'Hope and pray he's healthy': enlarged spleen sidelines Jets' Vilardi

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The health problems continue for Winnipeg Jets forward Gabriel Vilardi.

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Head coach Rick Bowness on Friday said Vilardi is out indefinitely with an enlarged spleen.

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The condition was discovered as the Jets were exploring an upper-body injury that originally sidelined the 24-year-old at the end of February.

“At this point there’s no timetable,” Bowness said. “They’re treating it as best they can.”

Vilardi was to miss his eighth straight game Friday night against Anaheim, and won’t join the Jets for their five-game road trip, beginning in Columbus on Sunday.

Among the possible causes of an enlarged spleen are viral infections like mononucleosis, bacterial infections such as endocarditis and other diseases like blood cancers.

Updates from Bowness have at times been murky since Vilardi last played in Dallas, Feb. 29.

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He was expected to join the Jets for their trips to Seattle and Vancouver last weekend, for instance, only to remain in Winnipeg.

“It sucks,” top-line centre Mark Scheifele said of losing his winger again. “All you do is hope and pray that he’s healthy… that he comes back sooner and is 100% healthy.”

Previously, Vilardi missed 20 games due to injury this season, including an early 18-game absence with a knee injury.

“He’s a great kid, and he’s overcome a few injuries in his early career,” Bowness said. “So you hope when this is behind him he gets a chance to get healthy and play consistently. We certainly miss him. He was a big part of the trade last year. And we saw the importance of him on our power play and on our top line when he was given a few games to get his game going.

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“So yeah, you feel for him. He’s disappointed. He’s in good hands here.”

A back problem hampered Vilardi at the end of his time in junior and through the early part of his NHL career in Los Angeles.

He put that in the rear-view mirror last season, scoring a career-high 23 goals with the Kings, despite missing a few weeks with a concussion.

The key component of the summer trade that sent Pierre-Luc Dubois to the Kings, he’s managed 16 goals and 30 points in 38 games this season, usually flanking Scheifele on Winnipeg’s top line.

On again, off again

While the Jets of late have been up one game, down the next, their leading scorer says his team is no different than any other in the NHL.

“Every day you’re searching for consistency, whether it’s in a game or in a stretch of games,” Scheifele said. “Every team wants consistency. Not every game is going to go the way you like, not every stretch of games is going to go the way you like. It’s how you bounce back, how you show your character and what you’re made of.

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“We’re searching for consistency just like every other team.”

Going into Friday, the Jets were coming off an uninspired, 4-2 home-ice loss to Nashville.

That came after a 3-0 shutout of Washington, which followed a 5-0 loss to the Canucks in Vancouver.

One day before that, the Jets were shutting out the Kraken in Seattle, 3-0.

They haven’t won two games in a row since March 2-3 and were just above .500 (11-9-1) in their last 20 games, going into this weekend.

Scheifele was asked if he sees anything in particular at the root of the inconsistency.

“Just part of the game,” he said. “It’s crunch time. There are going to be games that feel good, and some games that aren’t. That’s just the mental battle as well as the physical battle.”

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Calling the dinosaur

Scheifele returned to the lineup for Friday’s game after missing Wednesday’s loss to Nashville due to illness.

“There’s no worse feeling, that’s for sure,” he said, pre-game. “We thought it was all past us but I guess it wasn’t. It hit me halfway through morning skate. I was like, ‘Something’s not right.’ I had to pretty much race off the ice to call the dinosaur. It wasn’t fun.”

Another trade

It was trade deadline day on the farm, Friday, and the Jets used it to ship forward Wyatt Bongiovanni to Ottawa for future considerations.

In his second season with the Manitoba Moose of the AHL, Bongiovanni, 24, had eight goals, seven assists, in 34 games.

He played 56 last year, managing 13 goals and five assists.

The Jets signed the Michigan product out of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where he last put up 16 goals and 18 assists in 42 games.

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