Jets need power play to produce by committee
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As the 2025-26 season looms, a burning question hangs over the Winnipeg Jets: Can the team sustain its new-found power-play dominance, or was last season’s success a mirage?
Winnipeg cruised to the Presidents’ Trophy in the 2024-25 regular season with 116 points, finishing with a staggering +86 goal differential. To achieve such impressive regular season results, you need to dominate on both ends of the ice and the Jets did just that. They finished fifth in league scoring and, with the best goaltender on the planet in Connor Hellebuyck manning their crease, conceded a league-low 191 goals.
Unfortunately for the Jets organization, another strong regular season ended with another disappointing playoff exit, with the team dispatched by the Dallas Stars in the second round.
Since that loss, there have been several notable personnel changes. The most significant would be the loss of winger Nikolaj Ehlers, a near point-per-game player who signed a lucrative contract with the Carolina Hurricanes. Winnipeg is going to try and replace some of that production through committee, bringing in Gustav Nyquist, Tanner Pearson, and the ultimate wild card in 37-year-old Jonathan Toews.
The loss of Ehlers may sting on paper, but I think Winnipeg is still deep enough to overcome his departure. What may be harder to overcome is a potentially meaningful regression in power-play performance, something surely on the mind of assistant coach and power play guru Davis Payne.
The Jets power play was unstoppable in 2024-25, averaging 11.1 goals per 60 minutes, which, for context, has only been trumped by the 2022-23 Edmonton Oilers and the 2023-24 Tampa Bay Lightning.
But it’s a notable outlier performance:
There are many contextual reasons for why teams could see a meaningful shift in performance from one season to the next (and in both directions). In most cases, it concerns a significant change in on-ice personnel. But that wasn’t the case for Winnipeg. Just looking year over year, Winnipeg dressed many of the same faces, and yet rate scoring nearly doubled.
Every returning forward saw a sizable jump in year-over-year scoring on the power play –Ehlers was six goals better (having been shut out the year prior), Mark Scheifele was five goals better, Kyle Connor and Alex Iafallo four goals better, and Gabe Vilardi three goals better (his 12 power-play markers were top 20 league wide and on par with Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk and Detroit’s Patrick Kane).
With such little change in deployment (though I think Vilardi’s development into a lethal scoring weapon is notable), I turned my attention to structural changes ushered in by Payne.
During the season, Payne talked about his philosophy on the power play with a specific emphasis on attacking through the neutral zone and spacing in the offensive third. When you watch their first unit on video, you see this manifest over and over – playing with control and attacking between the circles feverishly, illustrated beautifully by the shot profiles over at HockeyViz.
Just look at the year-over-year change:
The hope here is Winnipeg’s power play can stave off major performance regression because their surge in productivity coincided with a coaching change and meaningful shift in tactics. Real goal scoring may have nearly doubled, but expected goal rates jumped considerably too, and it did so with just about the same complement of skaters year over year. Losing a player the calibre of Ehlers stings, but this is a group that has already shown it can produce by committee.
Winnipeg is good enough everywhere else to weather a power play regression if it comes. But if this group is capable of repeating last year’s explosive run on the man advantage, they have a shot to finish near the top of the NHL standings once more. And perhaps this time, parlay a new-found strength into something more meaningful when postseason hockey begins.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, HockeyViz