The Winnipeg Jets are going to find out a lot about themselves

The Winnipeg Jets announced on Friday that three-time Vezina Trophy winning goalie, and reigning league MVP, Connor Hellebuyck is going to miss the next four-to-six-weeks with a knee injury.

Elite goaltending can be as much of a curse as it is a blessing for an NHL team.

The blessing, of course, is that an elite goalie can hep you win a lot of games. Show me a team that overachieved and exceeded expectations in any season, and there is a good chance I can show you a good goalie. Show me a coach of the year, and I will show you a coach that probably has a great goaltending performance to lean back on.

On the contrary, show me an underachieving team, and I will probably show you a bad goalie. Show me a coach that got fired and, you guessed it, I will probably be showing you a bad goalie.

Goalies change everything.

The curse that comes with that is the more elite the goalie is, the more it can mask and hide flaws that might be existing underneath the surface on a team. It can make teams think or believe they are better than they actually are, preventing them from making meaningful and necessary improvements to get better. After all, we are winning a lot of games. Why should we think there is anything wrong or look to improve in areas or look for flaws? Winning is all that matters. Winning fixes everything.

Sometimes, however, winning does not tell the entire story of your hockey team.

This can actually end up lowering a team’s ceiling and ultimately hold it back. It is a big reason why I believe the Montreal Canadiens never won anything meaningful with Carey Price. It was/has been a similar story with Henrik Lundqvist and Igor Shesterkin with the New York Rangers.

To a degree, the same thing has kind of been happening with the Winnipeg Jets.

(I have written about this in this space a couple of times now.)

Winnipeg has been a good team the past few years, and at times a very good team. The past two Jets teams were around the top-10 in the NHL in terms of their underlying 5-on-5 numbers and their ability to drive play, while they have a lot of really good players at the top of their lineup. Mark Scheifele and Kyle Connor are great scorers and offensive players. Joshua Morrissey is a Norris caliber defenseman. There is talent here, and the type of high-end talent you want to see for a contending team.

But there have also been some flaws when it comes to the team’s depth and some of its defensive play. What has always elevated the team and hid some of those flaws has been the presence of starting goalie Connor Hellebuyck.

He is a three-time Vezina Trophy winner, the reigning league MVP, and has had a save percentage higher than .910 in each of the past nine years. In seven of the previous eight seasons it has been .915 or higher. He is as good as it gets, and one of the few goalies in the league that you can consistently count on to deliver big numbers and produce every single season.

He is, by almost every objective measure, one of the two or three best goalies on the planet right now, and he’s not usually No. 2 or 3 in those rankings.

He has had some struggles in the playoffs in recent years, but he is a big part of what gets the Jets to the playoffs and helps them win so many games in the regular season.

The problem the Jets are going to run into now is that they are going to be without Hellebuyck for the next four-to-six weeks after undergoing a knee surgery procedure on Friday.

This is going to be an interesting time period for the Jets because it might tell them about how good they really are, and whether or not they have some significant flaws that goaltending is hiding.

The numbers suggest they do. Even more than in recent years.

Let’s talk about it.