It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Winnipeg Jets’ fans after losing four games in a row to the Colorado Avalanche. We’ve taken some time to move through the stages of grief, and now that we’re near the end, it is time to conduct an autopsy on the entire team and analyze everything that comes with it.
We start off today with an overview of the team as a whole, before we pick apart each piece in the coming weeks. My posting schedule will be a bit irregular for the off-season, but I hope to keep to two pieces a week minimum with a paywalled section at the end for premium tiered subscribers.
After we dissect the team and its roster, we’ll look at opportunities and suggestions for the Jets moving forward.
Regular Season Team Performance
Overall, the Winnipeg Jets had a fairly good regular season. They finished the year with 110 points, tied with the Florida Panthers for fourth in the league. They were also fourth in the league in goal differential, and first in both regulation wins and regulation plus overtime wins.
Seems pretty good.
While the ultimate goal is to perform in the playoffs and potentially win the Stanley Cup, it is also true that there’s a lot more luck in that (let’s ignore that the Jets were objectively bad in the playoffs and not just unlucky).
Tore Purdy projected that the NHL’s best team on average would win the President’s Trophy theoretically about 32% of the time, but only the Stanley Cup about 22% of the time. That doesn’t mean there’s no luck in the regular season or skill in the playoffs. Just the ratios are slightly different.
Looking at evolving-hockey.com, the Jets were the top team in the league for 5v5 goal differential per hour when adjusting for competition (RAPM).
However, the team had some sizeable weaknesses. Despite being the top 5v5 goal differential team, the Jets were only 10th in 5v5 expected goals for, against, and differential. They were fourteenth in shot attempts (Corsi) for, seventh against, and twelfth overall.
Comparing the Jets to the Avalanche at 5v5, the Jets outscored better and were slightly better in expected goals. Unfortunately, Colorado was the better team in the metric more predictive of future success: Corsi.
And that’s just 5v5…
On the power play, the Jets scored goals 1.37 goals per hour fewer than average after adjusting for competition, ranking them 26th in the NHL. The only teams worse were all outside of the playoffs: Chicago Blackhawks, Saint Louis Blues, Buffalo Sabres, Pittsburgh Penguins, Colombus Blue Jackets, and Philadelphia Flyers.
The underlying numbers weren’t much better, with the Jets being 27th in shot volume (Corsi) and 30th in shot quality adjusted volume (expected goals).
But hey, if you don’t have a good power play, you can always rely on the penalty kill…
Where the Jets ranked 20th in goals against rates, 21st in expected goal against rates, and 19th in Corsi against rates.
The Jets were not a below-average team outside their goaltending, but they were a team where goaltending shifted them from okay to great. That’s fine, except when goaltending fails you.
There’s a reason why people are hesitant to jump on the bandwagon for teams driven by goaltending, even when it’s with a netminder as good and consistent as Connor Hellebuyck.
In my one and only article for The Athletic back in 2017, I wrote about how different components drive points in the standings.
In an individual game, shot volume is much less important than shot quality, finishing, and goaltending. However, those things are more volatile and fleeting. A good outshooting team will get outshot less often than a good goaltending team will lose the goalie battle. Most of the “luck” portion is volatility from those shot quality, finishing, and goaltending factors.
The Roster
The above graphic is a bit out of date, as it’s around game 67 mark for the Jets. But, it gives a pretty good snapshot of the team’s overall makeup.
The roster was one of many good players, but not many great players. The Jets’ goalie tandem looked elite no matter the model. Their blue line had one elite player with Josh Morrissey, and the rest varied from decent to outright bad. The forward group had solid depth, but no elite players. In addition, the distribution of talent upfront was highly inefficient in terms of ice time.
NHL EDGE data suggests the Jets were a decently above-average team in most respects, but they were lacking in speed. Winnipeg (56th percentile) was just barely over 50th percentile in speed bursts greater than 20 miles per hour. Colorado, meanwhile, was 99th.
When analyzing the difference in the Jets’ regular versus postseason performances, there will be a lot of narratives on what made the team not “playoff performers.” There is some legitimacy in some, as I think a lack of speed hurt the team. That said, I think in many respects the Jets just weren’t good enough to contend without their goaltender being “on” and stealing games.
Forwards
This is what I meant from lacking elite, top-end forward talent. Synthetic goals (sG) is a metric that looks at a player’s overall impact with combining things like expected goal differential impact, finishing talent, setting talent, penalty differentials, and special teams.
Adam Lowry had a fantastic season. I thought Lowry was long past his prime, and the Jets needed to upgrade him; he proved me wrong. Although, there is some caution in these results with Lowry dressing with Nino Niederreiter for all but the first three games of the season.
After Lowry, the next most impactful forward was Nikolaj Ehlers. This was the first time since 2017-18 where Ehlers was not the most impactful forward. Ironically, it was Lowry (and Mathieu Perreault) who beat him that year as well.
After that, the Jets have a lot of players sitting around the average mark.
The Jets' depth was indeed greatly improved from last year; the team had traded in much weaker performers like Karson Kuhlman and Saku Maenalanen for far less negatively impactful forwards Morgan Barron, Rasmus Kupari, and Mason Appleton.
It’s not just that the Jets’ top end lacked the talents of other teams, but also the gap between them.
Sure, the Jets don’t have a Roope Hintz and Jason Robertson, or a Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, or an Aleksander Barkov, or a Nathan MacKinnon, or a David Pastrnak, or an Artemi Panarin.
Those are the elite performing top-six forwards for teams remaining in the playoffs. The Jets don’t have any players of that level, but also all three of their top-line forwards—Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Gabriel Vilardi—finished the season with a below league-average sG value.
I think the team can build off its pieces and its depth, but the top players need to be better if the Jets are going to take steps forward rather than back.
Defenders
In mid-January, while the Jets were on a near historic streak, the Jets looked really good. Their forwards had a few more players in the “second-line” tier than they finished the season with. They also had four defenders all performing like “top-pairing” skaters.
Josh Morrissey has been elite, but the rest of the squad started to struggle in the last quarter.
Dylan Samberg, Dylan DeMelo, and Brenden Dillon all finished as bonafide top-four defenders, but also all finished the season lower than the previous year.
Nate Schmidt showed himself to be still a decent depth defender, but not at his price tag. Neal Pionk is the Jets’ weakest link, and Colin Miller was underutilized for who knows what reason.
Logan Stanley is a fine depth defender, but I have two problems with him on the roster.
His size causes him to be a temptation to use him when a team should not, like Rick Bowness choosing him over Colin Miller or Nate Schmidt in the playoffs.
The Jets now have two defenders lost to waivers that have been better thus far: Johnny Kovacevic and Declan Chisholm.
The playoffs also made it very apparent how painfully slow the Jets’ backend is.
Samuel Girard (13), Cale Makar (45), Sean Walker (78), Josh Manson (81), and Devon Toews (87) all placed in the NHL’s top 90 defenders for average even-strength speed.
The Jets only had two: Josh Morrissey (19) and Dylan Samberg (54).
Well, they also had Colin Miller (39), but do you actually have a player if you do not use them?
Just like size, speed does not equate to better. However, I would hypothesize that a team that struggles to move the puck could use more of it.
Speaking of size and defensemen, Colorado was the smallest team by both height and weight for defenders relative to their ice time. There has been some history of defender size and playoff success recently, but I’ve wondered how much of it is spurious correlations simply because some NHL teams that have been good for a few playoff runs happen to have some larger defenders.
Using height and size weighted by TOI, the Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, New York Rangers, and Florida Panthers were all significantly smaller on their blue line. Only Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks won while being significantly larger. The Carolina Hurricanes and Boston Bruins were slightly larger than their opponents, but not by what I’d call a significant margin.
Looking into the next round, Edmonton and Vancouver are about equal. Dallas is a bit bigger than Colorado, but not by much at all. New York is much smaller than Carolina, as is Florida to Boston.
Goaltending
I could go into all the fancy stats and such about the Jets’ goaltending, but we all already know the truth. I’m preaching to the choir here.
Connor Hellebuyck had one of the best regular seasons in the NHL and of his career. He’s the favorite to win the Vezina and was worth about 6.8 wins using WAR, nearly two wins more than the next-best goaltender.
Laurent Brossoit was also excellent and a big reason why the Jets won the Jennings trophy. While Hellebuyck had the highest WAR for starters, Brossoit was tied for second for the highest WAR for backups.
It’s true that the Jets’ goaltending did not show up in the playoffs, but you cannot stick their loss on the netminders.
Winnipeg’s first game against Colorado was the only one where they scored more goals than they allowed in expected goals. In other words, the first game was still the only game they would have won even if they had league-average quality goaltending. It wasn’t just poor shooting luck either, as the final game was the only one where they created more chances than they allowed, and only at the thinnest of margins.
Quick Sumarry
The Jets were a good team. If you ignored goaltending, they probably weren’t nearly as good as their record. Goaltending is indeed still part of the team, but it’s the part that most commonly can stop showing up at any moment. Unfortunately for the Jets, that moment was in the playoffs. However, even with decent goaltending, the Jets would have really struggled to win.
They were who we thought they were. A team slightly better in depth than last year but not by much, and who lack elite talent aside from goaltending (and Morrissey).
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Microstatistics
I tracked the Jets performance in zone entries and zone exits for the year.
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