The Winnipeg Jets Recipe For Success is Clear
Writing a series update after the first game seems a bit silly, but here we are. This post will be a bit shorter than the future versions, where we will answer your questions and go into more depth as our number of games increases.
But first, a look at prospects…
Prospect Updates
Manitoba Moose
The Manitoba Moose have been much better in their second half of the season. Ville Heinola, Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, and Dominic Toninato were huge injections of talent. Plus, the Jets young players like Brad Lambert and Nikita Chibrikov have further developed and rounded out their game.
The largest impact though was the call up of Thomas Milic. Milic’s 0.900 save percentage may not be much relative to the league, but the Moose have carried a 0.871 without Milic, which equates to one fewer goal against every 35 shots.
The Jets rested some of their vets last week, with games not impacting the standings. The two biggest beneficiaries were prospect Colby Barlow, who on an ATO scored three points in his three games, and Ville Heinola, who picked up some of Kyle Capobianco’s heavy offensive deployment and scored a goal, four assists, and a +5 over those two games.
Moving back to Barlow, it was great to see him play well under the Moose, but being a realist I do have to temper some expectations. It’s small samples and he did score about twice as much as we’d expect given his OHL production. A cautionary reminder of Daniel Torgersson going on a preseason torrid scoring pace once. That said, him fitting in well while not being predictive of a specific performance is still a positive signal of future success, and that is highly positive.
Arround the World
Pavel Kraskovsky’s team is trailing two games in the KHL finals. Kraskovsky did not get a point on Lokomotiv Yaroslavl’s only goal over those two games. They are currently playing their third match and trailing 1-0.
Elias Salomonsson played one game in the SHL finals thus far, where his team won 1-0. Salomonsson played just over 20 minutes, got a shot on net, +1, and with the team’s second-highest 54% Corsi for defenders. Salomonsson is also playing his next game but it is currently scoreless.
Jacob Julien and the London Knights are having quite the playoffs. They were always solid contenders but they have been dominant, sweeping both their first series 4-0. Julien leads the Knights in points with 7 goals and 5 assists in 8 games played. Six of Julien’s points come from the power play, leading his team in that area as well. He is sixth on his team for shots on goal per game.
Zachary Nehring has two assists in Sioux Falls’ three games. That’s nearly half the five-assist production Nehring put up over 44 games over the USHL’s regular season. Sioux Falls was eliminated in their best of three, falling two games to one. Nehring will graduate to Western Michigan University in the NCAA next season. I am not expecting much from him, but I’m sure the Jets were hoping an 18-year-old third-round pick would have dominated the USHL.
The Playoffs
As we discussed yesterday, the Winnipeg Jets may have won 7-6 but it wasn’t exactly a recipe for long-term success. That said, there were ingredients there, to continue the metaphor.
Every Jet spent more time in the defensive zone than the alternative, but the top line did still come out ahead in weighted shots. As noted previously, weighted shots combine goals and non-goal shots but with goals much more heavily weighted. I further refined that model by using expected goals to regress shooting and save percentages.
Kyle Connor had himself a decent game, not only in the outcome performance numbers above, but also in some of the other numbers we’ll go over below.
While the top line performed well in performance metrics and looked pretty good in the microstatistics I tracked, I would not say the same for the Jets’ second pair. The Winnipeg Jets outperformed the Colorado Avalanche with Brenden Dillon and Neal Pionk on the ice, but I would view that more as in spite rather than because. Although, to be fair, that statement is mostly in regard to the latter player than the former.
The Mark Scheifele line primarily faced off against the Mittelstadt line, and they were beaten up in those minutes. However, they were able to somewhat make up for that performance against MacKinnon and Trenin.
The Sean Monahan line was split between MacKinnon and Colton, faring better against the latter line. They also fared well against Mittelstadt, but — like the Scheifele line against MacKinnon and Trenin — I believe most of that comes from awkward in-between-line-change moments where the team or opponents are trapped.
As expected, the Adam Lowry line was hard-matched as much as possible against MacKinnon. While the MacKinnon line did control most of the play, the overall impact was fairly minor as they played a low-event game.
The line match the Jets were expected to win, Gustafsson versus Trenin, actually ended up being in Colorado’s favor.
I’m interested to see how things unfold in the next game. I expect we’ll see similar line combinations and deployment next time. However, I expect we see the top line facing MacKinnon more when the Jets travel to Denver.
On defense, the Josh Morrissey top pair was deployed mostly against the opposition’s top-six, with a slight tilt towards MacKinnon. The Dillon pair then was split fairly evenly across all, with a bit of a focus on Mittelstadt’s second line. Finally, the Dylan Samberg pair struggled to move out the puck against the Avalanche’s bottom-six.
Again, I do not foresee the Jets making many changes here in terms of their line matchups, but I would suggest maybe making some tweaks to the bottom pair as they struggled to move out the puck against the fast and aggressive play of Colorado.
Rick Bowness prefers to look at his line distributions based on who they are playing against rather than who they play with. I think that occasionally led to some issues with the Dillon-Pionk pairing often playing with the Scheifele line. They often get trapped in their own zone together, as there’s no dominant ice-tilting player in that five-player unit. The Jets top line is mostly counter-strike, rope-a-dope, and cycle offense types.
Now let’s look at the microstats I have been tracking manually.
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