How the Winnipeg Jets can save their season (and when you'll know if they've failed)
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Murat Ates
It seems it is simply not Winnipeg's year but if you're looking for signs the players or coaches have given up you won't find them.
The Winnipeg Jets are losing games — so many games — even when they’re playing well. They’re seven points out of the playoffs, with six teams to pass, and tied with Chicago for last in the league. Every desperate moment of success seems to be met with bad fortune, whether it’s Kyle Connor’s diving empty net goal cancelled out by Dylan DeMelo’s cross-checking penalty or a 40-shot night against Edmonton cancelled out by an utter lack of finishing and a giveaway to Max Jones.
It seems that this is simply not Winnipeg’s year.
If you’re looking for signs that the players or coaches have given up, though, you won’t find them.
Connor Hellebuyck just played his seventh game in a row. Connor and Mark Scheifele are averaging over 21 minutes per game, while the entire top line played over 24 minutes against Edmonton on Monday night. Coach Scott Arniel is getting aggressive with in-game management, riding Jonathan Toews’ hot hand in the faceoff circle (until the last faceoff of the third period of Saturday’s game, at least) while limiting other players’ minutes (mostly Cole Perfetti.) Whether or not each individual decision is working, it’s clear Arniel is leaning hard on his real and perceived aces.
His solutions sometimes evoke Will Ferrell’s famous “More Cowbell” sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” where Christopher Walken keeps repeating the same suggested remedy for the recording of “Don’t Fear The Reaper.” But Arniel believes Winnipeg is playing its best hockey in a long time.
“I can’t criticize the effort. I can’t criticize the battle. The opportunities, the game plan that we threw at them against their elite players, all of those things I asked them to do, they did it,” Arniel said after Monday’s 3-1 loss to Edmonton. “We’re not getting points and that’s the most important thing.”
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The players’ effort level is evident, too. You can see it in the team’s structure at five-on-five, in Adam Lowry’s line’s forechecking, diving plays by Dylan Samberg to knock the puck away from Connor McDavid, and the top line’s frenetic attempts to drive the team’s offence almost every single night.
Effort is unlikely to be the problem — at least until Winnipeg runs out of runway. The Jets are on pace to become just the fifth team in NHL history to miss the playoffs the season after winning the President’s Trophy. There may come a time when they quit on each other, start tuning out their coach or start cheating the game. Until that day comes, the problem is simple: Winnipeg isn’t good enough.
How does it get good enough?
If this is meant to be a serious playoff season, here’s what needs to happen — and when GM Kevin Cheveldayoff should act if none of them come to pass.
Adam Lowry, Cole Perfetti, and improvement from within
Winnipeg has played two strong games since the NHL’s holiday break, but that’s the exception for the Jets this season — not the rule.
The Jets aren’t in position to miss the playoffs because of bad luck, they’ve earned their struggles in real time. It’s easy to find lowlight reels that cost Winnipeg points, whether it was Lowry’s performance against Utah in OT or DeMelo’s penalty combined with his struggles with Kirill Kaprizov against Minnesota. They deserve credit for outshooting Edmonton 42-20 but would have more than one win in their last 10 games played if that kind of shot clock was their norm.
Zoom in and Winnipeg is not among the worst few teams in the NHL in terms of talent.
Even in this dismal season, the Jets are 21st in five-on-five shot attempts. They’re in the bottom 10 in expected goals, regardless of which public model you use, but they’re backstopped by Hellebuyck. This stops some of those extra scoring chances from turning into real goals: Winnipeg has the 16th-best share of real goals at five-on-five. Its special teams are mid-tier, too: Winnipeg’s power play is ranked 13th and its penalty kill is ranked 18th. These are the signs of a team more likely to claw upwards to a mediocre finish than draft Gavin McKenna this June.
A big part of the problem is that good players are playing poorly.
A list of players on pace for less than half of their scoring rate from last season includes Lowry, Vladislav Namestnikov, and Perfetti. That’s half of Winnipeg’s middle-six forwards, and doesn’t include Toews or Gustav Nyquist, who are each on pace to produce the worst offensive totals of their careers. Nikolaj Ehlers’ absence sucks a lot of offence out of the roster — and may be responsible for most of Namestnikov and Perfetti’s steps backward — but it’s not enough to explain the desolation by itself.
Lowry’s struggles since his return from hip surgery were predictable. Credit to him for owning his overtime mistake against Utah, but Lowry is meant to be a shutdown centre capable of winning his minutes against top players. He’s also meant to be able to chip in 30-40 points this season, but has not made it to the most dangerous areas of the ice with any consistency. NHL Edge data shows Lowry got nearly twice as many shots from the low slot last season compared to what he’s on pace for right now.
Perfetti’s struggles are more of a surprise. Losing a play-driver like Ehlers hurts; as confusing as Ehlers can be to play with, he’s a top point producer at even strength because he’s so good at getting the puck from one end of the ice to the other and breaking coverage with his speed. Perfetti misses that now — he’s not a puck transporter in the same sense — and he’s finishing only 5.6 percent of his shots, which is almost exactly half of his career average. Winnipeg desperately needs Perfetti’s missing offence.
Why pick on those two players? They’ve got better recent track records than the other forwards who are struggling.
Help in the middle six
Toews’ best-case scenario was a second-line centre whose hockey IQ helped Perfetti in ways that Ehlers didn’t. Instead, his faceoff assist on Scheifele’s goal against Minnesota was his first point since November. He’s on pace for 22 points: the worst offensive season of his career and the worst season by a Jets second-line centre in the 2.0 era. Winnipeg has recently reduced Toews’ minutes, but he’s still fourth among Jets forwards in ice time and ice time per game while playing on the second power play unit. Toews’ best-case scenario has not come to fruition; Arniel’s summertime joke about Toews not being a fourth-line centre has aged poorly.
The only way to improve Winnipeg’s middle-six — dominant last season, dominated now — is for play-drivers and scorers to re-emerge. Lowry and Perfetti have shown the ability before but are well off their previous production rates now. They need Lowry, Tanner Pearson, and Morgan Barron’s flow-of-play dominance against Edmonton to be their new normal. If Arniel goes back to the Perfetti, Toews, and Alex Iafallo combination that ended that game, their flow-of-play dominance (in the smallest available sample) needs to be their new normal, too.
Realistically, Winnipeg needs more help than that. Namestnikov doesn’t have a point in December and isn’t creating many scoring chances. Nyquist has yet to score a goal for Winnipeg and has averaged one assist a month since November. Nino Niederreiter’s hot start dried up, but he’s still one of only four forwards to have scored more than DeMelo’s 13 points so far this season.
If Winnipeg routinely outshot teams 42-20, you’d believe the dam was about to break. Lowry says he can see it coming, even on a team that’s won four times in its last 20 tries.
“We look at the contributions of certain guys in this room and what they’ve done in the past, they have long track records of producing offensively, good secondary rates. I think the chances, the posts, the looks we have, eventually the dam’s going to break and you’re going to get them, and then it seems like scoring comes in bunches.”
Less cowbell
Winnipeg is tied for the fewest points in the NHL and its solutions are mostly “do more of the same.” The Jets have won four times in their last 20 games and the two pillars of its top line — the only line that’s scoring, mind you — are intact. It’s hard to believe that Scheifele and Connor will earn over $20 million between them next season and aren’t good enough to drive two separate lines.
There is also a growing sentiment among Jets fans that Winnipeg should call somebody up from Manitoba, but Winnipeg has traded away too much draft capital and hit too few draft day home runs for the Moose to be well-stocked with NHL scorers. Walker Duehr and David Gustafsson are unlikely to hurt — and fans would be placated that the Jets were trying something — but Winnipeg’s top offensive prospects, Brayden Yager, Brad Lambert, Nikita Chibrikov, and Colby Barlow, are scoring less at the AHL level than most Jets whose jobs they’d be taking at the NHL level.
So when’s the sell-off?
When Cheveldayoff spoke to media at Toews’ unveiling in July, he talked about opportunity — for Toews, Nyquist, Pearson, and more. He responded to a question about the loss in team speed by citing Brad Lambert’s NHL potential. Half a season later and it seems as though none of Cheveldayoff’s offseason bets have worked.
Cheveldayoff has typically done a good job of reading the room, so to speak, when it comes to the NHL trade deadline. He adds when the team is competitive; often, this has meant sending first-round picks away for second-line centre help. Last season, he traded two second-round picks and a fourth-round pick for Luke Schenn and Brandon Tanev. Based on the standings, it seems probable that Winnipeg will hope for similar prices when it sells later this season.
The biggest reason to sell early would be to try to stay in last place, with top pick McKenna in mind, but Cheveldayoff will wait. His Jets face long odds to make the playoffs, but he’s committed to the 15-18-4 team he’s built and will almost certainly want to make it to the Olympic break before trying to recoup assets for his pending free agents.
If Winnipeg gets out of the Olympic break without realistic playoff hopes, then Cheveldayoff needs to commit to the lost season. His players aren’t cheating him, despite the total lack of firepower on the roster — nor are they cheating his coach — but there’s still time for both of those things to change.
He needs to be able to sell winning or a plan towards it. Nearly halfway through the season, his team is peddling hope.
“Just keep doing what we’re doing. Hopefully we can score some goals and we can get some points,” Arniel said.