The Winnipeg Jets Ought To Be Stanley Cup Favorites. Vegas Disagrees.
Why isn't the league's best team this season getting its due from the oddsmakers?
Now is a surprisingly great time to be a fan of the Winnipeg Jets.1 Instead of fading into non-contending irrelevance — as it seemed was happening each successive year following their upset loss to the expansion Vegas Golden Knights in the 2018 Western Conference final — the Jets bounced back to rank fourth in the league in Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (aka schedule-adjusted goal differential) last season. And forget about any hint of regression: This year, they have been the very best team in the NHL during the regular season, winning the President’s Trophy (more on that later) for the league’s best record.
All of that must have the Jets looking pretty good as we sit here, mere days from the start of the 2025 playoffs. And if you look at statistics like the SRS or my own 🏒 NHL Elo ratings 📉, that is true. Winnipeg has the highest chance to win the Stanley Cup of any team according to those statistical models, rising to 21 percent in the Elo odds specifically:
But as the great Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast my friend.”
Looking at the gambling odds paints a very different picture of the Jets’ chances. According to FanDuel (to use just one example), Winnipeg is not only not the most likely Cup winner — that would be Carolina (🤔) at +650 — but it’s not even among the Top 5 outright, checking in at a tie for fifth with the Washington Capitals at +950 apiece. De-vig those odds, and the Jets have just an 8 percent chance to win the title, far below their 21 percent in the Elo simulations or the 17 percent number found at Hockey-Reference:
The odds and models have their disagreements around other teams, to be sure — Elo is higher on the Lightning, Leafs and Kings, while Vegas is higher on the Canes, Oilers and defending-champion Panthers. But the biggest disparity by far belongs to the Jets, who are alone out on an island of belief from the stats and skepticism from the markets.
What gives? I think there are five factors driving this narrative:
✈️ Past playoff disappointments
Ever since that aforementioned run to the West final in 2018, the Jets have won just a single playoff series:2 A first-round upset sweep over the Edmonton Oilers in 2021. Aside from that, Winnipeg has played four series — three of which were against teams with inferior regular-season records — and they lost all four, by a combined margin of 16 games to 4.
All of this happened to this same core, too; each of the 2024-25 Jets’ five best players by Goals Above Replacement (Connor Hellebuyck, Kyle Connor, Mark Scheifele, Josh Morrissey and Nikolaj Ehlers) have been with the club since at least 2016-17. Like it or not, there is a perception that this group can’t get it done when it matters most.
✈️ Too goalie-reliant
It’s no secret that the Jets’ fortunes will rise or fall with Hellebuyck, who is the league’s best goaltender — and arguably its best player, period. Now, in most normal sports, having the most valuable player in the game (Shohei Ohtani, LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, etc.) would be a huge advantage for a team in the playoffs. But hockey isn’t a normal sport, at least not when it comes to playoff goaltending.
The cruel irony of the NHL playoffs is that elite-level goaltending is both the most valuable asset a team can have, and also the most unpredictable factor. There is little correlation between a goalie’s regular-season and postseason save percentages — something to which Hellebuyck himself can attest. Over the previous two years, his SV% has fallen from 17 percent better than average during the regular season to 30 percent worse during the playoffs.
✈️ Not as dominant under the hood
Hand in hand with how much the Jets need Hellebuyck to excel is the fact that they haven’t been quite as dominant if we try to remove “luckier” factors from their stats. In terms of GAR from skaters, they rank fourth in the league behind Tampa Bay, Washington and Vegas — not bad by any means, but not No. 1 in the league. (They also lack as much high-end skater star power as other contenders; Kyle Connor is their best non-goalie by GAR at 21.9, which is lower than other stars like Cale Makar, Leon Draisaitl, Nikita Kucherov and Nathan MacKinnon.)
Similarly, they rank sixth in their share of total expected goals in their games, decently behind the known puck-possession monster Hurricanes, and they’re even lower in other proxies for controlling game-flow, such as Corsi (12th) and the share of ice time spent in the offensive zone (12th). Bettors may be fading Winnipeg as a team that is merely good, but not great if Hellebuyck’s excellence in net is seen as less reliable.
✈️ Tough Western Conference path
Even if there weren’t questions about the Jets’ playoff fitness, it would be tough for any contender to feel good about a path that includes:
* A first-round matchup with the St. Louis Blues, who’ve added more points of Elo since the 4 Nations break than any other NHL squad (and it’s not even close).
* A second-round date with the Colorado-Dallas winner, who’ll have emerged from one of the most overpowered first-round series in NHL history.
* A conference final against, most likely, the Knights, Oilers or Kings, all of whom rank among the league’s Top 8 teams in Elo.3
With six of the eight best Elo teams in the NHL residing in the West, being the No. 1 seed in the conference is no ticket to the Stanley Cup Final.
✈️ Old priors are hard to break
It’s also just hard for some folks to change their opinion of a team, no matter how outstanding of a season they’ve had. Winnipeg went into the season as just the 15th-most likely Cup winner, according to the Vegas preseason odds. They were seen as a bit of a one-year wonder a year ago, with a huge leap in year-over-year GPG differential (from +0.27 to +0.73), and they lost the third-most value in the offseason of any team. The Jets were practically screaming “regression”, and there may be some residual skepticism of their regular season as a result.
This factor might also include fears of the “President’s Trophy Curse”. I’ve written about that phenomenon a few times before, and in each case I couldn’t find any evidence that President’s Trophy winners do meaningfully worse in the playoffs than we would expect from any NHL team with comparable Cup odds going into the postseason. As I wrote back in 2023:
“The notion of a curse — which dates back to at least the 1990s, in my memory — seems to stem mainly from two factors: A few high-profile flops by historic teams (see the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning’s first-round sweep after tying the all-time wins record), and a misconception about how often the top NHL teams should win relative to other sports leagues. Hockey is so chaotic that we can’t hold its best teams to the same standard as we do in, say, basketball — and we should probably stop pretending otherwise.”
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if the idea of a curse is at least slightly priced into the Jets’ Cup odds.
With all of that in mind, the Elo forecast might indeed be a bit too bullish on the Jets’ chances of winning the Stanley Cup that has eluded the city since joining the NHL in 1980. But at the same time, the market may be discounting just how good these Jets are. Including Winnipeg this season, only 93 teams in NHL history have ever produced an SRS rating of +1.00 or better. They are, far and away, the league’s best team by Elo Rating. And yet, they are considered nowhere near the Cup favorites. Come on: It’s time to at least put a bit more respect on the Jets’ name.
Filed under: NHL
I am not a Jets fan per se, but I could accurately be called a Jets sympathizer, as a former fan of the team that turned into them, the Atlanta Thrashers.
Discounting the extra “qualifying round” from the 2020 bubble.
Apologies to the Minnesota Wild, who are also in that part of the playoff bracket but have just an 8 percent chance to make the conference final.
The other consideration could just be who's betting at FanDuel. While there's more opinionation in the lines than "balanced action uber alles" admits, risk management limits how far the lines stray from pure balancing.
Especially with futures, there's a fair amount of fan action (and comparatively little pro action relative to single games and series, thanks to high vig and tying up funds for a long time), so teams with fans in states where FanDuel is active should tend to have greater implied odds than those that don't (most of the teams that are underrated relative to FD odds are from such jurisdictions).
There's a story from years ago about the Las Vegas Hilton, in order to get a group from Minnesota to book a 1000-room block in February, giving everyone in this group a free $100 bet at the sportsbook. Everybody in the group basically used it to bet on the Twins to win the World Series; the sportsbook manager chewed out the host who authorized it.
The year: 1987. Even though the Twins won, the book ended up making money on baseball by shading lines to hedge out exposure to the Twins: I suspect that one could have written an article about how the Twins had a much better chance than the odds suggested.