A red-hot Patrik Laine has the league — and, in a podcast this week, even the venerable Hockey News — re-thinking whether it should have been Laine, rather than Auston Matthews, who was the first overall draft pick in 2016.
Paul Maurice — at this point last year the odds-on favourite to be the next NHL head coach fired — is now being talked up as a potential Jack Adams Trophy winner as the league’s top head coach this season.
And Winnipeg Jets captain Blake Wheeler continues to get mentioned as a possible Hart Trophy candidate.
But after five weeks overseas, three of them spent covering the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, I returned home this weekend to find the single most valuable person in the Winnipeg Jets organization right now is still the same person it’s been all season long: netminder Connor Hellebuyck.