PoMo has been really clear about how much he dislikes the idea of Laine playing with Scheifele and Wheeler. He never gave them even an opportunity. He only threw them under the bus just to show the world that he is "right", when Scheifele was really rusty as he made his comeback after his injury. Was it 1 or even 2 periods he gave to them to gel. You know, he is a really generous guy. The same guy that gave ELL some 30 games and even after that never admitted he was so wrong.
So I am not really expecting to see Laine-Scheifele-Wheeler together, and that's fine. I don't think that would be optimal for the Jets.
If Stastny is lost and if Roslovic is not ready, the only sane option is to reunite Wheeler with Little and Scheifele with Laine. Just toss a coin to decide whether Connor or Ehlers play with Scheifele or Little. They pretty similar players anyway.
That said, I am not positive that Wheeler allows that. And I don't think PoMo has authority over Wheeler.
This is what I could not understand either. Why would a coach be so dead set about a certain line being inadequate when having so little data to make a quality assessment. If anything, it seemed nothing more than an uneducated assumption. I remember that some fans even mentioned that Maurice said this was a bad combination in an interview
before the game where he tried it out for a grand total of two whole periods. This only
after Scheifele had just recovered from the injury and was destined not to look so good in the next/first game (quite far from it in actually). P.Mo seemed to want this experiment just to show how "right" he was when in reality we will never know how they might have gelled with one another. Things like this is why I dislike Maurice. For the record, he did not seem to have any trouble giving tryouts for other top six forwards in this line - Connor, Ehlers and Perreault at least. If he wanted Laine in the second line, why not just come forth and say hey we need to balance up the offensive output?
You are quite right about the lines in case of Stastny not continuing with the team. The ELL won't work, there's no point even to try it. One option would be to switch places between Wheelers and Laine, cause Wheelers is pretty good at doing the heavy lifting that Little needs in order to find time and space to properly be effective offensively. However I seem to recall that even they seemed to struggle together last year. Of course I hope Roslovic is ready, but at this point we simply just cannot know one way or the other. Although common sense would probably say he needs one more year on the wing considering that the Jets are a contender. This might indeed leave Wheelers up for the task where one of the good things would be that then both top lines would without a doubt have line drivers and the team could better utilize Laine's one-timers. At this point we also cannot know how much better Laine is what comes to driving a line, yet regardless w/o a proper playmaker the team would be wasting an offensive weapon while not trying to get the most out of that shooting arsenal. Also as Ippenator mentioned, they should just split Ehlers and Laine cause they're both goal scorers with shoot first mentality and their games look too inconsistent while playing together, which to me seems like the main problem. In the regular season at least Ehlers was able to have good games with Laine as opposed to being shutdown entirely.
Yeah, Wheelers may not like the idea of playing w/o Scheifele and I'm not convinced either that P.Mo actually holds much or any authority over him (same seems to apply to Buff to a lesser extent). Also as long as he has Wheelers good will, he has the locker room and as long as Wheelers is in the prime position, he will continue giving high praises towards Maurice. They seem to feed off from each other in some sense. This also scares me at the same time cause P.Mo might feel he's being cornered and that could potentially open up an avenue to another experience of ELL- with him, you can never be too sure no matter what the history has already taught us. After all lets not forget that this trio was forced some half a season despite of fans, their cousins, grandmas' and probably even household pets saw they were the exact opposite of a perfect match.