It’s normal for there to be alarm bells not just ringing but blaring down Main Street as the Jets have lost three straight games, falling out of playoff position at precisely the moment in the season when good teams are meant to lock down their spots.

As Shayna Goldman wrote on Tuesday, 77 percent of teams in a playoff position at U.S. Thanksgiving in the NHL’s salary cap era have gone on to qualify in the spring. Last season, Winnipeg was one of 12 teams that made good on that statistic, consolidating a scorching start to the season with a strong second half, a President’s Trophy, and a third consecutive playoff spot.

Now the Jets are three points shy of the playoff cut line, their franchise goaltender is recovering from knee surgery, and Mark Scheifele’s line is the only one scoring goals with any consistency at all. As Scott Arniel laments the Jets’ lack of secondary scoring — most evident against in Wednesday night’s 4-3 loss at Washington, where Gabriel Vilardi and Scheifele scored all three of Winnipeg’s goals — there’s legitimate risk that the their biggest critics have been right all along: Winnipeg is too old and too slow to earn playoff spot without Connor Hellebuyck.

Could the Jets really join the 2024 Rangers as the second straight team to go from No. 1 in the NHL in one season to missing the playoffs the next? It’s a reasonable question to ask of a team that’s three points out of a spot, with four teams to pass.

Here’s what the Jets need to change to keep that from happening.

1. Find some secondary scoring

Duh. 

Honestly, that’s a good rebuttal. Everyone knows that Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Josh Morrissey drive the offensive bus for Winnipeg, with contributions from Vilardi. Scheifele and Connor are having brilliant offensive seasons, but it’s a problem when your No. 1 and No. 2 point producers have more than three times the number of points as anyone playing on the second, third, or fourth line.

Expand your scope to the four players listed — Scheifele, Connor, Morrissey, and Vilardi — and they’ve scored more points than the entirety of Winnipeg’s roster thus far, including players who are injured or have been assigned to the Moose. So it makes sense that Scott Arniel’s assessment of Winnipeg’s recent struggles include, “We’ve got to find a way to get some secondary scoring.”

The real question is how.

Arniel’s strategy so far has been to double down on his top line of Connor, Scheifele, and Vilardi. They’re winning their minutes, generating most of Winnipeg’s offence at even strength while also constituting 3/5 of Winnipeg’s top power play. If Arniel can use them as a “set it and forget it” solution, trusting that his top three forwards can keep winning their minutes, then he needs to find solutions on his second, third, and fourth lines.

The problem is that, while Connor, Scheifele, and Vilardi have outscored teams 17-12 while playing the most minutes together of any line in the NHL, the rest of the Jets forwards have yet to replicate that success. Whether it was Jonathan Toews centering Morgan Barron and Gustav Nyquist, Adam Lowry centering Nino Niederreiter and Alex Iafallo, or Vladislav Namestnikov centering Cole Perfetti and Tanner Pearson on Wednesday, every single line gave up a goal. Only Scheifele’s line scored.

2. Consider a top line split

Arniel has two choices now. One is to keep Scheifele’s line together — it’s the one that works — while working on finding chemistry among his other nine forwards. The other is to separate Connor, Scheifele, and Vilardi in an effort to create at least two lines that work. It’s not something the Jets have tried very often — Connor and Scheifele have played over 90 percent of their even strength minutes together — so Arniel may not want to mess with the one thing he feels like he can count on.

If Connor and Scheifele are so good they can create offence without each other, Winnipeg gets to enjoy new opportunities. Maybe Connor can get something going with Toews and Perfetti. Maybe Scheifele and Vilardi can still produce if Niederreiter plays at left wing.

Or maybe it’s on Toews, Perfetti, and company to start burying some of their chances. Toews’ on-ice metrics have improved in his last 10 games, for example, but he’s somehow been outscored 7-1 while earning approximately 50 percent of expected goals. Perfetti’s enjoyed an even higher share of scoring chances than Toews’ has had (and did some of his best work when the two played together, with Namestnikov) but Perfetti has been outscored 5-1.

Connor and Scheifele might be Winnipeg’s only offensive players who can create without needing another play driver on their line.

3. Give Elias Salomonsson a longer look

If you’ve only watched the highlights from 21-year-old Elias Salomonsson’s NHL debut, it’s possible that your only takeaway is that he made two mistakes.

On the first, he was late in recognizing John Carlson as a threat on a Capitals’ counterattack. There were multiple miscues on this play, including Dylan Samberg moving away from the middle of the ice to help Vilardi with Tom Wilson and Connor not identifying Carlson to his left. The error was not solely Salomonsson’s low positioning — and in fact, he had reason to be where he was if he thought he needed to cover the middle for Samberg.

But Carlson exploited the space and scored.

Table for one at Johnny Rockets pic.twitter.com/WvOzRAL476

— Washington Capitals (@Capitals) November 27, 2025

The second one was less ambiguous. Salomonsson crossed the offensive blue line to join a Jets attack but overskated an awkwardly placed pass from Perfetti. The pass was into Salomonsson’s left foot and not an easy one to deal with but he looked awkward as he tried to adjust, leading to Connor McMichael racing down the ice to score the game-winning goal.

Salomonsson told reporters in Washington that his teammates were quick to offer him support.

“The guys came and said, ‘Don’t worry,’” he said.

If all you’ve seen are the highlights, I’d urge you not to worry about Salomonsson’s ability to play at the NHL level. There may be growing pains if he ends up sticking with the Jets once Neal Pionk recovers from his injury, but Salomonsson made a long list of good plays in his debut.

His breakout passes were crisp, with pucks landing on teammates’ tape. His shoulder-checking and scanning of the ice showed a good understanding of the defensive zone. Salomonsson made confident plays in the offensive zone, too, darting to his right late in the first period before putting a pass onto Scheifele’s stick in the middle of the ice. The pass led to a scoring chance and Vilardi scored right after the ensuing faceoff.

“I thought he showed a lot of maturity at times tonight,” Arniel said. “There were some real nice plays, he had some real nice breakouts and nice plays offensively. This is a tough building, that’s a tough team, that’s a tough game to come into and I thought he held his own.”

The Jets might rotate players through their lineup while Pionk is hurt. Luke Schenn sat on Wednesday, while Logan Stanley and Colin Miller played on the Jets’ third pairing. Salomonsson may make the best breakout passes of the three and is under team control until 2032. Winnipeg has more to gain from his development than that of pending UFA right-shot defencemen like Schenn and Miller.

And we know that clean zone exits contribute to offence. Salomonsson may help more than he hurts, even as he grows.

That’s not to say he’s a finished product or should never see the AHL again, but I think the Jets have more to gain from continued Salomonsson opportunity.

4. Remember that there’s a ton of season left

Maybe this is just a writer’s version of Charlie Brown trying to kick a football but there’s a chance the Jets will get healthy this season.

If Hellebuyck returns to game action after six weeks — the longer end of the four-to-six week timeline we were given — then he’ll play against Ottawa on January 3. On that date, the Jets will still have 43 games left on their schedule. Their other injured players — Lowry, Perfetti, and Samberg, who have all recently returned to action, plus Pionk — will have had another month to get up and running.

I can’t write a season preview about how Winnipeg will struggle (and why fans shouldn’t write the Jets off, despite those struggles) and then write Winnipeg’s season off with 60 games left to play. They’ve been a maddening team — they’re great at looking good for 8-10 minutes at a time — but they have shown measurable improvement in the past couple of weeks.

Scott Arniel was asked if he thinks the team is better than their record: “It’s funny, because the first 10 games we were showing a lot of red, but our record was real good. It wasn’t a recipe that was going to have success for 82 games.”

“Our last 10 games have been way better.… pic.twitter.com/JT0B2oNGiB

— Connor Hrabchak (@ConnorHrabchak1) November 25, 2025

The Jets do need to find secondary scoring. They are slow enough such that they struggle to break games open, outside of their top players. Their lack of foot speed also reduces the margin of error on every single read they make on the ice. And Hellebuyck’s return should coincide with a team playing a stronger five-on-five game than it did prior to his injury.

5. Be bold enough to address things by trade

Impatience is an option, too.

Even if I believe the Jets have enough runway to work with, they may not want to leave making the playoffs to chance. Winnipeg is all-in on its star players, its core, and its captain — and willing to be all-in on this era of its own history. But the window is closing on that era, whether Winnipeg wants it to or not.

The Jets have a limited number of shots at the playoffs before Hellebuyck, Scheifele, Lowry, and the rest of the oldest roster in the league this season age out of effectiveness. Hellebuyck turns 33 before the end of the season and just had his knee scoped. How many more years can the Jets be sure their No. 1 goaltender is among the best in the league?

This could be a good year for Winnipeg to be aggressive, if not in terms of the size of the assets sent away but with respect to the urgency of players brought back. Maybe the Jets don’t send a Grade A prospect and a first-round pick away for Ryan O’Reilly just yet. Maybe Alex Tuch has Winnipeg on his five-team no trade clause. Making a trade takes two teams to agree and often requires a player to waive their trade protection.

A team that wants to contend but needs help to make the playoffs would benefit from starting those conversations early this year.