The Winnipeg Jets dropped their Monday night contest to the Buffalo Sabres 5-1 in an effort that felt like pre-Rick Bowness era levels of embarrassing.
Winnipeg entered the second period down 3-0, and they pulled Eric Comrie from the net to jolt the team, but that proved to be a futile move as Winnipeg allowed Buffalo to look like an elite team.
Without Connor Hellebuyck, Winnipeg’s Vezina and Hart-winning goaltender, the Jets are in a free fall that they haven’t seen since the 2022-23 season. The Jets are 1-6-0 without Hellebuyck and are on an abysmal stretch where they’ve lost nine of their last 13 games. Winnipeg sits sixth in the Central Division with a 13-12-0 overall record as they fight to stay out of last place.
Since the stretch, there is a visible refusal to adjust the style the Winnipeg Jets are playing in Hellebuyck’s absence to erase the errors they’ve made. They simply will not adapt, as other teams have figured them out and are beating them with ease.
In every sense, the game was a trainwreck, and nobody was safe from it, as Murat Ates of The Athletic posted on X.
Simply put, Winnipeg bled too many chances where they were caught scrambling to do anything to recover. A 5-1 loss was nearly much worse, given Buffalo had many other grade A chances throughout the entire game.
I don’t have to remind anyone, but Winnipeg was the best defensive team in the past two seasons. Tonight was an effort that can’t be replicated again, given what the team has achieved since Rick Bowness moulded the team into, and the heights Scott Arniel took the team to last season.
It feels like rock bottom for the Jets, but one has to wonder if things are going to get worse. They look slow on the ice, and a young and upcoming team like Buffalo exposed that perfectly in a game where Winnipeg looked like they were getting an extra skate in.
The veterans of this team are making mistakes that haven’t been seen since Rick Bowness first took over the team. It’s such a long-winded subject that even the right words can’t emphasize how hard this team has fallen on its face.
Simply put, Scott Arniel is coaching like he’s afraid to make changes.
You don’t win the Presidents’ Trophy and many other trophies around the league by pure fluke. The Winnipeg Jets are arguably one of the best teams in the NHL when healthy, and when they’re playing to the style they can play to.
Many will point to the head coach or the General Manager of the team, but there seems to be one deep cut to this team that’s affected them so far, and that’s the loss of Nikolaj Ehlers.
Ehlers has 16 points (5G, 11A) in 25 games played for Carolina this season, and those are numbers he’s posted after his slow start to the year. Since his departure in the 2025 offseason, the Jets haven’t had a true killer instinct in the middle-six.
His contributions, even in the limited ice time he received, were far more impactful than most realized, and now it’s hitting the team as they cannot find an answer to fill that void.
The Jets, even with an above-average power play this season, miss the chemistry Ehlers provided when he was part of the top power play unit, especially in crucial moments in do-or-die games.
There are also questions as to why none of the draft picks are ready yet, most notably by former Winnipeg Sun Jets beat reporter Scott Billeck, and that simply isn’t true. Some of Winnipeg’s most notable prospects on the Manitoba Moose right now are Brad Lambert and Nikita Chibrikov. Give them a chance in the middle-six and not the fourth line to have a chance to help the team, and they could possibly do better than some of the players in the lineup, given this road stretch.
Other names that are with the Moose are Danny Zhilkin, Brayden Yager, Walker Duehr, David Gustafsson, Parker Ford, Phillip Di Giuseppe, and Samuel Fagemo, a long list of names that could reshape the Jets’ bottom six for the better if they want to win games going forward.
Add the Jets’ refusal to make any significant roster changes, most notably breaking up the top line of Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Gabriel Vilardi, and now it feels like the players are dictating the lineup instead of the coaching staff addressing core issues. It feels like things are being done the coaching staff’s way rather than solving the lack of secondary scoring and defensive structure the team has to return to.
It feels as if teams have figured out the Winnipeg Jets and noticed they’re going to be weaker since they’ve lost core pieces to their lineup over the past two offseasons.
There are better options the Jets can inject into the lineup, but the refusal to make the changes has sewered this team. Hellebuyck’s absence is not helping a team in free fall, but the dam needs to be closed before things fall beyond rock bottom.
Does this team promote Brad Lambert or Nikita Chibrikov into prominent roles anytime soon? That remains to be seen, but the Jets certainly need to stop forcing the same lines every night while hoping for a different result.
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