Winnipeg Jets in reach of new record: Quickest collapse by a 1st-place team in NHL history
Pundits offer explanations as Jets, who led conference in January, now in danger of missing playoffs
With four games to go in the NHL season, the Winnipeg Jets have an opportunity to set a new league record — albeit one no player, coach or front-office official would ever want on their resume.
If the Jets miss the playoffs, this team will be credited with the worst regular-season choke in NHL history.
That's not an opinion. Prior to this season, no team has ever led a conference more than halfway through a season and still ended up missing the playoffs at the end.
Winnipeg is in danger of becoming the first to engage in such a spectacular late-season collapse.
"In mid-January, the Jets were in first place in the conference. The idea that this was possible is unthinkable," said Sportsnet reporter Sean Reynolds.
Winnipeg last occupied first place in the Western Conference on Jan. 22, when the team had a 31-16-1 record after 48 games.
Two and a half months later, Winnipeg sits in eighth place in the west, tied in points with the Calgary Flames, who beat the Jets Wednesday in what was regarded as a must-win game for both clubs.
Although the Jets still have a game in hand compared to the Flames, a Winnipeg team considered a Stanley Cup favourite only three months ago now faces the very real possibility of missing the playoffs altogether.
"It's not surprising as much as it would be shocking just to see, especially since it's an NHL first," said Scott Billeck, who covers the Jets for the Winnipeg Sun.
The real question for sportswriters, fans and potentially even the team itself is how this situation came to be.
Improbable collapse
If Winnipeg misses the playoffs after a strong performance during the first 60 per cent of the season, it would not just constitute a record-setting collapse. It would also be highly improbable from a statistical perspective.
"There's only about a four per cent chance of them doing as badly as they have done," Peter Tanner, founder of probability tracker Moneypuck.com, said in an interview from Toronto.
In mid-January, there was only a two-per-cent chance of blowing the season altogether. At the time, Moneypuck gave the Jets a 98-per-cent chance of making the playoffs, with a first-place finish the most likely outcome.
According to Tanner's statistical model, part of the Jets' change of fortune is due to bad luck on offence, as the club has scored 27 fewer goals than you would expect them to score this season, based on the quality of chances they've had.
Forwards Blake Wheeler, Adam Lowry and Morgan Barron have been particularly unlucky with their shooting, he said.
"There's just a lot of luck in hockey and unfortunately they've been on the wrong side of that over the past couple of months," Tanner said.
A tale of two systems
Luck alone, however, doesn't explain the nosedive, according to hockey journalists who cover the team.
Winnipeg achieved success earlier this season by sticking to a system of play devised by head coach Rick Bowness. For some reason, they stopped adhering to that system in January.
"It was a blueprint set down by their new head coach to change the way they played. He was successful in the beginning of the year at having them adopt that new system, and then at some point they abandoned it and it's left the head coach baffled," Reynolds said.
"They've gone away from the structure that helped them win hockey games early on in the season, a structure that was predicated on hard work and defence-first hockey that opened up opportunities in the transition game," Billeck said.
"It opened up opportunities for defencemen that really move up into the play."
It was more of a grinding approach to offensive-zone play than the Jets have played over the past four years, Reynolds said.
It relied less on the individual offensive skill of the Jets' most talented forwards, including Mark Scheifele, Nikolaj Ehlers, Kyle Connor and Pierre-Luc Dubois.
"You get the puck up to the back end, you throw bodies to the front of the net and then you just create chaos in front of that. You make it hard for the goaltender to see the shot coming from the point," Reynolds said.
It seemed to work from October to January. And then the Jets got away from it.
"The kind of game they were playing earlier on in the year that brought them success isn't how a number of players on this team wants to play," Reynolds said.
"The system that they seem to want to play is one where they hold on to the puck endlessly looking for that perfect seam pass that gets through and it's a tap-in in the back of the net."
The big question then becomes, why change what seems to work?
If it ain't broke ... or is it?
This season is not the first to see the Jets sink after initial early success.
A late-season swoon in 2018-2019 cost the club home-ice advantage in the playoffs. A drop-off in the play during the pandemic-abbreviated 2019-20 season only put Winnipeg in a playoff spot due to an expanded post-season format.
Poor play late in the season last year led to no playoffs whatsoever.
Why NHL-calibre athletes would change what's been working for them has been a head-scratcher.
"Every hockey player dreams one day of lifting a Stanley Cup and that's the part that I don't understand," Billeck said.
"Maybe the answer is very simply that they would rather play a specific kind of game and not succeed than play a specific kind of game they don't want to play, and succeed. Maybe it's as simple as that," said Reynolds.
"There's chaos that's involved in this, right? When a team starts falling apart, it doesn't start out as a team saying, 'OK, we've succeeded doing this system, let's not play this system any more.'
"What ends up happening inside the dressing room is you get lost. Certain players are pulling on the rope, certain players aren't. That causes friction and potentially resentment and problems."
The idea this team is divided behind closed doors has been the subject of speculation since the 2018-19 season, when Winnipeg failed to capture the magic of a long playoff run the previous year.
A division between veteran players like Wheeler and Scheifele and younger players like former forward Patrik Laine was seen as a source of conflict.
"They couldn't find a way to integrate Patrik Laine, who was a generational goal scorer. I mean they're missing a guy like that right now but they almost drove him out of town because he didn't fit the mould," Billeck said.
"There's still a bit of a divide on the old and the young on how this team wants to play a hockey game."
Add to this mix some losing, and you have the chaos Reynolds identified.
"Failure brings confusion, failure brings questions of why things are going so wrong, and everyone starts getting their different take on why. Once that happens, everyone's going in different directions and everyone has different ideas of what the solutions are," he said.
"The Jets at this stage aren't choosing not to play the system. The Jets are simply lost and don't know how to find their way back to success."
What happens next
Prior to this season, the most dramatic choke by an NHL team in first place in their conference belonged to the 2021-2022 Vegas Golden Knights.
They missed the playoffs after sitting first in the Western Conference 37 games into the season.
The second-worst choke belongs to the 2011-12 Minnesota Wild, who were in first place in the west after 33 games before falling short of the playoffs.
The Jets declined to comment on the prospect of setting a new record for season-collapsing ignominy.
If the team does miss the playoffs, management must make changes, Reynolds said.
"The Winnipeg Jets have shown that they're a team capable of monumental collapse and playing a style of hockey that just should not be acceptable for a team that considers itself a playoff team," he said.
"If they are not talking about tearing down and rebuilding, the people who are in charge of this team are not doing their job there."
That could mean dealing away star players on expiring contracts, like Scheifele, Dubois and potentially even Connor Hellebuyck, who has consistently been one of the best goalies in the league.
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With files from Nathan Liewicki