Winnipeg Jets in reach of new record: Quickest collapse by a 1st-place team in NHL history

With four games to go in the NHL season, the Winnipeg Jets have an opportunity to set a newleague record albeit one no player, coach or front-office official would ever want on their resume.

If the Jets missthe playoffs, this team will be credited with the worst regular-seasonchoke 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 isin danger of becoming the firstto 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.

Winnipeglast occupied first place in the Western Conferenceon Jan. 22, when the team had a 31-16-1 record after 48 games.

Two and a half months later,Winnipegsits in eighth place in the west, tied in points with the Calgary Flames, who beat the Jets Wednesday in what was regarded as amust-win game for both clubs.

Although the Jets still havea game in hand compared to the Flames, a Winnipeg team considered a Stanley Cup favourite only three months agonow 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 sinceit's an NHL first," said Scott Billeck, who covers the Jets for the Winnipeg Sun.

The real question forsportswriters, 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 fourper centchance 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, Moneypuckgave 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 wrongside 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 successearlier 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 anddefence-first hockey thatopened 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 onewhere they hold on to the puck endlessly looking for that perfect seam pass that gets through and it's a tap-inin 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 theJets 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 duringthe 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 Lainewas seen as a source of conflict.

"They couldn't find a way tointegrate Patrik Laine, who was a generational goal scorer. I mean they're missing a guy like that right now but they almost drove himout of town because he didn't fit the mould," Billeck said.

"There's still a bit of a divide onthe old and the young onhow 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 infirst place in their conference belonged to the 2021-2022 Vegas Golden Knights.

They missedthe playoffs after sitting first in the Western Conference37 games into the season.

The second-worst choke belongsto the 2011-12 Minnesota Wild, who werein first place in the west after 33 games before falling short of the playoffs.

The Jetsdeclined 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 beenone of the best goalies in the league.

Pundits offer explanations as Winnipeg Jets now in danger of missing playoffs

2 years ago

Duration 1:53

Two and a half months ago, the Winnipeg Jets were in first place in the NHL's Western Conference. Now they're fighting for the last playoff spot. If they don't get it, Winnipeg will set an NHL record for a mid-season collapse.