Giving The Farm Away
Announced earlier this morning, the DEL's Adler Mannheim have inked 2017 fifth-round pick Leon Gawanke to a four-year deal, making him unable to skate for the Jets or the Moose for the foreseeable future. With Gawanke's departure, the Moose lose another very good, very capable defender whose skills have once more been overlooked and underappreciated by both management and coaches of the Jets.
Gawanke's last two seasons in the AHL pointed to a defenceman whose stock was rising within the Jets organization. He scored ten goals and 36 points in 65 games in 2021-22, and then doubled his offensive spark by scoring 20 goals and 45 points in 68 games this season. You can argue that his stats may not be "NHL-ready", but he tied for seventh in AHL scoring among defencemen and he finished with more points than Michael Del Zotto, Will Butcher, and Connor Carrick who have all skated for NHL teams for at least one season.
Gawanke will be good for Adler Mannheim, though, so kudos for the Eagles picking up a puck-moving, offensively-minded defender to skate on their blue line. Winnipeg's efforts in "draft and develop" are working wonders for teams not based in Manitoba, it seems, and those players who have chosen to remain in the Jets' depth chart are buried nicely behind overpriced veteran players who apparently enjoy playing one playoff round in seasons where they qualify for the playoffs.
Don't believe me? Here's the breakdown in simple numbers between 2015-2020 as those players should be eligible NHL players:
- The Jets drafted 37 players including seven first-rounders.
- In total, those 37 players have played 2319 NHL games - an average of 63 games/player for all teams.
- First-round selections have played 1602 games - 69.1% of the 2319 games for all teams.
- Only 15 of 37 drafted players have skated for the Jets at some point - 40.5% of all picks.
- Of those 15 players, Kyle Connor has skated in the most games as a Winnipeg Jet at 466 games.
- Of those 15 players, five are currently playing for teams other than the Jets - 1/3 of picks that made an NHL roster.
- Of the 37 players drafted, 13 are still somewhere on the Jets' depth charts.
If the Jets are developing just 26.7% of their non-first-round picks to skate at the NHL level, this is not a "draft and develop" team. It's only a "draft" team because there isn't much development happening when it comes to producing NHL talent. First-rounders are thriving, but the work needed for players selected lower in the draft simply isn't being realized if it's being done at all.
Since this team returned to Winnipeg in 2011, players drafted in the fourth-round or lower have skated in 1512 NHL games. If we remove Andrew Copp, Connor Hellebuyck, Mason Appleton, and Tucker Poolman from that total, fourth-round picks or lower have skated in just 92 NHL games. Of the 42 selections made in the fourth-round or lower in twelve years of Jets 2.0 hockey, just four - 9.5% of picks - have played over 100 games, and two of them skate for teams not named the Jets.
If you're wondering why I'm dissecting the draft history of the Jets when it comes to NHL talent, the problems are compounded by Winnipeg allowing good young players to walk away from this team due to variety of reasons. Most times, NHL teams draft players based on their skills - scoring, defence, and goaltending - and the Jets are no different. They celebrate the scoring skills of players they draft while talking of development, but it should be clear that the Jets haven't learned a damn thing when it comes to the new way of thinking in the NHL.
The Curious Case Of Comrie
If we consider the case of Eric Comrie, a 59th-overall pick in 2013, the Jets simply couldn't figure out what to do with their developing netminder. He'd win games and look superb at times, but he'd also suffer games where stopping the puck seemed more like a challenge than a routine. In three months in 2019, he was waived to go to Arizona from Winnipeg, to Detroit in a trade with Arizona, and back to Winnipeg off waivers from Detroit as he lived out of a suitcase. Chevy again lost him on waivers to New Jersey in 2021 only to reclaim him a month later. It was hard to understand what Chevy was doing with Comrie after all those moves, but it seemed they wanted him based on the number of times they reacquired him.Backup netminders are paid to win the few games they play in place of the team's starting netminder. Comrie seemingly could do that for Winnipeg as he was 10-5-1 with a 2.58 GAA and a .920 save percentage in 2021-22 while earning the league's minimum salary value, so it was baffling that the Jets allowed him to walk as a free agent by not playing for 90 more minutes in that season to retain his rights as a restricted free agent. Yes, he may have played above his head, but given the option of either David Rittich or Eric Comrie, I'll take the 27 year-old kid over the proven-to-fail veteran.
Yet Winnipeg, needing just 90 more minutes of playing time out of Comrie, allowed him to leave without any compensation for his play in 2021-22. Even if the Jets believed this was an aberration in his career where he'd never have another season like this, teams are always hedging their bets on young goalies. The Jets could have simply qualified him, and then traded Comrie to bring back an asset. All it would have meant was 90 more minutes in the blue paint, and the Jets might have been able to maximize his value. Instead, he signed with Buffalo while the Jets searched for another inexpensive backup netminder.
Too Many Defenders
It wasn't hard to see that the high-priced defenders that the Jets had assembled on their roster for the start of the 2022-23 season was going to push players back down to the AHL, but the one player expected to go was Logan Stanley. Instead, the Jets waived Johnathan Kovacevic in a rather inexplicable move to send him to the Moose only to watch the Montreal Canadiens claim the defender after a solid preseason. He didn't score, but he played physical, had good gap control, and seemed to fit nicely into the bottom-half of the Jets' defence corps.Instead, Montreal used him in 77 games this season where the 6'4" defender scored three goals and added 12 helpers while only being whistled for 39 PIMs. Earning the league's minimum salary, Kovacevic showed his value by anchoring the defence on the third pairing while providing valuable penalty-killing shifts for the Canadiens in his 16:55 of ice-time per game.
Nobody expected him to be Shea Weber or Erik Karlsson, but he was leaps and bounds better than Logan Stanley ever was. Chevy's failure on this one was not recognizing his mistakes in drafting Stanley in the first round and then sacrificing Kovacevic to keep him on the depth chart. That's just inexcusable.
How About Mikey?
Another player that the Jets mismanaged into a better situation than what he had in Winnipeg was Michael Eyssimont. Leaps and bounds more effective than both Sam Gagner and Mason Appleton in a third-line role alongside Morgan Barron and Adam Lowry, Eyssimont was the player that threw himself completely into his work. His advanced stats were much better than his point totals, but he was expected to cause chaos in the offensive zone with his touch and he often was praised for his work ethic.Somehow, Eyssimont ended up on waivers as the Jets couldn't find a spot for him in the lineup, and the San Jose Sharks scooped up the available forward where his additional ice-time and play in all situations benefitted him greatly. In fact, he looked quite at home alongside Logan Couture on the Sharks' second line until the Sharks flipped him to Tampa Bay. And when he got to the Lightning, he was given the same green light by Jon Cooper as he had in San Jose.
All said, Eyssimont totalled a goal and four assists in 20 games with the Jets, but rattled off four goals and six assists in 35 games between San Jose and Tampa Bay, and then added another goal and an assist in three playoff games by the Lightning. It leads one to ask how on earth does Cheveldayoff continually misjudge the talent he has on his roster?
What About Axel?
In a similar lack of astuteness when it comes to asset management, the Jets seemingly didn't care enough to keep forward Axel Jonsson-Fjällby around after he joined the Jets as a waiver pickup from Washington after 23 games. He played in 50 regular season games for the Jets and appeared in one playoff game to end the season with 74 games where he scored eight goals and ten assists. It should be noted that was more than Saku Mäenalanen (four goals, seven assists in 69 games) and Sam Gagner (eight goals, six assist in 48 games) in their entire season of work.Beyond that, the speedy Jonsson-Fjällby was an excellent forechecker and played hard on the penalty kill when sent over the boards, but I guess making the league minimum was too rich for the Jets' blood and they missed his contract requirement of 75 NHL games by one game in order to keep him as a restricted free agent, allowing him instead to become a Group 6 UFA on July 1.
While his stats certainly won't have all 31 NHL franchises lining up for a shot at signing him, Jonsson-Fjällby is a very serviceable player who will help teams be better. He's not going to win an Art Ross Trophy nor captain an NHL team, but he doesn't have to as long as he plays in his role like he did here in Winnipeg. And the Jets will receive nothing for him if they had deemed him expendable just like Comrie.
Burying The Best
The Jets, at one time, owned the rights of the best defender in the AHL in Sami Niku. Niku was voted as the AHL's best defenceman in 2017-18 as he collected the Eddie Shore Award that year, and it seemed the Jets may have found another highly-skilled offensive defenceman in the flashy Finn. Detractors of Niku will point to his inability to move players from in front of the net or his avoiding physical play while looking for loose pucks as problems with his game, but at no point was he ever seen as an Erik Černák, a Jan Rutta, a Brendan Dillon, or a Jake Muzzin.Time and time again, though, we saw Niku planted in the pressbox when called up. Paul Maurice opted to dress Dmitry Kulikov over him in January 2020. Luca Sbisa and Anthony Bitetto were played ahead of him. Somehow, Carl Dahlstrom got ice time over Niku. It would be one thing if the Jets were a sound defensive hockey club under Paul Maurice, but they weren't. They were pretty darn horrible when it came to most metrics, so why not add some offence to the mix if you can't prevent teams from scoring?
Sami Niku, the AHL's top defender in 2017-18 with the Manitoba Moose, played 54 games with the Jets in parts of four seasons, scoring two goals and eight assists. The Jets then put him on waivers in 2020-21 order to buy out his contract.
If the Jets believed they could develop a Lidstrom-type defender, they went about it all wrong. If they thought they could get him to rachet up the physical play, they completely missed the boat on Niku as a prospect. He was an offensive defenceman through and through, and it's hard to understand how the Jets missed so badly on Niku.
Confused By Offence
It seems the Jets are falling into the same problem they had with Niku when it comes to Ville Heinola. He's virtually the same defenceman as Niku was - slight in stature, all offence, very little physicality - and it seems the Jets have no clue what to do with him other than bury him in the AHL. He can skate, he has good vision, and he does occasionally turn the puck over when trying to push the offence, but he's never going to be a traditional defensive defenceman.How long does Heinola stick around the Jets organization? No one can be too sure, but he has 35 games of experience in four seasons so I don't think averaging nine games per campaign is going to make him anxious to return when his contract expires.
Back To Leon
You can probably see why a skilled German offensive defenceman would look at the depth chart - one where he's never been called up from the Moose to the Jets - and figure he's better off playing elsewhere. He's never been close to winning anything in North America as a junior player or as a professional, and he made that very clear in Mannheim's release, stating, "I haven't won anything in my career and I'm hungry for titles. I want to win the championship with Mannheim."As North Americans snicker at the idea of winning a DEL championship being on the same level as the Stanley Cup, it needs to be mentioned that a lot of European players take extra pride in winning their nation's top league. Whether it be Joel Lundqvist in the SEL, Ilya Kovalchuk in the KHL, or Jussi Jokinen in the SM-Liiga, there's a ton of personal and civic pride in these players returning home to help their clubs win their respective championships. Gawanke seems to be the next young player to follow that thinking with his four-year pact with Mannheim. Hockey is simply viewed differently in Europe than it is here, and I commend Gawanke for going where he's wanted.
There's The Door
Whether it be his trainwreck of a season-ending press conference, his belief that the Jets' core group is good enough when it clearly isn't, his rather terrible draft record that he claims is good, or his brutal asset management within the organization, it seems pretty clear that Kevin Cheveldayoff's time with the Jets should have been over long ago. Quite frankly, it should have been over when the Blackhawks' sexual assualt coverup unfolded, but Chevy somehow eluded the axe in that chaos. In my view, having Gawanke sign overseas with no conversation with management says more than enough about the problems within Chevy's kingdom.At this point, there's not much for which fans should be optimistic when it comes to next year. If the team was going to purge a number of veteran contracts and go young, they're losing good young replacements quickly. While Heinola and Chisholm are likely ready to step in and be part of a rebuild, the Jets have no goaltending candidates ready to step forward nor do they have a deep enough pool of netminders that they can wait a year or two. In short, a rebuild will be long and painful because the Jets' ability to keep good, young players seems be something with which they struggle. Based on the number of players that have been waived only to excel elsewhere, Chevy's done a helluva job in giving the farm away.
Culture and player issues aside, none of this should surprise anyone. Chevy's been here for twelve years, meaning he's watched three coaches battle players inside the room and through the media while nothing has changed. He's watched his team make one phenomenal run to the 2018 Western Conference Final while spending the rest of the time holding that up as an achievement and justifying his contract through various letdowns and disappointments. As critical as I may seem right now, the NHL is a business that excels when teams are winning, and if the Jets are wondering why their season ticket numbers continue to fall they should look no further than the office with the General Manager's name on it.
Since there's only one man who has continually said that he's in charge of the team, it's his head that should roll. He made it clear in his season-ending chat with the media that he's the guy making decisions, and it seems pretty clear that he's responsible for the messes shown above. If he's going to thump his chest and take credit for the team's successes as he did with the media, he's also responsible for the mistakes and failures they've experienced. Based on the lack of development throughout the organization outside of a couple of players and based on the number of players he's simply gifted to other organizations along the way, it's time for that man to be dismissed as easily as he's dismissed talented players.
In short, Kevin Cheveldayoff is the problem with the Winnipeg Jets.
Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!
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