The Ides of November seem to be the best time of year for new Minnesota Wild forward Ben Jones. Nearly three years to the day after he made his NHL debut for the Vegas Golden Knights, he got a re-start to his career at hockey’s highest level on Tuesday, cracking the Wild lineup for the first time versus the St. Louis Blues.
In mid-November 2021, Jones got in a home game for Vegas and played a road game in St Louis, so perhaps it was fitting to be back in the vicinity of the Gateway Arch for his first NHL game wearing red and green.
Jones made an impression in the preseason, with two goals in four games for the Wild, and is off to a good start in Iowa with 12 points in 14 games. That helped get him back to the NHL.
“He seems like he has got a little bit of a knack to produce. I think his last two games he has got seven points in Iowa, and coming from training camp I thought he was just like a good two-way player,” Wild coach John Hynes said following the team’s morning skate at the Enterprise Center. “He’s got good hockey sense. He has good attention to detail. You can tell he’s an experienced guy in the pro game.”
With regular forward Mats Zuccarello out for a month, and forward Joel Eriksson Ek missing the team’s last game, the Wild recalled Jones and Devin Shore from the Iowa Wild. Eriksson Ek was good to go on Tuesday in St. Louis. Shore was a healthy scratch, with Jones getting the fourth-line slot.
“I think I feel like I had a pretty good preseason, so they kind of knew about me going into the year,” said Jones, who is from Ontario and signed as a free agent with the Wild on July 1, 2024. “Just building on like I said like I’ve been doing down in Iowa.”
Highway to the danger zone
Legendary Minnesota Duluth coach Mike Sertich, who lost a long battle with cancer over the summer, used to say that a shot on goal is never a bad play. While Hynes is among the myriad coaches who likes to talk about getting pucks to the net, he is more focused lately on producing scoring chances, which are very different from the seemingly harmless shot from the blue line that a goalie can knock down without much challenge.
The statistics show that in Saturday’s 2-1 home loss to Dallas, the Stars nearly doubled the Wild’s shot output (40-23).
The coach felt the game was much less lopsided than those numbers might otherwise indicate.
“I don’t look at shots. I look at chances. I look at danger zone chances, things like that,” Hynes said. “It was a hard-fought game on both teams. They happen to have more shots than us early in the game. But like I said, you have to sometimes play the games (where) maybe a team has more shots than you do.”
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