The question posed to Winnipeg Jets captain Adam Lowry came with a prickly premise.
As the 2024-25 season begins, it seems the Jets players whose back-checks are never in question -- whose defensive execution is unflappable -- are not a consistent threat to hit the scoresheet. On the other hand, it seems the players whose offensive talents can take over games -- most of the top six forward group, for example -- are not great defensively.
Can the Jets win without addressing this imbalance between offence and defence?
Lowry's full answer was thoughtful and articulate.
"In a salary cap world, you can only have so many superstars," he said in a recent one-on-one conversation. "You task other guys to step outside of their skill set and overachieve a little.
"Every team has strengths and weaknesses. It's about how can you, as a team, as a system, get extra value out of things. When you look at two years ago to now, our defensive metrics, if I had asked you two years ago do you think we can move from 29th in inner slot shots against to a top-10 team, did you think we had the defensive horses? I know we had the goaltending but did you think that we had enough guys to buy in?"
Full disclosure: I did not. Still, Winnipeg did improve year over year. We wrote about it at length. And the Jets gave up the fewest goals in the NHL last season.
"Individually, maybe we don't necessarily have a Connor McDavid, a Nathan MacKinnon -- someone that can turn a series on its head -- but that's where I think we have to double down on our systems, in our scheme," Lowry said.
Lowry then spoke to the gaps between Winnipeg last season and Winnipeg as an elite team. The Jets need to maintain last season's defensive accomplishments, which isn't necessarily a given, and they need to improve elsewhere on the ice. The Jets' special teams need to be worlds better. When teams like Colorado change the way they play -- from a rush-heavy team during the season to a heavy forechecking, net-driving team in the playoffs -- the Jets need to adapt.
The regular season will come with growing pains. The playoffs are a different animal altogether.
"Colorado changed their style. They became a heavy puck retrieval team. It was something -- not that we were surprised -- but when you watch them historically, they were a really good rush team, especially that top line," Lowry said. "Even that top line, they were willing to dump the puck, they were willing to forecheck. They won their forecheck battles. They didn't really give our D a lot of time to break the puck out. We didn't slow them down enough to give our D that chance. And they certainly won the special teams battle."
We spend a lot of time at The Athletic playing with the concept of "optimal." Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor and Gabriel Vilardi are great offensive players, for example -- and can each contribute in certain defensive roles, to varying extents -- but when they played together last season the Jets were outscored.
Winnipeg's top line didn't get as many pucks out of their own zone as they needed to (and it was a trouble spot again during preseason.) Even with better health and more familiarity in year two, there is no guarantee Scheifele's line wins its minutes.
So we poke. We prod. We write essays about how Scheifele's numbers -- not analytics, but the number of real goals he creates and the number of goals other teams score against the Jets -- get better when Nikolaj Ehlers plays on his line. We try to rearrange the Jets' lines and pairings in a way that supports the numbers we dig up. As journalists and as fans, we play armchair GM -- and to be clear, I don't want us to stop. There is a ton of passion, intelligence, and creativity that go into the lineup debates.
But it's not a game that Lowry plays. Nor should it be.
"That's not my place as the player. Coaches get paid a lot of money (and) managers get paid a lot of money to put out what they think is the best lineup, what they think is the most optimal. They might ask for your input but I don't think that it's our job to be going down there and requesting things. We show up at the rink, we see the lineup, and we go out and try to perform to the best of our ability," Lowry said.
"The more you start playing armchair GM, the more you get lost on your process -- you coming to the rink to work on your game, to make yourself better, to make your team better. You sometimes take away from that buy-in. You don't want to be sitting there thinking you should be playing more than 'X' guy, or why aren't you getting this opportunity? I think it's important that you come in, you're happy for your teammates and you try to push each other every day -- either for more ice time or special teams -- and make sure you're ready to take advantage of it."
On paper, the Jets are a probable playoff team without an inside track to Stanley Cup contention. Their defence took a hit over the offseason. They could use a bona fide second line centre -- an admittedly familiar Jets sentiment -- to supplement Scheifele's offence. They will need to push each other the way Lowry describes if they are going to move beyond the first round of the playoffs for the first time since 2021.
But that's the exciting thing about this time of year. If Winnipeg goes on to great success this season, the finished product will make the Jets look like more than the sum of their parts. Lowry is right to say we underestimated their growth potential two years ago.
Could we be underestimating them again? Now that we know their day-one roster, let's start with a look at the biggest takeaways from camp.
There is a gut reaction resonating through parts of Jets fandom right now. How are these Jets supposed to be any better than those Jets -- the ones who followed their 110-point regular season with such a poor playoff performance? Didn't Kevin Cheveldayoff promise exciting opportunities for Winnipeg's young players? Was that just a shot across the bow of Rutger McGroarty, whose lack of path to NHL playing time appeared to play a role in his desire to exit Winnipeg?
McGroarty opens the season on the Penguins roster. Brad Lambert, Nikita Chibrikov and Elias Salomonsson begin with the Moose. Apart from injuries to defencemen Ville Heinola and Logan Stanley, Winnipeg's opening day roster is exactly the one we projected in July.
The counterargument to these complaints comes in the form of last year's Jets success. As I told Lowry, I didn't think the Jets had it in them to be a top defensive team or win the Jennings Trophy with the roster they had on hand. Winnipeg opened the season with a nearly identical roster to this one, led the West for large portions of the season and finished fourth in the NHL with 110 points. Clearly success -- of the regular-season variety -- is well within their grasp.
One note I'll make on the Jets' youth: Lambert and Salomonsson played in four preseason games. Chibrikov played in three. While I saw growth in all three players' games, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to start the season in the AHL. And I don't think McGroarty would have made this team.
Let's approach this back-and-forth from a different perspective. If you were Scott Arniel, a part of the regime that helped Winnipeg improve its team defence in back-to-back seasons, how would you approach the problem of making it successful again as head coach?
You'd want to consolidate the things the Jets were great at during the regular season: five-on-five team defence and Hellebuyck's goaltending excellence. You'd want to size up their biggest weaknesses -- the power play and the penalty kill -- and do what you could to stop them from letting the air out of team success. And you'd want to find a way to solve whatever issues led to such a stunning first-round collapse.
It's clear Arniel believes in Connor, Scheifele, and Vilardi as a top line. He's optimistic good health and a second year together as a trio will improve their defensive shortcomings. (Recall Winnipeg reached the top of the standings with Ehlers, Scheifele and Vilardi as their top line. It seems possible they're leaving goals on the table by continuing the CSV experiment.) The degree to which his bet on that line pays off -- or doesn't -- will go a long way towards whether Arniel's Jets can consolidate the defensive improvements they made over the past two seasons. He's going to need to be able to adapt and move off that trio if the results don't follow the hope.
The Jets' biggest challenges might not come from within, though. Put plainly, there are fewer freebies waiting for Winnipeg on their divisional schedule. Nashville, St. Louis, Utah and Chicago all got better this offseason. It's going to be harder to run the table against those teams, making regular-season success more difficult to come by. No one will care if the Jets slide down the standings -- as long as they make it out of Round 1 -- and Arniel's biggest challenge is to instill a culture of resilience in the face of tough times.
There is an item missing from most of our discussion about the Jets' power play.
We've been talking about Nikolaj Ehlers as though he's in the bumper position (or "pop" position, as the Jets are calling it this year.)
That's all well and good. He has a good shot and will score if he gets his looks from that spot -- and he will get his looks if Scheifele and Vilardi continue their excellence. But watch Ehlers for the full duration of this clip, not just the moment he scores:
Ehlers isn't in the bumper position for the full duration of the play. That's because the Jets have multiple looks on the power play this year. They change looks depending on who has the puck where and what they're reading in front of them.
Ehlers heads into the corner after the initial shot in the clip. Winnipeg recovers the puck and the most important thing to watch is how Ehlers moves into the slot before his goal. When he moves from the top of the crease into the slot, he does so behind the Flames defenceman -- who doesn't shoulder-check -- and he stops before he gets to the low Flames forward.
In this moment, he illustrates why it's so important for the Jets to move on the power play. In this case, Ehlers has snuck into his spot mostly undetected, but even if the defenceman saw Ehlers approach the slot, his movement would create a decision to make: how high does the defenceman track him? How low does the forward move? These decisions are the types of things that open up seams -- and they're only possible because the Jets skaters are interchanging positions as quickly and intelligently as they do in this clip.
The Jets will have multiple, changing set-ups as they attack from the top of the zone, both flanks and from behind the goal line. I've seen it often enough in practice now to believe they're headed for a substantial improvement vs. what we saw last year.
Winnipeg gave up its preseason goals the same way it gave up goals in the playoffs.
When opposing teams pinched their defencemen up the ice, taking away time and space on the Jets' breakouts, Winnipeg struggled to get the puck out of its own zone. The Jets played long shifts inside their own end because their breakouts were cut short -- whether after the first pass inside the zone, at the Jets' blue line or as they tried to carry the puck up ice. We saw that against Colorado to the point of dominance; a less-discussed part of Dillon's exit is the loss of his puck-moving skills in addition to his toughness.
The Jets' new-look PK gave up five goals in six preseason games, continuing last year's playoff tradition of making life tough on the goaltender. It seems one way to score on Winnipeg is to float a shot into the slot for a high-slot deflection.
"If you want to look at our PK it was softer from the point with screen and tip, and they had a couple of those," Hellebuyck said after the playoffs last year. "Another one is they would bring a four-man rush and post up at the corner of the blue line and flip it over to a D-man coming in just with open space. Those two right there accounted for a good portion of the goals, and then tips, but I mean that's kind of the same as the PK."
That hasn't changed. When the Jets talk about boxouts, they focus on timing. They want to pick up their opponents while they're still moving; as hard as it is to defend Leon Draisaitl or Mikko Rantanen at pace, they're next to impossible to move once they're already planted. If Josh Morrissey or Neal Pionk or Dylan DeMelo or Dylan Samberg can engage with top forwards before they get established -- and, most importantly, take away their stick -- it will take away some of the net-front goals we've seen beat Winnipeg in recent history.
It's hard for me to imagine the Jets don't add a defenceman if they're contending for the playoffs by midseason. The team is too good and the defence looks too troubled -- on paper in both cases -- to miss a chance to upgrade.