No relief for Mark Scheifele's pain

The Jets' alltime goal scorer loses his father, and his team loses a passionate Western Conference Final to Dallas.

“Why you got to be so cold? Why you got to go and cut me like a knife, and put our love on ice?” — Chris Stapleton, “Cold.”

For a while it was hockey’s next Disney movie. Embattled star is preparing for a Western Conference semifinal elimination game. Finds out his father has died. Immediately tells coach he’s playing. On the road, in the second period, he scores his team’s first goal. As the game proceeds, fans of both sides contribute $30,000 in increments of $55, since that’s his jersey number, to the True North Youth Foundation, in his name.

But then hockey reverted to its natural home, the more complicated province that contains real life, a place where 31 of the 32 teams don’t win, where more than 90 percent of the shots don’t go in, where you find concussions and skate cuts and firings and pucks that go double-doink off innocent bystanders and past the goaltender and into the net, where the quality of mercy is indeed strained when it exists at all.

Mark Scheifele, the Winnipeg Jets’ top skater, the seventh pick in the 2011 draft and the alltime goal scorer for the franchise that picked him, found out his father had died on Friday night. Brad had been sick but wasn’t expected to leave so soon. Mark texted coach Scott Arniel and told him he was playing, which didn’t surprise anybody. Then he wound up in front of Dallas goalie Jake Oettinger and tapped the puck through his legs for Winnipeg’s lead.

The Jets were trailing Dallas, 3-2, in the series. But they felt if they could just conjure up this victory, they’d be fine. Game 7 would be at home on Monday, in front of white-clad fans who had stopped going to games for a while. Some were lured back, 996 of them per game to be exact, by a 116-point season, tops in the league. You say no team has done that, won the Presidents Trophy and the Stanley Cup in a full season since the 2008 Red Wings? Sorry. No one in the building can hear you.

Now Scheifele was in position to be the heavy-hearted hero. Dallas did tie it in the third period on a rocket shot by Sam Steel, its fourth-line center. But Winnipeg didn’t mind going to overtime, the ultimate coin flip, especially since Josh Morrissey, its top defenseman, had limped off with a knee injury.

Then Scheifele, near the Dallas blue line, wound up and fired a shot and heard the most sickening sound possible. His stick had broken. Steel scooped the puck and was zooming in for a breakaway. Amid the mad noise, Schiefele sprinted back and apprehended Steel before he could get a shot off. It was a tripping penalty that he had to take. The only question was whether it should have been a penalty shot, as the Stars insisted. It wasn’t, and Scheifele went to the penalty box and watched the Stars and Jets while away the final 14 seconds of the period.

When the music resumed, Scheifele returned to the box, and that’s where he was when Tyler Seguin saw a puck headed to the space behind goalie Connor Hellebuyck. Seguin got there without anyone noticing and immediately fired a pass to defenseman Thomas Harley, who shot it immediately, low and in the left corner. Goal, set, match and series. Dallas had won, 2-1, and Scheifele, finally overcome by the day, bowed his head in the box. Final insult: Harley also wears No. 55.

It was the only penalty of the game. Had the officials called a penalty shot, with Steel against Hellebuyck, the Jets likely would have profited. Penalty shots used to seem automatic, but with all the shootouts in the NHL, the goalies are accustomed to one-on-one. And Hellebuyck, the best goalie in the league all season, was on a high. In this game alone he stopped 18 high-danger chances at even strength. The winner was 6-on-5. Had Hellebuyck had turned away Steel on a penalty shot, there would have been no power play.

NHL players treat each other shamefully on the ice. In Game 5, Dallas’ Jamie Benn abjectly floored Scheifele with a left hand. But they come together in hard times like no other group. During the traditional post-series handshake, Benn hugged Scheifele for a long time, and the other Stars did, too.

Scheifele had 11 game-winning goals this season, most in the league. His 39 goals and 87 points were career highs. For the ninth consecutive year he averaged more than 20 minutes per game. Jets’ fans had fretted about the wandering eyes of their top players. They still remember when the original Jets, now the Phoenix Coyotes, were forced to trade Teemu Selanne to Anaheim. They were ecstatic when the Atlanta Thrashers moved north to replace those Jets, but now they wondered if Winnipeg would just be a farm system for the richer clubs. Scheifele and Hellebuyck seemed to ease those fears in 2023 when they signed matching seven-year, $59.5 million deals, both of which began this season.

Scheifele is a seeker. He consulted with Tom Brady’s nutritionist and adopted his no-gluten, no-dairy, anti-inflammatory principles. He modified his weight-lifting program and now prioritizes rest and balance, joining Morrissey for basketball workouts, revisiting his lacrosse and volleyball background. He draws motivation from the way Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby shrink from satisfaction and continue to work for a better tomorrow, and the fact that Team Canada left Scheifele off its Four Nations Cup roster was another motivational droplet. He played junior hockey for Dale Hawerchuk, a Jets legend and a Hall of Famer, and he consults with Adam Oates, another Hall of Famer who serves as a guru for many.

Scheifele is so consumed with the game that Paul Maurice, his Jets’ coach at the time, turned over a pre-game scouting report to him. Schiefele was in his second NHL season. “He’ll make way too much money to coach,” Maurice said, “but he’ll be a great GM.”

Like most teams, the Jets staged a Dad’s Trip every year, and Brad Scheifele was always front and center. “His energy was infectious,” remembered Adam Lowry, the team captain. Brad remembered the living room in Kitchener, Ontario, and the family reaction when the TV showed Mark scoring his first NHL hat trick. “Even the dog was barking,” Brad said.

Until Saturday, the noise around Hellebuyck silenced everything else. He had led the NHL with 47 regular-season wins and eight shutouts. At home in the playoffs he was good, too, with a .955 save percentage against Dallas and a 4-0 record against St. Louis. But in all three games at St. Louis, Arniel had to hook Hellebuyck in favor of Eric Comrie. Going into Saturday and stretching back to last season, Hellebuyck was 0-9 in road playoff games,, giving up five-and-a-half goals with a paltry .831 save percentage. In 2025 those numbers were 0-5, .793.

But the Jets’ overall defense wasn’t traveling well either. Hellebuyck actually had a .800 percentage on high-danger chances, which was better than those of Jordan Binnington, Sergei Bobrovsky, Darcy Kuemper and Joseph Woll. He was sensational Saturday. Oettinger, who openly covets Hellebuyck’s No. 1 goalie spot on Team USA, was one save better.

The Jets returned to Winnipeg with their honor recovered, but their hands were empty, and Scheifele’s sorrow is just beginning. “You want to give him that strength,” Lowry said, in the aftermath. “You want to get that (penalty) kill so bad, but we just couldn’t do it.”

He and Scheifele and Winnipeg got the latest cruel reminder of something everyone in the game has known forever. It’s never been hockey’s job to warm your heart.