Hockey Bytes: Another Winnipeg Mirage?
Hockey Bytes: Another Winnipeg Mirage?
Will the Jets continue their pattern of early promise and a familiar fade? Plus, a look at last year’s non-playoff teams most likely to make a comeback.
Welcome to Hockey Bytes — a ✨brand-new spin-off✨ of my baseball column, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various hockey spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Hockey Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🧊 Winnipeg’s Annual Tease
If you had “the Winnipeg Jets get off to one of the longest season-opening win streaks in NHL history” on your 2024-25 hockey bingo card… well, congratulations!
After an offseason in which they made little in the way of upgrades, the Jets were still among the dozen or so teams who could go into opening night plausibly expecting to at least make a run at the Stanley Cup. But there were few indications that Winnipeg would be far and away the best team in the league through the first month of the regular season. And yet, that’s exactly what has happened so far.
It’s a testament to the ongoing greatness of goalie Connor Hellebuyck (who ranks third in Goals Saved Above Average), the elite two-way play of D-men Neal Pionk and Josh Morrissey, and an extraordinarily deep forward unit led by Nino Niederreiter, Nikolaj Ehlers, Kyle Connor and young Cole Perfetti in what might be his long-awaited star breakout.
But it’s also something we’ve seen these Jets do before.
In the course of resurrecting their former potential with a return to the playoffs in both 2022-23 and 2023-24 — and now with a 95 percent playoff probability this season as well — the Jets had (as of Monday) gone a collective 62-28 in the first halves of the regular season, good for a .689 winning percentage that ranks No. 1 in the NHL by a sizable margin over the Boston Bruins (.659) and Vegas Golden Knights (.615):
During the second halves of their schedule, however, the recent Jets haven’t been able to maintain that same momentum. In 2022-23, they fell to below .500 (20-21) down the stretch — and while they were better than that last year (24-17), they still were worse than in the first half, leaving them with a 44-38 record (.537) across both seasons combined.
And that’s just the regular season. There are also the playoffs, where the Jets are a combined 2-8 after a pair of five-game eliminations against the Golden Knights and Avalanche. One might argue that those are both quality teams; Vegas even went on to win the Stanley Cup in 2023, the year it went through Winnipeg. But the Jets had a better regular season record than Colorado last season, yet suffered the same result. And the main source of disappointment for Winnipeg was how it lost both series.
The 2022-23 Jets had the league’s eighth-best save percentage and allowed the 10th-fewest goals per game of any team; the 2023-24 version was even better on D, ranking No. 1 in both SV% and GPG allowed. But across those two playoff series, Hellebuyck and the Jets allowed 47 total goals in 10 games — giving up four or more goals nine times, five or more goals seven times and six or more goals three times. By comparison, across the 164 games of those regular seasons, Winnipeg had allowed five or more goals just 17 times (or in 10.4 percent of games) and six or more goals just seven times (4.3 percent).
So we might be forgiven if we reserve judgment before investing too much hope in the 2024-25 Jets’ long-term chances. And it appears that the bookmakers agree with that assessment. According to FanDuel, Winnipeg went into Monday night with just the 13th-highest odds to win the Cup (+2200) despite ranking first in Hockey-Reference’s SRS ratings, which adjust a team’s GPG differential for strength of schedule:
They’re not alone in the odds not respecting the early results: Despite the inspirational story of the Columbus Blue Jackets rallying around the memory of the late Johnny Gaudreau to be on pace for their best GPG differential since 2016-17, Vegas cares not for sentimentality, setting Columbus with the same Cup odds as the woeful Sharks. But the Jets have the biggest disparity between SRS ranking and betting odds of any team who was supposed to be a solid contender going into the season.
To change that, the Jets can keep blowing the doors off the competition and force the oddsmakers to pay attention. But on a certain level, nobody will believe them even then, because we’ve seen a version of it before. It may well take closing the season strong — and starting to build momentum in the playoffs — in order for Winnipeg’s play to actually be taken more seriously.
🧊 Back in the Hunt
One of the fun things to dig into early in any season — hockey or otherwise — is a look at which non-playoff teams have the best chance of making it back to the postseason this year, based on their early playoff odds. So this blurb is, well, exactly that. Here is the ranking of teams who missed the 2024 playoffs, based on their playoff probability according to my Elo forecast model:
The Minnesota Wild sit atop the list, and it’s nice to see Kirill Kaprizov get off to a career-best start — and for Filip Gustavsson to bounce back to his elite form of 2022-23 — in the team’s first full season under coach John Hynes. It’s also nice to see the Flames potentially return to the playoffs after everything unraveled for them since facing the rival Oilers in the 2022 West semifinals.
But perhaps more interesting are the New Jersey Devils, a team that the oddsmakers adore — they’re tied for second in the Cup odds — after their offseason upgrades, even if Elo doesn’t quite know about that yet. (They’re up from preseason, but not by too much after a 6-6 start.)
And below them are a quartet of teams we’ve been waiting years and years to see in the playoffs again: the Sabres, Blues, Red Wings and Senators. St. Louis last made it in 2022, while Buffalo, Detroit and Ottawa have all been on the outs for at least seven years. (Ottawa last made it in 2017, Detroit in 2016 and Buffalo all the way back in 2011!)
Surely at least one of those teams will make it back this year. Err, maybe not “surely”… but the odds are in their favor. In Monday’s set of simulations, at least one of Ottawa, Detroit or Buffalo made the playoffs 81 percent of the time. And 2.5 percent of the time, all three teams made it, which would be an incredible — and long overdue — thing to see happen this season.
Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Hockey Bytes
New Jersey would reflect a 2024-2025 hat trick of sorts for owner Josh Harris...should the Devils make it into the Playoffs along with the Commanders and 76ers, who are expected to. He will join Stan Kroenke's Rams, Avalanche and Mammoth from 2022.
Of course, Kroenke's 2022 teams were champions.