Jets GM confident his moves good for team

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2019 (2385 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If they gave out Stanley Cups to the franchise that racks up the most deadline-day trades, the Winnipeg Jets would be planning a parade down to Portage and Main right now.

After all, Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff left every other executive in his dust with a dizzying display Monday, the likes of which we’ve never seen around these parts. He had the NHL office on speed dial, morphing into Monty Hall for a few hours and playing Let’s Make a Deal with his counterparts across the league.

You wonder if officials at the central trade registry started thinking they were being pranked every time the phone rang with a 204 area code. “Hey guys, get a load of who’s on line one. It’s Chevy. AGAIN!”

Six new faces were brought in. Two familiar ones were shipped out, along with at least four draft picks. That is a whole lot of moving and shaking in short order, especially for a “draft and development” team that is now considered a legitimate Stanley Cup contender.

It’s fair to ask the question: if things were going so well, why the extreme makeover? Just look at the Tampa Bay Lightning, who are pretty much lapping the field these days and were absolutely silent on Monday. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

So what to make of the Jets, who have been anything but perfect lately. There’s plenty of reason for concern with the team’s play, a 3-5-2 stretch over the last 10 games, including a disappointing 4-1 loss Sunday evening in Arizona.

Sure, they still woke up Monday morning in first place in the Central Division, but the Nashville Predators and even the St. Louis Blues have made up ground lately, and the immediate road ahead doesn’t get easier, with nine straight games against teams currently sitting in a playoff spot, starting Tuesday night against the Minnesota Wild.

With 21 regulation losses through 62 games, Winnipeg already has one more than the 20 they had through 82 games last season. Doesn’t exactly feel like a team poised to go four rounds, does it?

And so Cheveldayoff threw his struggling team a life-raft, landing one of the big trade-deadline fish in Kevin Hayes. To do so, he parted with a young player in Brendan Lemieux and a first-round draft pick, just as he did last February to acquire another talented centre in Paul Stastny.

That had to sting, at least a little.

“Valuable. Really valuable,” Cheveldayoff said Monday when asked the value of a first-rounder.

“Like, don’t ever underestimate it and don’t ever think it’s an easy thing to just sit there and just do it. You look at how we built this organization, and we will have to build this organization continuing with those draft picks. As excited as you are for the immediate, come talk to me in Vancouver (at the 2019 draft in June) and see how lonely I am. But hopefully it’s way down at the end of the draft floor.”

That last line was a reference to where the Stanley Cup winner’s table is set up, by the way.

“It’s about taking advantage of the opportunity that you have in front of you. You never go in saying, ‘I’m going to trade my first-round pick.’ You go in to try to make a deal that works for you — it has to fit for you. And you have to be comfortable with the acquisition price. We are in both instances — very comfortable with the fit for this team and comfortable with the acquisition price.”

It was another strong message sent about the team being “all-in,” recognizing the window of opportunity is open, and not for eternity. Considering how other Western Conference powers also loaded up, it was also a necessary move. The status quo wasn’t going to cut it.

The Vegas Golden Knights added Mark Stone, a player the Jets were very much in on until the asking price apparently got too high. (Vegas gave up perhaps the NHL’s best blue-line prospect, a player off its roster and a draft pick). Nashville got Mikael Granlund and Wayne Simmonds. The San Jose Sharks brought in Gustav Nyquist.

For the record, Cheveldayoff insisted this wasn’t about keeping up with the Joneses or pushing any kind of panic button with regards to what he’s seen lately from his team — I find that last one a bit hard to believe — but rather sticking to the plan first set out when he took the helm of the team in 2011.

“I like this group. No two years are ever going to be similar, even if you have every single player the same. You’re going to go through your ups, you’re going to go through your downs, you’re going to have your adversity. I think that, if you look at ultimate Stanley Cup championship teams in the end and you dissect their seasons, it’s never really all that smooth. It’s never one straight line from start to finish,” said Cheveldayoff.

It’s important to note the Jets also didn’t mortgage the future in terms of prospects already in the fold, short of saying goodbye to fourth-line forwards Brendan Lemieux and Nic Petan. They held on to youngsters Jack Roslovic, Mason Appleton, Sami Niku, Tucker Poolman, Kristian Vesalainen, Eric Comrie, Logan Stanley and Dylan Samberg, among others, who had been linked in ongoing trade talks.

As Cheveldayoff said, the building continues for an organization that is in pretty good shape right now, with no guarantees of how long that might last.

“I think from Day 1, with the organization and my tenure here, we’ve said we’ll do whatever we need to do,” he said.

“It’s a tough day to buy, because it’s expensive. There’s lots of things that you have to pay for. But as an organization, as a players group, as a coaching staff, they earned the right for me to try to make these moves, to try to provide the depth and try and get some pieces that fit to maybe give us a push.”

Now it remains to be seen just how far that push might take them.

“I like what we did today for our organization. The game is played on the ice. It’s not played in the boardroom, or in the dressing room, or on the score sheet or the stat sheet that gets handed out at the beginning of the game. The moves we did were discussed and calculated and I feel good about it,” said Cheveldayoff.

Yes, the Jets got quantity at the trade deadline. But time will tell if they’ve added the quality needed to plan one of those real parades later this year.

 

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg