Nikolaj Ehlers and Mitch Marner are taking turns lighting it up in the Stanley Cup Final, silencing critics and encouraging Winnipeg Jets fans to ask heated questions for our latest mailbag.
There’s also the matter of Winnipeg’s usage of analytics, its quest to find the right trade partner, and how the Jets will add toughness to a roster that’s lost several fighters and hitters over the years. Will Mark Scheifele and Morgan Barron have to take their own fights next season, too? Let’s discuss Winnipeg’s asset management, Ehlers’ impact on future Jets and more subscriber questions, starting with an easy one about Brad Lambert.
Questions have been lightly edited for clarity.
Hi Murat, do you think Brad Lambert did enough in the last four or five weeks of the season to earn a regular role next year? His play stood out to me during that stretch. — espo 2.
I agree with you on this one. Lambert showed more dynamism down the stretch and won’t be waivers-exempt next season. I believe he’ll be an NHL regular next season. The only question is how much offence he will produce.
Win or lose the cup, Nik Ehlers left the Jets to get this exact chance. What is the impact or influence of Ehlers’ decision, and the results? — Dan N.
Good question, Dan. The idea of Ehlers leaving Winnipeg and finding immediate team success — and Jets players taking notice — is something league sources have brought up to me, too.
I see a lot of hot takes with respect to why Ehlers left Winnipeg. Most of those takes are opinions and interpretations; the only accurate source for why Ehlers left is Ehlers himself. I’ve long thought he wanted a bigger role, to be seen as a go-to guy instead of a secondary option, and I continue to see that sentiment as part of the reason Ehlers chose the Carolina Hurricanes. Ehlers offered this clarification to my colleague Cory Lavalette in March:
“I’ve never said I wanted to play on the first line. I’ve never said I wanted to play a certain amount of minutes … But you pay me to be an important, key guy on the team, and I want to be out there for the key situations.”
Ehlers was a primary scorer used like a secondary scorer; the Jets aren’t deep enough to have that problem anymore. Ehlers’ role has grown — slightly — in Carolina, as I predicted here. The Hurricanes deploy their ice time more evenly than the Jets do, but the regular season increase from 15:47 per game for Winnipeg to 16:35 for Carolina is significant. (So is the increase to 19:09 per game in the playoffs.)
That said, my guess is the ripple effect for Winnipeg is minimal. Last summer, I looked at other players who’ve left the Jets and found the grass was seldom greener outside of Winnipeg. Ehlers’ success, as obvious as it was to predict, is closer to the exception than the rule. If you keep your analysis to his career high of 71 points and trip to the Stanley Cup Final, then it would be reasonable for other top Jets to wonder what they might achieve somewhere else. But there’s no one like him left.
Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele are the Jets’ two offensive drivers and they’re each signed long-term. Gabriel Vilardi is signed through 2031, but he plays with Connor and Scheifele often enough that he’s not a comparable for Ehlers’ minutes. Vilardi also doesn’t generate offence all by himself; he and Cole Perfetti have similar point-scoring rates without Connor and Scheifele on the ice.
If a free agent does choose a different team because he thinks he’ll have better odds of winning a Cup there, it wouldn’t be because of Ehlers. It’s something UFAs have always tried to do.
I struggle with the excuse that the Jets couldn’t have traded Ehlers in the midst of a Cup run because they needed him. We saw Colorado and subsequently Carolina trade Mikko Rantanen in a competitive window season. Where do you land on this? — William Garret W.
My view is that the Jets’ “self-rental” of Ehlers is defensible when compared to standard NHL operating procedure. They were a Presidents’ Trophy-winning team and had strong five-on-five results, a great power play and Connor Hellebuyck — if ever there were a year to prioritize the present moment, 2024-25 was it.
The standard way of thinking is that Winnipeg would have needed to pay premium assets to acquire someone like Ehlers as a rental, therefore retaining him “saved” them those assets. (The counterargument is that they could have sold Ehlers as a rental, gaining those premium assets, but the Jets were trying to win the Cup.) But you’ve asked about Colorado and Carolina, who are two of the NHL’s most successful teams in terms of asset management.
The more I study other teams’ transactions, the more I see the best ones make deals using the principles of arbitrage. Perhaps the Hurricanes or Avalanche would have sold Ehlers for multiple assets and used some of those assets to acquire a “win now” player, too. Maybe the old ways of “buying” or “selling” are outdated. Carolina added Taylor Hall during the first Rantanen trade; it also acquired multiple draft picks in the second Rantanen trade and used one of them to move up at the 2025 draft. But that’s a digression.
The part I get stuck on is that Winnipeg wouldn’t have been surprised by Ehlers’ decision to sign elsewhere. The Jets had entertained trade discussions involving Ehlers multiple times in the past (including with the Hurricanes). The best asset play was to sign Ehlers early or, failing that, to trade him long before the 2025 deadline. I don’t have all the information, but it does look like Winnipeg cost itself by not being as proactive as it could have been.
Is there any evidence that the Winnipeg Jets coaching staff or management use analytics? — Jamie L.
Yes. There is a lot of evidence that the Jets use analytics. I wrote about Winnipeg’s analytics summit in 2024, back when the Jets were at the top of the league, and followed it with this piece about what the Jets might learn from analytics.
But what does it mean to “use” analytics?
Is it enough to know how many slot shots you give up, or are you looking for tools that find areas to exploit on the ice, like Colorado claimed it did against Winnipeg during the 2024 playoffs? If you’re focused on team construction, is it enough to know that shooting and save percentages tend to regress towards their means or do you need your team to design its own model to project values for every roster player, draft pick and transaction? Is your analytics team turning Sportlogiq data into bullet points for the coaching staff or are they proactively developing their own projects to answer questions that might help you win?
The point of it all is to find an edge, however small. Are the Jets advanced compared to the rest of the NHL in this regard? It could be that they’re keeping their edges hidden — this is something teams do — but my guess is no.
How will the Jets address their physical deficit? With Luke Schenn and Logan Stanley gone and Adam Lowry focusing on being healthy, the Jets do not have any players to answer the bell when the opposition goons start running the Jets. — Richard W.
Whether it involves re-signing Logan Stanley or pursuing a different UFA (like former Manitoba Moose forward Jeffrey Viel, whom you mentioned in your question) I think Winnipeg will address its lack of physicality. When Scheifele and Barron dropped the gloves to stand up for themselves at the end of last season, Barron was concussed by veteran fighter Josh Manson. This can’t be the norm and Adam Lowry can’t be asked to do it all.
There’s a possibility Winnipeg promotes Tyrel Bauer, whose Moose highlight reel is a devastating collection of hits and fights. Bauer’s play on the puck is not a strength — he has more fights than points in all four of his Moose seasons — but he earned more trust from Manitoba’s coaches this season than last. Winnipeg could try him out.
The free-agent market is better stocked with big hitters than with scorers. Options include defencemen Connor Murphy, Jamie Oleksiak, Jeremy Lauzon, Radko Gudas and Andrew Peeke. Depth forwards include Viel, Michael McCarron or A.J. Greer. If you want some scoring included, there’s Mason Marchment, who is more of a pest than a fighter.
What team(s) would you consider as optimal trading partners for the Jets? Who would have what we need (for now and the future), and who might want what we got? — Chris W.
Who needs an elite goaltender? (Winnipeg needs an elite goaltender.)
Multiple league sources believe that if the Jets were to shop Hellebuyck in earnest, there’d be a bidding war for his services. Florida, Buffalo, Detroit, Edmonton, Pittsburgh, Utah and New Jersey are all in various “win now” positions and none of them have a goalie they can trust. Florida is probably the most interesting; the Panthers badly need a goaltender and could offer the No. 9 pick, a young forward like Anton Lundell or Mackie Samoskevich, and a goaltending prospect like Kirill Gerasimyuk or Tyler Muszelik. They have plenty of cap space, even with Aleksander Barkov back at full health.
I’m not expecting a bidding war because I’m not expecting Winnipeg to sell Hellebuyck, but he’s the biggest asset that brought trade suitors to mind.
