Just In: Fate, I keep doing things at the right time in the right place Jets player brags
Fate hands Jets a kernel of hope
And it may have changed the course of a floundering team’s season. The twist of fate, in this case, was a bug.
What if Winnipeg Jets forward Tyler Toffoli hadn’t caught that bug and had been able to play against the LA Kings on Monday? We know one thing: Cole Perfetti wouldn’t have played. 
Head coach Rick Bowness told us that on Monday morning. The rest, we’ll never know for sure.
Instead, Perfetti found himself doing the right thing in the right place at the right time to open the scoring in the first period, just his second goal since the first week of January, an agonizing stretch of 27 games where he was in and out of the lineup.
You could almost see the weight fall off those slender shoulders.
And when Perfetti fired a laser shot for the game-winner in the third – from virtually the same spot he’d been wiring shot after shot off the bar and into an empty net during the morning skate – you could almost see the young man grow.
“I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t easy,” Perfetti said of the last few months. “I just tried to come to work every day with a positive mindset and be a good teammate. If an opportunity presented itself, I just wanted to be ready.
“An opportunity came, and I just tried whatever I could to seize the moment.”
He had wondered, though, if that moment would ever come.
For half of his team’s previous 16 games and six of the last nine, Perfetti had been scratched from the lineup in favour of someone else.
When he was playing, he was often getting fourth-line minutes, not exactly where someone picked 10th overall in the NHL draft should be. Known for a smile that’s hard to come by, Perfetti had no reason to.
That Mr. Serious look is a reflection of how hard the Whitby, Ont., product is on himself. “The last 25 games has been a roller-coaster,” he acknowledged.
“He’s been working really hard,” head coach Rick Bowness said. “The coaches have been spending a lot of time with him. I did tell him, ‘Listen, when you get back in, we’re going to give you more time with the top six.’ That’s more his game, so he took full advantage of it.”
When Perfetti found out he’d be in for the ailing Toffoli, though, he told his new linemates he was going to play a little like a fourth-liner.
He was going to keep it simple, he said to Sean Monahan and Rick Bowness before the game. “I am not going to try to overdo things,” is how he put it. “Just go to the net, while trying to open some ice for you and letting you make some plays. It worked and we created lots and scored a lot.”
They were on the ice for all four Winnipeg goals, Monahan getting one, too, Perfetti setting up Josh Morrissey for the other.
Of course, focusing on the goals would feed into the very problem that’s been plaguing this team: thinking offence, first.
And that’s where Perfetti still forces his coach to think twice about his status. His line was on the ice for the second and third Los Angeles goals, with Perfetti in position, on both, to have potentially prevented them with some more effective checking.
“I would have liked a couple of those back,” he said. “If I can clean that up then those goals don’t go in. We have lots to build off there. We haven’t played together as a line, so that was a good start.”
While the jolt of confidence should last a while for Perfetti, it’ll likely take a little more to get his team fully believing again.
If it becomes two at home against Calgary on Thursday, three in Minnesota on Saturday, then the Jets will start to believe in what they’re doing again.
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