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The Winnipeg Jets are to a phenomenal start in 2024-25, jumping out of the gates with a 9-1 record and looking like one of the National Hockey League's premier teams in the process. The Jets began the year with eight straight victories, and dating back to the end of the 2023-24 campaign have now won 16 of their last 17 regular-season games.
It's been an incredible run of regular-season success for the Manitoba-based franchise, and the team is getting contributions from all over the lineup. Kyle Connor is on an otherworldly tear, recording nine goals and 17 points over a season-opening 10-game point streak. And Winnipeg boasts another four players who are playing at a point-per-game pace or above — and two of them are defensemen.
Both Mark Scheifele and Nikolaj Ehlers have been excellent, with 13 and 11 points, respectively, while the squad is getting a ton of offense from the back end. Josh Morrissey continues to shine, with 11 points in 10 games, while Neal Pionk has come out of nowhere with 12 points of his own.
Along with standout play from reigning Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck between the pipes, the Jets are looking like an absolute wagon that won't be slowing down anytime soon. It's hard to imagine this team has a fatal flaw in 2024-25, but there is one place that general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff could look to improve on ahead of the Stanley Cup Playoffs next spring.
Jets are off to a near perfect start in 2024-25
The Jets have suffocated opponents with a combination of high-flying offense, strong, team-centric defensive play and excellent goaltending. They've scored a ridiculous 4.70 goals per game, which is far and away the best in the National Hockey League. And they're giving up just 2.40 goals per game — good for fourth in the league.
The Jets also boast the league's best powerplay, which is clicking at an automatic 44.8 percent. Add the fourth best save percentage, and it makes sense that Winnipeg is first place — both in league standings and the latest edition of ClutchPoints' NHL Power Rankings.
Everything is clicking in the early going for the Jets, who are coming off one of the best regular seasons in franchise history. The 2023-24 iteration of this club won 52 games and finished just four points back of the President's Trophy winning New York Rangers.
No one in Manitoba will have anything to complain about after this scorching start. That's especially true after last year's amazing regular season. But the Jets haven't been out of the first round since 2020-21, and this core is desperate to make another deep run.
Despite regular-season excellence, Jets can't find success in playoffs
After making a thrilling run to the Western Conference Final in 2017-18 — and losing to the Vegas Golden Knights in five games — the Jets have won just a single playoff series. They were defeated by the Colorado Avalanche in Round 1 in five games last year, and lost to the eventual champion Golden Knights in the same amount of games in Round 1 of 2023.
The regular-season success is obviously encouraging, but this roster needs to find a way to string together some wins in the playoffs. And Sportsnet hockey insider Elliotte Friedman provided an interesting perspective as to why that hasn't been happening in his latest 32 Thoughts column.
“Whenever Winnipeg thinks it has a chance, it adds. Watching the Jets' blazing 9-1 start, the one thing that stands out is the size of their defence. You have to be mobile, you have to be skilled, but you have to be big. The recent Stanley Cup champions had that in common: a long, agile, aggressive defence that always seemed to have a body, a stick, an arm or a leg in your way,” Friedman wrote on Wednesday night.
“A thicket for opposition to navigate. NHL heights and weights can be deceiving, but the Jets’ sizes — minus Dylan Samberg, Logan Stanley and Haydn Fleury — are the smallest since the 2018 Washington Capitals. That doesn’t mean you can’t win, but it certainly flies in the face of what’s recently worked.”
And there is the Jets' main flaw in 2024-25: an undersized blue line.
Jets' fatal flaw is an undersized D-core
Although the Jets' defensive unit has been excellent so far, it is true that it is a small and mobile unit. And most of the teams that have won Stanley Cups over the last couple of years have been big, strong and relentless. Friedman makes an interesting point, and it checks out considering the lack of playoff success the Jets have had in recent years.
Winnipeg's entire first two pairs — Morrissey, Pionk, Dylan DeMelo, Colin Miller — are not overly big guys, and GM Cheveldayoff could look to make a trade to upgrade the team's size. With Friedman already speculating that the front office could make a move to help complement a roster that is on fire, it adds more fuel to the fire that a trade could be coming.
Currently, the Jets have just under $2 million in cap space to work with, per Puck Pedia, and they also have significant draft capital to potentially dangle in a trade. Cheveldayoff should probably be going all in considering how well the roster is performing as currently constructed, especially considering the core isn't getting any younger.
The Jets are probably only going to get a couple more good playoff runs with Scheifele, Connor, Morrissey and Hellebuyck in their primes, and they can't afford to keep crashing out in the first round.
To rectify that, Cheveldayoff should be looking to add another big but mobile defenseman to the blue line. That's starting to look like the standard in Stanley Cup winning teams, and the Jets certainly have the talent to make another deep run.
It'll be intriguing to see if the Jets make any moves to address their fatal flaw, and whether another regular-season powerhouse can avoid another devastating early playoff exit.
