The Winnipeg Jets finished first in the NHL last season, won a playoff round for the first time since 2021, and then named the Stanley Cup as their goal. Now they’ve missed the playoffs altogether, wasting spectacular offence from Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Josh Morrissey — plus one more year of franchise goaltender Connor Hellebuyck’s prime.
The Los Angeles Kings’ win 5-3 in Seattle officially ended Winnipeg’s playoff push before the Jets’ 6-2 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights had the chance. Winnipeg’s playoff miss is a dramatic failure for an aging team focused on winning in the short term.
Here’s where Winnipeg went wrong:
Management failed its 2025 roster review
Winnipeg’s failed 2025-26 season began at last season’s failed trade deadline. The Jets tried but failed to acquire a second-line centre, but Brock Nelson preferred Colorado to Winnipeg. The Avalanche sent New York an impressive package, including Calum Ritchie and a first-round pick, and the Jets pivoted to grit.
Winnipeg spent a second- and a fourth-round pick on Luke Schenn (and another second-round pick on Brandon Tanev), which cost last year’s playoff team a little and this year’s Jets a lot. Tanev didn’t score any points in Winnipeg’s 13 playoff games, while the Jets were outscored 11-3 when Schenn was playing at five-on-five. Winnipeg opted to keep Schenn playing a consistent role on its third pair this season, where he continued to bleed goals against. The Presidents’ Trophy-winning Jets had won their minutes, even with their third pair playing, but this year’s team was outscored 29-16 while Schenn was on the ice.
There may be some intangible value to playing a 36-year-old veteran with two Stanley Cups on his resume, but the Jets cost themselves an inordinate number of breakout passes, helping kill transition offence before it started, to chase that value. Schenn wasn’t the only example of that — and Elias Salomonsson struggled early, by his own admission — but it soon became clear Winnipeg had better options it declined to see.
Winnipeg gets beaten by no-movement clauses in the trade market. It’s not a premier UFA destination. The Jets can’t afford to miss the development of their own top prospects.
Offseason bets were too old and slow for too long to help
Winnipeg opened the 2025-26 season as the oldest and slowest team in the NHL — and yes, we cited this as cause for concern.
Winnipeg lost speedsters Nikolaj Ehlers, Mason Appleton and Rasmus Kupari last offseason, replacing them with Jonathan Toews, Gustav Nyquist, Tanner Pearson and Cole Koepke. Koepke was a success on the Jets’ fourth line, despite a lack of finishing, because he has the work ethic and speed to make himself a pain to play against. The Jets’ other additions were underwhelming.
Toews’ hockey IQ helped him find ways to contribute despite a lack of top-end wheels at this stage in his career. It wasn’t nearly enough to warrant his second-line usage for the first half of the season. Nyquist, 36, has scored one goal all season. Pearson, 33, put up 14 points in 55 games. The Jets didn’t have a route to signing Ehlers — years of secondary usage made his exit more inevitable than shocking — but his career-high, 70-point performance in Carolina equals the 70 Winnipeg has received from Toews, Nyquist, Pearson and Koepke combined.
Scott Arniel’s systems play requires forechecking tenacity and backtracking speed. The disconnect between roster quality and Winnipeg’s route to success was costly.
A half-season lack of secondary scoring hurt the top line, too
Winnipeg flirted with a catastrophe bigger than missing the playoffs for much of the season. On Jan. 8, the team was in last place.
As of that date, Connor, Scheifele, and Gabriel Vilardi had scored 58 goals between them. The other 23 skaters who had dressed for Winnipeg to that point in the season had scored 62 goals combined. The embarrassing secondary scoring stat line had a multitude of causes: Ehlers’ departure, Toews’ slow start, Cole Perfetti’s high ankle sprain, Adam Lowry’s offseason hip surgery, and Arniel’s unwillingness to see if Connor and Scheifele could each drive their own line.
You can’t play half a season with three forwards and one defenceman (Morrissey) producing and expect to survive in the NHL. The Jets didn’t have a lot of options but hurt themselves by only trying one of them: Connor and Scheifele, in various combination, backed by Morrissey.
The numbers aren’t quite as lopsided from Jan. 9 through Winnipeg’s push up the standings to today, not because Winnipeg found better ideas but because Perfetti and Toews came to life: Perfetti’s nine goals and 23 points in 38 games since that date put him on a 50-point-per-82-game pace, while Toews’ pace improved to 35 points per 82 games during this time period.
It’s not nearly enough — and it wore on Connor and Scheifele, too. The best version of those two players win their minutes against any and all competition. The version that functions as the only consistent scorers for half the season started to chase offence and give up goals that erased some of the ones they scored. One might blame coaching for the lack of apparent consequences, but there’s also an angle that asks, ‘What was Arniel supposed to do?’ and comes up empty — aside from splitting Connor and Scheifele altogether. After a certain point, it gets hard to blame the top scorers for defending poorly when they’re driving the offence themselves and the coach keeps giving them minutes.
Winnipeg got a better version of its top line last season when its second and third lines drove results, too. This one got outscored unless Morrissey was also on the ice with them.
The power play cost the Jets 24 goals
The Jets’ power play regressed from No. 1 in the NHL, threatening to establish a new record for efficiency for much of last season, to 24th best this year. The drop-off has cost Winnipeg approximately 24 goals and counting through 80 games.
In a league in which every three goals tends to correspond to roughly 1 standings point, that drop-off alone torched approximately eight points — more than enough to explain the playoffs miss. Had the Jets merely been average — slightly over 20 percent — they’d have scored another five goals and won at least one extra game.
Why so bad, then?
• They’ve spent the least time in the league in the offensive zone.
• They’ve struggled on faceoffs and zone entries relative to the league.
• They’re winning fewer races to the end boards to recover pucks after missed shots.
The top unit responded to Ehlers’ departure by using Toews and Perfetti in his spot, in roughly equal measure. Neither player produced at even half of Ehlers’ power-play scoring rate of 7.6 points per 60 minutes, while all of Connor, Scheifele, Vilardi and Morrissey also saw their point rates decline.
You can’t dominate the league on the power play if you can’t spend time set up and in formation. Ehlers’ departure hurt in terms of puck recoveries, and may have hurt zone entries, too; he was not the Jets’ puck carrier or even a frequent first pass recipient at the offensive line, but his presence would have earned respect from opposing defenders. It’s not enough to explain Davis Payne’s move from magician to mid as the Jets’ power-play coach.
Hellebuyck’s knee scope led to two months of awful goaltending
Connor Hellebuyck missed just under a month of action in late November and early December, shutting himself down to get a procedure done on his knee. Winnipeg went 3-8-1 without him, tying Vancouver for the worst record in the NHL during his absence. The .870 save percentage the Jets got during this time period from Eric Comrie (11 games) and Thomas Milic (three games) was the second-worst in the NHL.
Hellebuyck struggled upon his return, too, posting a 5-10-7 record with Winnipeg heading into the Olympic break. He’ll finish the season with a sub-.900 save percentage and without Vezina Trophy consideration. The only month he finished with a save percentage above .900 was October, when the Jets raced out to a 9-3-0 start. He turns 33 years old this May; he may bounce back, but it may also be time to reconsider 60-game seasons as Hellebuyck’s norm.
The Jets fell short of a .500 points percentage by five points during that stretch — almost enough to close the gap on Los Angeles now.
Utter lack of resilience in close games
Winnipeg gave seven points away in games it led comfortably. Readers should be familiar with the Jets’ second-worst win percentage in games they’ve led after two periods. We’ve highlighted this before, but these are the games that will hurt the most:
• OTL to Minnesota in December: The Jets led 2-1 with 30 seconds left in the third period, but Dylan DeMelo took a cross-checking penalty and the Wild made Winnipeg pay.
• Loss to Toronto after leading 4-1 partway through the second period: The Jets made it to the second intermission with a 4-3 lead, but the Maple Leafs completed their 6-5 comeback win in the third.
• OTL to Vegas after leading 3-2 with 5:04 left in the third period: It looked like Connor’s go-ahead goal would be the difference, but 59 seconds later, the game was tied and the Golden Knights went on to win in overtime.
• Loss to Edmonton after leading 3-1 after the first and 3-2 after the second period: This was the last of 11 straight losses between Dec. 15 and Jan. 8, and another in which Winnipeg led but couldn’t close.
• OTL to Toronto after going up 3-1 early in the third period on Nino Niederreiter’s goal: Once again, the Maple Leafs stormed back, and this time it took until overtime for Toronto to win.
Some of these lost points overlap with Winnipeg’s power-play and goaltending woes, but the unique factor is that the Jets had a win within their reach. The defending in some of these games was atrocious, with top Jets skaters losing track of opposing stars like Connor McDavid with costly regularity. A 7-12 record in overtime and shootouts also hurt.
Coaching staff tried too little before running out of ideas
Connor and Scheifele get referenced a lot — not because they’re drains on Jets productivity, but because they’re people who could be part of solutions Winnipeg did not even try to look for. Heading into Monday’s games, Connor and Scheifele played more minutes together at five-on-five than any other two players in the NHL. That bears repeating: they shared more minutes together than any other two forwards you can think of and every single defence pairing, too.
Arniel once called it a “business partnership.” I don’t know what that means, but going a full season of losing and sometimes last-place hockey without once trying to find out if Connor and Scheifele can drive their own lines — on a team whose secondary scoring was nonexistent — probably cost Winnipeg multiple millions of dollars this spring. The Jets will miss the playoffs. Their two best forwards will score nearly 200 points between them.
What if Connor and Scheifele are so good that Connor-Vilardi-X and Perfetti-Scheifele-X would score more goals than Connor-Scheifele-Vilardi and a second-line centred by 21-point player Adam Lowry?
The Jets may never know.
Hot takes and quick hits
- The Jets have the 20th-ranked prospect pool, according to Scott Wheeler.
- Lowry’s line doesn’t get enough credit for its dominance in 2024-25, but Lowry was a shell of himself after his return from surgery this season.
- Ehlers’ departure took Vladislav Namestnikov’s offence away with it. Other veterans who had down years include Neal Pionk (whose 12 points are a career low), Niederreiter (whose 19 points are the lowest total since he was a teenager), Nyquist (whose 12 points are the lowest total since he became a full-time NHL player) and Toews (whose 29 points are a career low).
