnipeg Free Press who reported that the lines and D pairs looked as follows:
Iafallo-Scheifele-Namestnikov
Ehlers-Perfetti-Niederreiter
Barron-Lowry-Appleton
Viel-Kupari-Ford
Gustafsson and Jonsson-Fjallby mixing in
Morrissey-DeMelo
Dillon-Pionk
Samberg-Schmidt
Stanley-Heinola
Hellebuyck
Brossoit
Delia
He added that Nate Schmidt was in a non-contact uniform.
On the other ice surface Ken indicated were Kyle Capobianco, Declan Chisholm, Chaz Lucius, Colby Barlow and Wyatt Bongiovanni who are dealing with bumps/bruises (or recovering from illness in the case of Barlow).
Jets bench boss Rick Bowness provided health updates saying none of Kyle Connor, Gabe Vilardi, Nikolaj Ehlers and Nate Schmidt will play tomorrow night in Calgary.
He was asked about the team placing players like Jansen Harkins and Dominic Toninato on waivers.
“Listen those are tough but we can’t keep everybody. We’ve got to give some guys another game. If we had more games then they’d be playing because they both had good camps. When we told them today, we’re not disappointed in them at all but we’re running out of time, we’re running out of games. We got to get our practice numbers down so we can keep the tempo up, we don’t have guys standing around all day. Those are tough calls but they both had very, very good camps. Not displeased at all. Just looking at other guys at this point.”
When asked if he wanted to see them go down to the Moose and dominate he said his message to them is:
“Go down and play like you did here and they’ll be back. With injuries and everything else. They were both used last year and they’ll both see some games this year. With the schedule and the travel and the injuries, we expect them to be dominate players down there and when we need help, injuries or we want to change things up, those are the first two guys we should be hearing about.”
Of course the question is whether they make it down to the minors. We will know at 1 PM CDT on Monday if any of the five players including Harkins and Toninato get claimed by another NHL club.
The Jets will have a morning skate at 10 AM at the hockey for all centre before they take off for Calgary. Puck drop is at 8 PM CDT and the game will be streamed on the Jets website.
