Better luck next year: The Winnipeg Jets and revisiting the problem with elite goaltending

Great goaltending alone will only take a team so far.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Winnipeg Jets.

In the very early days of this newsletter I wrote about the 2022-23 New York Rangers and how sometimes elite goaltending can be more of a long-term curse than anything else. It is obviously great to have and it can completely change the outlook of a season, playoff series or an entire postseason. The truly great goalies — or even good goalies having truly great seasons — can lift ordinary teams to extraordinary results.

The problem is that in most cases that alone is not enough to win it all, and it can sometimes limit the ceiling of what a team can do because it does not always give the most accurate look at how good it actually is. It can trick front offices into thinking their team is closer to winning than it is because a lot of their flaws are getting covered up by a goalie that is stealing games on a nightly basis.

The Carey Price Montreal Canadiens.

The Henrik Lundqvist New York Rangers (and perhaps even the Igor Shesterkin Rangers to a smaller extent).

The Dominik Hasek Buffalo Sabres.

Even the Ilya Sorokin-Semyon Varlamov New York Islanders as a more recent example.

All of those teams had (or have) elite goalies that were consistently among the best in the NHL, and they won a lot of regular season games and found success because of it. But they never actually won a Stanley Cup and rarely — if ever — got close to it. And it wasn’t because the goalies were overrated or were not good enough.

They simply never had the right supporting casts around them, and they never seemed to get enough help in terms of roster construction to get there.

Elite goalies will take you far by themselves. But there is a limit to it, and eventually even the great ones can no longer keep carrying the team.

All of that brings us to Connor Hellebuyck and the 2023-24 Winnipeg Jets, a team that exceeded all preseason expectations by winning 52 games and gaining home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs, and then proceeded to get absolutely crushed by a far superior team in the playoffs.

Goaltending drove most of that regular season success.

When it disappeared in the playoffs all of the flaws suddenly showed up all at once.

The Jets are clearly a step or two below the top-tier Stanley Cup contenders in the NHL and have a ways to go before they can join them. The question is whether or not the front office will take the correct lessons from this loss and make the proper fixes in the offseason.

Let’s talk about it.