The day began with the Illegal Curve Hockey Show which spent two hours discussing the first 10 days of Jets training camp. We looked at the battles for 13th forward and 7/8 spots on the backend, Parker Ford gaining notice at camp, Ville Heinola’s strong training camp, streamlining the groups to get closer to the opening night roster and took a look at The Athletic’s Jets 2023-24 season preview. We were joined by Sean Reynolds of Sportsnet and Craig Button of TSN.
The Jets began the morning by dividing up into two groups with a veteran group 1 skating at noon and the less veteran group 2 skating at 2 pm.
It was notable that Parker Ford, Axel Jonsson-Fjallby and Jeffrey Viel were part of group 1 while Jansen Harkins and Dominic Toninato were part of group 2.
Missing from the morning skate as per Scott Billeck of the Winnipeg Sun were Kyle Connor and Gabe Vilardi while Nate Schmidt was taking part in a yellow, non-contact uniform. As per Scott here were the lines and D pairs.
Iafallo-Scheifele-Namestnikov
Ehlers-Perfetti-Niederreiter
Barron-Lowry-Appleton
Ford-Kupari-AJF
Gustafsson and Viel rotating in.
Morrissey-DeMelo
Dillon-Pionk
These five rotated pairings:
Stanley, Schmidt, Samberg, Heinola, Chisholm.
He also noted that at some point Declan Chisholm left the skate early.
Speaking after skate were Cole Perfetti (watch here) and Ville Heinola here(watch ).
When head coach Rick Bowness spoke following the first group’s skate he volunteered that Kyle Connor and Gabe Vilardi were “sick today so we kept them home. Just fighting some kind of a bug. I’m not even sure if they are going to be able to skate tomorrow and if they don’t skate tomorrow they’re probably not going to play on Monday.”
He was asked about Declan Chisholm leaving early today and indicated “He has a lower-body. He got banged up last night and it started acting up a little bit today so we let him go, let him leave the ice. We got to deal with these nagging injuries now, we don’t want to go and make it a lot worse.”
Sticking with the back end 2022 2nd rounder Elias Salomonsson left the game last night in Ottawa after a big hit along the boards in the first period and did not return to the game. He was listed as part of group 1 but didn’t skate. Asked for an update the bench boss of Winnipeg said “Upper-body. More his neck. Wasn’t a head shot. Was more his neck than anything so he did not skate.”
Last update was on defenceman Nate Schmidt who had been skating with the IR group but as indicated was skating with the main group in the non-contact uniform. When asked about the yellow jersey the coach said “We’re hoping we can get him out of that tomorrow.”.
One of the question Bowness was asked was regarding training camp cuts. The team currently is sitting with 50 players. He didn’t answer the query by Mike McIntyre of the Winnipeg Free Press “We know when we are going to make those moves but the players will hear about it first.”
Their AHL farm team released their training camp schedule this afternoon. The Moose have physicals on Sunday and then on ice gets underway on Monday. It seems likely that the Jets will make some moves later today or tomorrow morning.
For now the schedule for Sunday calls for group 1 to skate at 11 AM with group 2 on the ice at 1 PM.
Update: The Jets announced they had reduced their roster by ten which brings them to 40 left in camp.
