Don't worry you will and likely the year after and so forth. You are going to have to luck out like Edmonton did or face the constant rebuild cycle that your team or other rebuild teams are in.
I can't imagine the low self esteem it must take to dump on Winnipeg. We live in the coldest city in the Western world half the year and the other half its a Mosquito infested swamp. We can't bail ourselves out signing UFAs and we have to be competitive enough for the fans to keep showing up.
But our soon to be 2 time Vezina winning goalie will continue to drag our team into the playoffs year after year for the foreseeable future and hopefully we get that right mix of youth prospects we draft and vets int he lineup to make a run because that is the best we can hope for.
So in the meantime just enjoy our 1st in the draft and hopefully a Carey Price will come along again and be able to drag your sorry asses into the playoffs too
On the UFA thing, now that we have a pretty big sample size to look back at, I honestly wonder if the Jets are doomed unless it can somehow follow the Edmonton model of tanking hard to bumble your way into multiple generational players?
Hear me out.
Chevy has by all accounts done a good job of drafting and developing. Maybe he hasn't knocked it out of the park at every turn, but it's been good. He has also done a great job of getting a solid return on players who want out for one reason or another.
However, the missing puzzle piece has proven to be any kind of key UFA signings to plug holes in the team. It is not such a struggle for other teams to find long-term solutions to gaps like secondary scoring, or defense. The best Chevy can do is finding "UFAs from within" like Scheif and Helle.
Edmonton used to be like that too, but now with McDrai they are a desirable destination. They have several UFA acquisitions in key roles on the team.
It's fine to finish fourth overall and get into the playoffs, but constantly disappointing everyone by crapping out in the first round does nothing to build the fanbase and sell season tickets. Mind you, the prolonged rebuild worked in Edmonton because they may be the most blindly loyal fanbase after Toronto. There wouldn't be the same degree of patience here in Winnipeg to sit through a decade of missing the playoffs.
