We open today's reading with Susie Dent's Word Of The Day. That word is “recrudescence,” and it means “the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.” It originates in the 17th century, and lives in the 21st.
With that as our guiding rubric—always trust a brilliant lexicographer from another land to contextualize America's decision to put itself on Santa's Seriously Pissed Off List—let us now turn our attention instead to the best team in the National Hockey League, the profoundly Who The Hell Are They And Why Are They Doing This Winnipeg Jets.
Notably, they're from Canada, which gives them a leg up already.
Their 3-0 victory on Tuesday night over the equally anonymous Utah Hockey Club was the Jets' 12th win in their first 13 games. They have scored the most goals per game and allowed the second-fewest; they have won eight of their games despite allowing the first goal, a power play scoring 44 percent of the time, the second-best save percentage in the league, and essentially dominate all the more sophisticated metrics that we would share with you if we weren't currently gripped with resentment-based paralysis. There is no facet in which they haven’t been dominant.
And for all that, the Jets are powered by not the work of their best players— Kyle Connor, Mark Scheifele, Josh Morrissey, Connor Hellebuyck, household names all—but by the best wishes of the coach of the Eastern Conference's best team, the defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers. To wit:
Paul Maurice coached the Jets twice in his lengthy career, getting fired once and walking away once because in his own words, he wasn't reaching the players any more. A coach taking responsibility for his own loss of effectiveness is a rarity, but to announce it publicly and take the weight for it is almost certainly unprecedented.
But you know what is more than almost certainly unprecedented? Celebrating your own championship by wishing the next one for someone else, as Maurice does above. This makes Maurice a mensch, sure, but when he described himself in the victory parade speech as “an asshole,” he might also have mentioned his powers of manifestation. Maybe he didn’t know that he had the power to create a new juggernaut 2,225 miles away, but here we are.
The Jets are in many ways the oddest historical team in North American sports history. They were birthed in the World Hockey Association, gained relevance by buying Bobby Hull, won three AVCO Cups—the WHA's Stanley Cup, which perfectly explains why the league died a deserved death—survived that league’s evisceration and became the sort of NHL team you immediately and permanently ignore. They lost 11 of their 13 playoff series in Winnipeg and then moved to Arizona, where they lost nine of 12 playoff series. Now they're in Utah and refusing to go on the grid by creating a nickname. Nothing about the Winnipeg Jets is weirder than this: The team currently playing under that name isn’t in the same lineage as the one that previously did.
The existence of these Jets is down to the fact that the Atlanta Thrashers were just as bad an idea as the original Jets. After essentially going broke in 11 years, the Thrashers moved to Winnipeg, renamed themselves the Jets—bold, creative, saves money on letterhead—and … have won three of 10 playoff series, which is if nothing else decently Jets-y of them. The team Paul Maurice declared in his godlike omniscience to be his choice for the next Stanley Cup has, in its bifurcated existence, played 23 playoff series as The Hockey Team From Winnipeg, and won five of those. Their entire history is to be anonymous in ways that the Jacksonville Jaguars can only envy.
Yet here they are, trying quietly to convince the rest of the NHL that they are finally supposed to be taken seriously. Hell, never mind the NHL. Their own town, which has only the CFL Blue Bombers as competition, has the sixth smallest arena in North American pro sports (15,225 seats) and has only sold out one game—their annual match-up against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Canada's Dallas Cowboys. Their win over Utah last night drew only 12,932, which is 700 and change below their average for the year. In other words, even Winnipeg isn't buying Winnipeg yet, and while it might just be Bombers Fever taking effect, or the completely justified expectation of miserably brief playoff failure, this is inarguably no way to treat Paul Maurice's prophetic vision.
But we believe anyway, if only because Maurice made the previously semi-comatose Panthers a league power, and such skill and self-awareness in victory deserves a reward. This is especially true relative to the bumper crop of recent dynastic brand names like the Dodgers, the Celtics, the Chiefs, UConn, and Michigan. So why not the Jets? Hell, they can't surprise us any more than they're surprising themselves by fighting off that old recrudescence every night.
