Should the Winnipeg Jets actually sign Jonathan Toews

Is there anything there other than face offs?

The Winnipeg Jets’ season has ended, and we’re in the middle of breaking down who the Jets are, what they’re lacking, and what they should target this summer.

So, of course, Darren Dreger threw a wrench into the discussion by pumping out some wild theories:

This isn’t the first time I’ve touched on the subject. Jonathan Toews being from Winnipeg has made him a constant target in Winnipeg fan trade proposals since I first started discussing hockey on HFBoards.

It wasn’t until whispers of Toews’ potential availability leading up to the 2023 trade deadline that things shifted from NHL video game trades into a more real-world possibility.

And I did write about that previously:

That was during the 2022–23 season. Since then, there have been two—soon to be three—Stanley Cup champions.

So, let’s take a look at how the world has changed since then.

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But first… the series thus far

1. Winnipeg Jets 2024-25 Season and Playoffs Review

2. The case for and against Winnipeg Jets extending Nikolaj Ehlers

In our first post, we reviewed the Jets’ performance as a team in both the regular season and playoffs. We looked at team-level results and the general performance of the roster and its components.

In our second post, we took a deep dive into Nikolaj Ehlers—Kevin Cheveldayoff’s biggest offseason question.

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Who is Jonathan Toews… analytically speaking

I say “analytically speaking” because there are very, very, very few people reading this blog who don’t know the name. Heck, we named a lake after him.

Toews was, at one time, one of the greatest NHL players in the league. He was arguably the best NHL player at his peak, when “who is the top elite center?” was a hot debate.

During that time, Toews was a true number-one, all-situations centre. He was elite at creating 5v5 offense, an average setter with above-average finishing, solid on special teams, and a strong 5v5 defensive impact with elite penalty differential..

One thing that made Toews really efficient was that he rarely had his shots blocked, and those shots rarely missed the net.

Toews retained most of his elite 5v5 offensive impact for nearly his entire career. However, as he aged, his defensive impact, special teams play, and finishing talent steadily declined—starting around his 27th birthday.

In fact, his 5v5 defensive impact was already below league average by that point—something that heavily contrasts with his reputation. It was this declining defensive impact that dragged down his overall value from 2015 to 2018.

Those dates are important because they predate the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks we all recognize now. This was right after a Stanley Cup championship, and the team still made the playoffs twice afterward.

Toews’ defensive collapse happened before the Blackhawks became a very, very bad team. It was seemingly age-related decline—not team quality—that was pushing Toews downward.

His further decline in later years was driven by a drop in special teams performance. The most recent year’s complete drop-off came from his once-elite 5v5 offense—an area that had been making up for other deficiencies—falling to merely league average.

Wait, I thought he was good defensively?

Toews started performing below average in 5v5 defense in 2015 and became below average on the penalty kill by 2018. This is quite different from his reputation as a strong defensive center.

Why? Well… because of something that still matters, but is likely the most overrated stat in NHL history (either that or goalie wins): Face-offs.

Face-offs are very, very overrated. I could go deep into why, but I already did the last time Toews came up on Winnipeg’s radar, so let’s just copy and paste:

Toews has historically been solid at winning face-offs, and has done exceptionally well this season.

Face-offs matter… but they often get way over focused on in how much they matter. Why is that? There are multiple small things that add up to why:

• Winning allows you to start with possession but isn’t the only factor. Face-offs only account for 20% of how good or bad a team is at possession. And that has confounding influences as teams good at face-offs are likely better at other things, like puck battles.

• In many ways, face-offs are like most 50/50 puck battles that occur throughout the game.

• Teams that do well in FO% in the regular season are not really any more successful in the playoffs than teams that do not.

• About one-third of even strength face-offs take place in the neutral zone, which are very low impact. On average, you need just over 100 more face-off wins than loses to equate to a +1 goal differential improvement. (Which at 60% FO% means you need about 500 face-offs for 1 goal value)

• Looking outside of neutral zone face-offs, the defending team is heavily more likely to be the next one scored on… even if they win the face-off. You have to subtract difference to get the actual value of a win vs loss, but your brain and memory doesn’t work that way.

• Most players and teams are fairly close to 50% win rate.

Looking at Toews’ impact specifically:

• Toews has started 703 5v5 shifts with a face-off and we’ll pretend he’s taken all of these (which he hasn’t).

• 39% have been in the neutral zone, or 272 face-offs… or about 0.5 goal +/- in value at a 60% win rate.

• 431 have been in defensive or attacking zone, which at his win rate is about a +100 face-off win differential… or about +2.45 goal differential in value.

• So we estimate Toews’ elite face-off performance this season to being valued at about 3 goals (at 5v5).

Three goals is certainly better than 0, but it gives some context to volume. The spread in goal differential between top and bottom 5 percentile Corsi skaters on the third line is worth about 10 goals.

And, I would suspect that Toews would be taking substantially fewer face-offs even as a specialist simply due to fewer shifts and ice time.

The issue is that we all remember the face-off wins or losses that directly led to goals. We forget the hundreds that don’t—or even the ones where the team that lost the face-off still scored the next goal.

Face-offs should be treated as what they are: a means to an end—to improve shot quantity and quality. That means, like height, weight, and physicality, face-offs are already baked into a player’s impact on shot and expected goal differentials.

So how good would he be now?

It’s hard to say for certain. There’s no doubt that his performance is a long way from his best season as a 24-year-old—13 years ago—when Brad Lambert was only eight years old.

We’re talking about a 37-year-old who hasn’t played a season in over two calendar years, due to suffering from Long COVID, which affects stamina and the vascular system.

Regardless of how he was before, that alone is already a recipe for serious performance risk.

The other elephant in the room is his final season as a Blackhawk: Jonathan Toews was bad. Really bad.

Toews’ final season saw him post a -5.4 sG. For context, that’s about the same as the Jets’ worst forward this past season—Brandon Tanev (-6.1).

For those unfamiliar, sG—or synthetic goals—is a model that estimates what a player’s performance value would be if every player had the same deployment: same team, same linemates, same opponents, same zone starts, same power play and penalty kill time—same everything.

In theory, this model accounts for playing on a bad team. That said, some disagree. The argument is that it’s just hard to look good on epically bad teams.

I have a few responses to that.

Most bad teams are bad because of their top lines and pairs, not their depth players. Depth matters, but they play fewer minutes, and the minutes they do play have less impact on win percentage in terms of leverage.

Or, to paraphrase one NHL exec (who I’ll keep anonymous): Bad teams are usually bad because the players they think are good… are actually bad.

However, there’s something I’d call the mail-it-in effect. If you’re a skater on a terrible team that isn’t even trying to dress a competitive roster, then yeah—it can be hard to give a full effort.

One well-known example: Drew Doughty.

His performance dipped from 2018–2020, and many suggested he looked noticeably less interested and engaged. Some thought he was cooked, done, ready to retire—but as the team bounced back, so did he.

The dip wasn’t because playing on a weak team made it hard to perform. It was because playing on a weak team made it hard to want to perform.

There’s a difference.

In the latter case, the player earned that performance—even if it wasn’t skill that caused the drop.

Player aging curves are almost never smooth. There are a lot of ups and downs. Some of that is because models are estimates and have error margins. Some of it is that players give different levels of effort in different situations. Sometimes, hockey simply isn’t their top priority—like we saw with Josh Morrissey, when many were worried about his decline in 2020–2021.

These aren’t weaknesses of models, per se. Players’ actual performances—good or bad—are still largely based on what they produce, even if skill isn’t the only factor driving it.

And sometimes, health plays a big role.

I don’t think the mail-it-in effect was at play with Toews, because his decline appears much more steady and consistent.

That said, there's an argument that his final season might have been better if not for health issues.

Even then, you have to ask: How much has he recovered? And how close is his new self to his former baseline? Especially since the last time he produced top-six forward value by the sG model was when Cole Perfetti was drafted, or Logan Stanley and Patrik Laine for the xGAR model.

There’s a wide range of realistic outcomes. I think he could potentially be a decent third-line center if he’s truly healthy again and if his decline was mostly health-related.

The more likely scenario is that he performs like a fourth-line skater—this time due to age-related decline, rather than illness.

That said, a 2C role, like Darren Dreger suggested, is a pretty wild speculation not grounded in reality.

Should the Jets do it then?

I’m really hesitant to say they should—it depends on quite a few factors.

Given the right price and the right projected role, Toews could be a neat story: a homecoming and a final push for one more Cup run. I’m sure the move would sell a lot of jerseys in Manitoba, too.

If Toews hasn’t lost his fastball, he could provide some secondary offense to the Jets’ bottom six. Even-strength offense—especially from the bottom half of the roster—has been a sore point, and was the team’s biggest issue in the playoffs outside of goaltending.

He could be an upgrade on Vlad Namestnikov and Rasmus Kupari on the fourth line, and could fill in on the third line while Adam Lowry recovers from hip surgery.

That said, the could is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There’s a very real chance Toews isn’t even an upgrade over Namestnikov—or possibly even Kupari.

That realistic chance means the risk needs to be counterweighted by a very low AAV, and by the willingness to demote or cut ties if things don’t work out. Given the supposed “long list of clubs with interest” and the Jets’ history with underperforming players with “intangible value,” I’m not confident either will happen.

Despite his poor final season, contracts are often driven by ice time, usage, and counting stats. As such, Evolving-Hockey.com’s projection model estimated Toews at one year, $2.3 million.

There’s one more issue.

The optics of a homecoming are great—but there’s another set of optics that I’ve shared before:

Kyle Beach: Cheveldayoff was the AGM at the time, and Toews was the captain. I’m not an expert on the situation, nor do I know all the right things to say, but there’s more to life than hockey. This entire scenario raises important concerns beyond just the sport.

That’s all for this one. Next week, we’ll get back on track with a keep-or-drop breakdown of the Jets’ pending free agents, aside from Ehlers, who we’ve already profiled: