Jets Beginning to Gain Altitude Back to Identity

The Jets, a club that captured its first Presidents’ Trophy last season, take pride in following their blueprint for success, which has stout defensive structure as its foundation.

That’s why, despite going 7-3-0 in their first 10, no one was doing a victory lap — they knew their play was far too loose and far below the standard they expect of themselves.

“We probably still haven’t played our best game yet. I think that’s the encouraging part,” Mark Scheifele, who has a team-leading 20 points, said Friday.

“Obviously our record is good, but we still have a lot to work on. But we have a group that is eager to keep getting better and growing as a team and growing as a group. Just gotta keep pushing forward,” the top centre continued. (From ‘Jets looking for a November to remember,’ Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 31, 2025.)

The Jets often looked like a different team from period to period through their first 10, were getting caved in at five on five, and struggled in second periods especially. Them not being wholly consistent right away was not necessarily a shock they were and are without the injured Adam Lowry, Cole Perfetti, and Dylan Samberg — three players who have bought in completely to the team ethos — and were trying to incorporate a number of new players into their regime.

However, a team with Stanley Cup aspirations must — as now-retired head coach Rick Bowness used to say — embrace solutions, not excuses.

Gabriel Vilardi called the win over the Blackhawks the team’s most complete of the season, and he wasn’t wrong, but the win over the Penguins was even more lapse-free.

“That looks more like us from last year,” second-year head coach Scott Arniel said after the latter game.

“I thought we played extremely fast. We got out of our zone fast. We got zone transition. We moved it quick. We didn’t hold on to pucks. We didn’t dust it off. We didn’t take it back. We’re hard to defend when we come after people with speed like that.”

Kyle Connor, who has eight goals on the season already, agreed with Arniel. “We were dialled in,” he said. “We were on our toes today, playing right.”

Even though their first 10 weren’t perfect, the Jets already had some good things going for them: scintillating starts from Scheifele and Connor, excellent special teams, decent production from three different lines, and great goaltending from Connor Hellebuyck and Eric Comrie among them.

None of those things are as sustainable as playing shutdown defense and translating that into offense at five on five. However, if they can find a way to keep those aspects going for the most part while consistently playing as strongly team-wide as they did versus the Blackhawks and Penguins, they’ll soon be soaring along and potentially ready to hit warp speed when Lowry, Perfetti, and Samberg return.

The Jets will have to focus on doing that while traveling, though: 11 of their next 14 games are on the road and they begin a six-game western swing beginning Tuesday versus the Los Angeles Kings.