The National Hockey League kicked off their 2026-27 season with a slate of 5 games on Tuesday, so I guess it is about time to get the ball rolling here at Arctic Ice Hockey for the upcoming Winnipeg Jets’ campaign. To be honest, it is probably past time….since the other writer here has been bugging me for a few days to write a Season Prediction article. I will be fair, Mullayo wasn’t expecting me to do all the work, since once I agreed that it was a good idea…it wasn’t long before I received his thoughts on the True Northers’ chances this season. Now I am not sure whether he used mathematical formulations, educated guesses, coin flips, or some sort of Kiwi magic to come to his conclusions….but they certainly wrapped up much more quickly than the process I chose.
First, in the past I haven’t made a habit of prophesying of how Winnipeg would perform each season, preferring to give a general range of where our club would end up if things went well & if they didn’t. However….Mullayo could probably seriously pummel me, so I figured it was best to play along and not upset the big guy. Typically when I decided to do something, I choose to do it well. So when I thought of how to come up with a somewhat logical formula to determine the Jets’ prospects in the upcoming season, it led me down a long & winding road to reach my final prediction.
Before we get to that though…..let us recap exactly what has happened to the Manitoban franchise since the disappointing 2025-26 NHL season came to an end. Unbeknown to all us fans, the signs of change occurred immediately after that, though goalie Connor Hellebuyck’s post-season press conference certainly started the rumour mill churning. For once, the masses were right, but it wasn’t until August that the True North faithful officially received confirmation that the long-term starter wanted a change of scenery. But before then, Winnipeg was able to add some players in the draft and from free agency that could potentially play a role in a bounce back campaign for the recent President’s Trophy winners. With Helly holding out while GM Kevin Cheveldayoff patiently deals with his request, looking for a way to help both the now & future of the club by moving arguably the best tender in the league, the Jets made a final addition when they claimed Clay Stevenson off waivers from the Washington Capitals. After all that, here is a breakdown of the changes that occurred this summer:
As you can see, Winnipeg has certainly had a bit of a youth movement, with a bunch of 30+ yr olds moving on while the Jets appear to be set to have as many as 4 rookie/near-rookies on their opening day roster. And that doesn’t even include young defenseman Elias Salomonsson, who is expected to miss 6-8 games recovering from off-season surgery. Other off-season additions were from the 8th overall selection of the 2026 Entry Draft, Viggo Bjorck, some free agent signings in the form of Mario Ferraro, Stuart Skinner, & Noah Gregor, a trade of depth forward David Gustafsson for depth defenseman Jack St. Ivany, and a couple potential promotions from the Moose in Brad Lambert & Tyrel Bauer. Finally, it also looks like Isak Rosen, who was acquired in the Logan Stanley/Luke Schenn deadline trade to the Buffalo Sabres last year, will be getting a legit chance to be a full time starter.
A lot of changes….so it appears that Chevy and head coach Scott Arniel learned that the True Northers need to be a lot faster this season and have turned to young legs in the hopes of finding that. The biggest question mark, of course, is what can the Jets get for their pouting & suspended goalie (with 5 yrs left on his recently signed extension)? That and when the trade occurs will probably have the biggest impact on Winnipeg’s 2026-27 campaign….and is almost impossible to determine. So I can’t speak for Mullayo, but I ended up doing my projection on the guys in the dressing room….so any in-season trade would likely increase whatever my final projection would be….even if our GM doesn’t end up getting his asking price.
Alright, before I get back to the whole crystal ball schtick…..I thought I would spend a bit more time talking about the goalie the Jets ended up getting on waivers. Clay Stevenson is no longer consider a prospect at the age of 27 yrs…but that just happens to be the same age that Brandon Bussi was when he lifted the Stanley Cup in his first season as a tender in the NHL. I was told by some Capital fans that our back up goalie’s nickname is “Mudd“, a play on his forename Clay, and they certainly seemed fond of him. A prototypical NHL goalie with a 6’4” frame, Stevenson has put up a 2.60 GAA & a .910 sv% in his 5 NHL games to date, but has helped Washington’s farm team to the AHL Championship in 2022-23. In fact, his numbers were very good in 3 out of 4 AHL seasons…check out Mudd’s career numbers below:
I’m not sure about you…but that data and some of the things I’ve read about Stevenson has given me hope that Winnipeg has found a solid 1B option. I still would like to see Dominic DiVincentiis given a shot with the Jets as well this year after his fantastic playoffs, especially if he starts playing just as well this year with the Manitoba Moose (who open up their AHL season on Saturday afternoon). Probably should include Thomas Milic in there too…while undersized, the goalie has won championships at all the levels under professional so he certainly has the ability to elevate his game. Milic will be soon losing his waiver-exempt status, so the team should try to figure out exactly what they have in him before a call up puts him at risk.
Alright….I think we set the stage enough…it’s projections time!! Since it was our newest writer’s idea, I figured that I would be gentlemanly and allow him to give you his perspective first…..
MULLAYO
The Winnipeg Jets’ season hinges on management, specifically with how they react to two events. The first is the schedule, so they should already have plans in place for that, but will they wilt when the heat comes on during a very difficult early season calendar? The second is a Helly trade, and that is more of an unknown, but how and when will it affect our youth movement?
KEEPING MORE KEEPERS
Okay, let’s begin by addressing the Hellephant not in the dressing room.
Taking out last season’s .895 save percentage (sv%), Helly’s career sv% is .918 (with it is .916%). He also generally averages 62 games per campaign – apart from last year (57) and his first when he only played 25 games (only 45 COVID games in 20-21 too). An average keeper is just under .900 sv%. Which means having an average Hellebuyck on your team is worth an extra 30 goals (saved over his 62 games played, compared to league average). That’s approximately 80 pts.
What if the Sharks had AVERAGE Helly last season?
The Sharks finished with a -41 differential. An adjusted -11 would have put them above the Ducks (-15) and Kings (-22) who both made the playoffs. So, already a shoo-in to improve San Jose’s record. Worse still, Askarov actually had a .883 sv% over 40 starts, whilst Nedeljkovic put up a .896 sv% in his 47 games. So below average seasons for both of them, approximately .890 sv% overall combined. Thus their total Goal Differential with average Helly could be quite a bit bigger. Roughly +47, which would put the much improved Sharks differential at +6, not -11. That’s using Askarov and Nedeljkovic combined. It would be more if you just replaced the better performer in Nedeljkovic, +50-ish? Less if you replaced Askarov, +42 or so? But still a lot more than 30 goals.
What if the Jets don’t have average Helly this season?
If Skinner et al. COMBINED can eke out a .900 sv%, it costs us 30 goals (80 pts). That’s even if Skinner is improved at .905 sv% for his average 53 games. It requires the backup(s) to be at .891 sv% for 31 games. Milic had a .871 sv% for his 3 appearances last season (2 of 3 starts against top 5 NHL clubs). If Skinner gets the yips…I think a smart team should have 3 keeper options to give them another place to turn. The 84-game schedule increase sort of puts every team in a 1A and 1B situation. Even if your starter plays 50 or so games, backup(s) still have to play 34. Thus, this longer schedule slightly diminishes Helly’s value and moreso his perceived value – just what we needed… Now teams are scrambling for a good 1B, because their influence is growing…
Waiver exempt keepers are great insurance (maybe why so many got drafted this year), I feel we may need both DiVincentiis and Milic this season. Personally, I’d run a tandem, but rotate your AHL keepers when the 1B goes cold. For example, something like our Ace Skinner 53 games, 1B 15 games, DiVic 9 games, Milic 7 games. Treat them more like MLB minor league pitchers. Maybe a different keeper for 2nd game against a team? Let the 1B, 1C, 1D study up in advance on their opponents’ tendencies, whilst getting their confidence back in the AHL.
DRAW: WIN OR LOSE?
In 2024 we won 15 in a row (100% baby!) on our merry way to the President’s Trophy with a 68% overall winning record. Next season we started brightly winning 9 out of 12 (75%) before falling apart and finishing 50%. This year I’d be ecstatic to be at 50% after our first 16 games. The murderers’ row gauntlet has 9 away games, 11 against last year’s playoff teams, plus 2 against former champions (2024 and 2025) Florida. Even if we win at Tkachuk HQ, Trump may overturn it… After our great start last year, we fell off a cliff, and landed all higgledy-piggledy at panic stations. Players were brought up, players were dropped down, players were traded out (Stanley, Schenn, Pearson), players were traded in (Rosen, Bryson). Soon the lines were an unsettled seething mess. It was chaos and out of control…
What if in early November we’re 5-11? This is supposedly a playoff contender, so a winning percentage of 31% doesn’t come close to cutting it. Questions will surely abound, though the answers could be ugly…
Can Chevy and Arniel stay the course, resisting chopping and changing?
What does damage control look like?
Who will bear the brunt of the blame, management or players? Young or old?
Will they finally embrace the suck and trade away Nino, Vlad and Iafallo?
More likely Chevy will bring Yager up, spin it like his form demanded it. And then any other Moose-ling doing marginally well…
LIKE SCHOOL ON A SATURDAY: NO CLASS
Our team has been half-assed overhauled. The defense is shored up. Several youngsters have even been included in the forwards… But as we’ve seen this preseason, we’re basically battlers, perspiration rather than inspiration. The general problem is we only have 4 premium players and the best one prefers to fish than play. The major problem is their average age is 32.
We need 1st line prospects in our system ASAP. Once Mark Scheifele gets his record swag this year, he may pull up stumps too… 2027 looks a good draft to get a 1C. I think even Chevy knows we need one, he’s variously asked for Helenius, Lundell, and Misa when touting Helly.
POSITIVES
Plenty of players owe us bounce backs. Neal Pionk in particular was 20 pts down on his Jets average. But Cole Perfetti, Adam Lowry, Nino Niederreiter, & Dylan Samberg all could and should rebound… How far remains to be seen.
Defense: Our defense has been overhauled. Out Stanley and Schenn. I could stop there. But no, lots of more exciting players have been brought in. Ferraro, Henry Thrun, St. Ivany, & Dysin Mayo. Then there is the rise of the Moose, Isaak Phillips, Bauer, Alfons Freij, Garrett Brown, Lukas Gustafsson…
We’re younger: The average age has probably dropped 3 years and will likely get younger again next year.
We’re faster: We were the slowest team in the league last year. This year we’re probably middle of the pack, with specific players strategically placed to use their pace on each line.
The eventual Helly trade could give us a boost, although not as much as originally thought, and now probably more futures based.
NEGATIVES
Draw: From Hell, especially after the two previous parades we were given. From the frying pan into the fire all Fall.
Holdouts: Losing Helly will likely cost us between 20-50 goals. Enough to drop us 2-5 places in the division.
Class: We still haven’t replaced Nikolaj Ehlers. Just rearranged the deck chairs. How do we compete, yet get premium players?
Management vs reality. Can the leopard change it spots? And earn it’s stripes?
PREDICTION
The first month will be telling, but I won’t. Ask me again in November… Gun to the head, I’m probably pulling the trigger… If I cared about winning this season (thankfully I don’t). We’ve fallen from 116 pts to 82 pts without Ehlers…now without Hellebuyck as well, I have us below .500 at 78 pts when the regular season concludes. Which should be good/bad enough to win the lottery, or at least be top 5 and grab a future 1C.
There’s a caveat. It’s reliant on management finally realising we’re in trouble, offloading Alex Iafallo, Dylan DeMelo, Vladislav Namestnikov, Niederreiter, etc at the deadline and tanking hard like we should have last season. Now, if Helly gets traded early enough and we get some some scoring talent, that could bump us up towards 90 pts and into wildcard territory, but is that what we really want? I’d prefer to play our younger new lines as is, for as long as possible, then decide around the deadline which direction we are going. Then do it properly this time and fully commit.
*****
Alright, so now we have heard from our resident “stats guru“…..I think he brings up a lot of valid points. Not a pretty picture that he painted…but then you can’t create a masterpiece without the right ingredients. It also fits perfectly into his desire to see the Winnipeg Jets go into a full tear down rebuild….since he, like me, loves tracking the development of prospects. In the past I have touted the complete rebuild model as the best way for a NHL team to build a Stanley Cup winner, showing that over 70% of champions in the Salary Cap era had went through one prior to finding success.
And that is even truer for a market that can’t draw in talent from other NHL squads like Winnipeg. In fact, I believe this exact same roster put in a more desirable market would have easily been able to pivot to truly compete for Cups over the next few seasons. Unfortunately that is not the case. But neither does it appear that True North ownership & management are ready to embrace the idea of retooling the roster to that degree. Will that change after this season?
Guess we shall see…okay, now it is my turn.
BOJA
I hinted earlier that the way I chose to tackle this problem ended up taking up a significant amount of time…and since I had to spend that effort, I thought I would share the pain by bringing you along through the whole thing. The process started off with my attempt to determine how good each NHL team was, based on the projected starting day rosters on PuckPedia. I opted to go through every single starter on every single team to give them a letter grade between A+ and D, based mainly on the projected point production over a full 82 games (sometimes I looked at past seasons as well). I didn’t give the benefit of the doubt to players who suited up for less than 40 games and they were given the letter grade below where their production put them. For some checking forwards and the defensemen, I relied on their xG% numbers for 5 on 5 play as well as points. And, of course, I used save percentage & Goals Saved Above Expected when ranking the goaltenders. Here is a legend showing the expected point range for forwards and save percentages to earn each grade, as well as the points their clubs get for having them on their roster.
When rating the players, I started with the Winnipeg Jets as I am most familiar with what those guys can do. However, in the end I probably was a bit harsher on some of the True Northers than I was to other teams. In particular, my ratings for Isak Rosen & Brad Lambert were D’s when later on I tended to give players who hadn’t played a full NHL season yet a C. But then some people (Mullayo) have a problem with me giving Gabriel Vilardi an A rating, so maybe it will all even out in the end. Really I would say that the younger teams that are bringing in untested yet highly touted prospects might be underrated in my model, as I only ranked the players I deemed exceptional higher than a C.
I do regret not making the cut line for the A+ rating a bit lower for forwards, since my A section covers a large 45 pt range. I just didn’t want to give players like Nick Suzuki or Scheifele an Elite rating so didn’t want to make the cut line 100 pts, which I probably should have. Not that those two stars aren’t great, I just think the top tier is more for the Connor McDavid’s & Nathan MacKinnon’s of the NHL. But too late to go back, so it is what it is.
After I had ratings for all 640 players that are expected to start according to PuckPedia (or sit on the bench as back up), I totaled them up to see which clubs had the most “talent“. The exercise was enlightening to me, so I opted to make the spreadsheet below, which I hope will help us in our quest to determine how well the Jets do this year. In the first column I put the Team names, yet they are colour-coded by the Eastern & Western Conferences, with the darker gray & blue representing the potential playoff teams for each, while the lighter colours show the non-playoff squads. Also, the final 2 columns will be used in the next stage of my review, so I will talk about them then. The rest of the layout I think is fairly self-explanatory, but I will note that I used a LW-C-RW order for the Forwards and a LD-RD order for the Defensemen (in case you want to try & follow along on PuckPedia…though I did insert injured players who are likely to be starters when healthy where I thought appropriate).
POWER RANKINGS OF EVERY NHL TEAM
*****
Now this chart didn’t exactly answer the question of how the Winnipeg Jets would do this season, despite strongly hinting that the results probably won’t be too good. Since the NHL standings are determined by wins & losses, we would need to look at the True North franchise’s regular season schedule to come up with a more accurate Point Total projection. Before we get into that though, might as well spend a bit of time discussing the graphic above.
If my player assessments are anywhere near accurate, I think the talent misbalance in the NHL is clearly displayed above. The East clearly have the “better” teams based on my ratings, having 8 of the top 10 ranked clubs and none in the bottom 6. With the West only having 2 squads that could be considered Elite/Great and 7 of the bottom 8 rosters talent-wise, the countries are heavily slanted towards the Atlantic Ocean. I will note that the above chart isn’t really supposed to show the order of the Standings at the end of the regular season since schedules haven’t been taken into play. The unevenness of things continue within the Divisions as well:
Atlantic Div: 3 Elite, 2 Great, 1 Good, & 2 Average
Metro Div: 1 Elite, 2 Great, 3 Good, 1 Average, & 1 Sub-Average
Central Div: 1 Elite, 1 Great, 1 Good, 2 Average, & 3 Sub-Average
Pacific Div: 2 Good, 2 Average, & 4 Sub-Average
Based on my relatively simple review, it seems that the Atlantic franchises face the stiffest competition as they are the only one without a Sub-Average team in it. The Metro is stronger than the the Central, but the Pacific falls very short on my chart, with only 2 squads rated better than Average. Of course there will be some surprises to a lot of people up there, as clubs considered by the media to be Cup contenders like the Vegas Golden Knights & Edmonton Oilers are middle of the pack. Both franchises have been hurt by questionable goaltending as well as having too many depth level forwards due to the cap situations. Another shock might be the Minnesota Wild since they fell in the Average category despite widely believed to be a dangerous club. While they do have adequate tending my rating system was not impressed with their bottom six & bottom defensive pairing. And this was done before news broke that one of their best defenders, Brock Faber, will be missing time due to a skull fracture. The Anaheim Ducks are a club that I expected to take a step back this season after making the playoffs in 2025-26, but to fall into the Sub-Average group was a bit more than I foresaw. A totally revamped defense, questionable done, and a lack of forward depth may return the Californians back to the non-playoff category.
The Florida Panthers would have been higher on the list if there was more confidence in their goalies and the Tampa Bay Lightning might have been a bit inflated by their tending situation. But I once again see the New Jersey Devils as a potential breakout club. Can they be this year’s Buffalo Sabres or will they let another chance with this young group slip by? In the West, my breakout team is the San Jose Sharks, who are set to take advantage of the Ducks fall. I have questions about the St. Louis Blues ranking being as high as it is though, as I think they might not have enough 2 way forwards on the roster to do consistently well over an 84 game schedule.
Moving on to our Winnipeg Jets, I really was not surprised where they ended up. I went in thinking that they weren’t going to be right near the bottom, but felt there could be some distance between them and the wildcard spots in the West. Of course, with a top level Hellebuyck in net, their team rating would increase to 67 and make it more likely that they could snag a post-season berth. Yet that won’t happen….what may happen is that a trade does occur at some point and the True Northers get at least 1 player that can join the NHL club to provide immediate help. Will it be enough or too late? That deadly start to the season makes me lean towards the latter. The Jets can also out-perform their current ranking by getting all or some of the following: players like Rosen, Lambert, & Bjorck to exceed my expectations – Lowry & Niederreiter bounce back to form a new version of a shutdown 3rd line – they get a solid performance in the crease from Skinner & Stevenson.
I won’t go on further about the other teams rankings in the article, but will certainly get involved in any side discussions in the Comments section.
So now it is time for those last 2 categories in the graphic…..talking about Odds. To keep to the strictly “scientific” approach, I sort of pulled some numbers out of the air to determine Winnipeg’s chances of beating teams in each of the categories. Using the logic that the Jets should have a 50% chance against clubs in their same group, I altered this slightly by allowing a 10% boost for the home team to get 60-40% (H) or 40%-60% (A) odds for those games. Then I slowly decreased those chances as I went up to the Elite group that ended up with 30-70% (H) or 20-80% (A) odds for those contests. Now that I had all this information, it was time to actually tackle the Jets’ 84 game schedule for the 2026-27 campaign.
Obviously the next step was to go and grab my Dungeons & Dragon’s die and simulate the entire True North season, going game by game with the varying odds to see if Winnipeg would win or lose (actually did it 3 times to get an average). Using the 4 sided, 10 sided, & 20 sided dice, I was able to replicate the odds I came up with by assigning some of the numbers as Jets wins & others as losses. Makes perfect sense, right? I did start to worry when I initially rolled “wins” in 5 of the first 7 matches, but eventually the percentages began to show up more as expected. I will spare you all a play by play of the 252 dice rolls it took to get my final results, as you have already read enough by this point.
PREDICTION
The result was a range of 32 to 38 wins for Winnipeg out of the 84 regular season games, which I averaged out to 35 (70 pts). Yet that doesn’t immediately mean that the Jets would have 49 regulation losses in the campaign, as on average an NHL team is expected to be involved in 18 overtimes or shootouts. With any losses in those contests, the team walks away with the “loser point” and that will add to a club’s final tally. Last season, the True Northers ended up playing in 19 such contests, walking away victorious in only 7 to pick up an extra 12 loser points to add to their win total. I figured with the extra 2 games this year, I would go with that exact breakdown in my simulation. Therefore, I assumed that 7 of those 35 wins I already determined would have been in OT or SO, leaving me to add 12 loser points to Winnipeg’s 70 to get a final result of 82 points on the season…..which just happens to be exactly the same amount as last year (35-35-12 vs 35-37-12).
With a result like that for the Jets in 2026-27, I think it is very likely that they would end up drafting near the place they did at the 2026 Entry Draft…top 10, but probably not top 5. But that depends on so many factors that both Mullayo & I have brought up already. The True North faithful might be best to prepare themselves to savior the little victories this season…like beating that team you really dislike, watching good developmental steps taken by young prospects in & out of the NHL, or seeing some veterans have bounce back seasons that may make the games more entertaining to watch while also raising their trade deadline value.
Because of my ingrained Canadian politeness, I only thought it fair to offer Mullayo one last chance to add any thoughts to his portion of the article or make an observation about mine. Will have the Winnipeg Jets Game 1 Preview done on Friday morning and everyone is welcome to join us in the Comment section to celebrate the start of another NHL season.
*****
MULLAYO
TLDR
Mullayo: How many points you reckon we get this season?
BOJA: Dunno, about the same as last year I expect.
Mullayo: Yeah, nah. A couple less I reckon.
BOJA: Oh, maybe, depends… Want to play Dungeons & Dragons?
Mullayo: Nup.
