Taking a step back from the playoffs for a second, the ongoing Jack Eichel saga is one of great interest. Not only is it only for the regular hockey fans, but the fantasy hockey fans are already putting together dream packages to get Eichel to their preferred destination for their dynasty teams. Admit it. I can feel it.

Anyway, Joe Yerdon, who has been a long-time Buffalo beat writer, wrote an article on Eichel and how he's assuredly going to be traded. I have trust in Joe as a reporter and from what we've heard elsewhere, this makes sense. So, I will put it to the readers: where do you want to see Eichel end up not for your favourite hockey team in real life, but for fantasy purposes?

*

The NHL announced the finalists for the Norris Trophy:

Adam Fox (@NYRangers), Victor Hedman (@TBLightning) and Cale Makar (@Avalanche) are the finalists for the 2020-21 James Norris Memorial Trophy. https://t.co/MQjtrVFd4Q #NHLAwards #NHLStats pic.twitter.com/FxqxhvGRy5

— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) June 9, 2021

Last month, I discussed the NHL awards and how despite a down year from Victor Hedman, he was not only going to be a top-3 nomination, but probably win the award. I had him as winning with likely Adam Fox and Cale Makar as the next up, or possibly Charlie McAvoy. I feel like I nailed this one.

Anyway, if you want to reward the absolute best defenceman in the NHL this year, it's Makar. If you want to reward an elite defenceman who played a full schedule, it's Fox. If you want to give Hedman the Drew Doughty Memorial Award, well, that's your prerogative.

*

What was a tense 1-1 game after 20 minutes turned into a 4-1 laugher for the Islanders after 40 minutes, a lead they would hold for the rest of Game 6, taking their series with the Bruins. The 6-2 final was about indicative of how the play went, though there were a pair of empty-net goals.

The easy play here would be to blame Tuukka Rask for a bad game but the truth is the Boston blue line was creating turnovers like they were a group of pastry chefs. This was a glaring problem for them all season and it came back to bite them in the playoffs. Other things went wrong, of course, but their defence beyond their top-3 (including the injured Brandon Carlo) is very thin. At this point of the playoffs, those depth problems get exploited.

As for the game itself, Brock Nelson had a pair of those second-period goals, both of them thanks to brutal turnovers by the Boston back-end. Mistakes are magnified in pressure situations and it was like the Hubble Telescope of magnification here. Kudos to the Islanders for making the Bruins pay for their mistakes, but this game was kind of gift-wrapped for them.

All the same, the Islanders are back in the Conference Finals for the second time in two years, an incredible accomplishment for this franchise. A tough task in the form of the Tampa Bay Lightning awaits them next round.

*

The Winnipeg Jets were unceremoniously dumped out of the playoffs in the second round, being speed-bagged in four games by Montreal. It wasn't really close, either, as the Canadiens ran over the Jets basically every game, outscoring them 14-6 in that span. Winnipeg good a good performance out of Connor Hellebuyck but most everyone else was not. The suspension to Mark Scheifele didn't help but honestly, he wasn't the difference in that series. He wasn't the difference between the Jets being bounced in four games or winning in seven. No, it would have taken a lot more than him.

Now that they're bounced, I want to look at a few problems that the Jets have that need immediate solving, and what the fantasy outlook for next year could be.

The blue line

First off, the blue line continues to need an overhaul. This has been the case for two years now. To their delight, I'm sure, Neal Pionk had a strong season. He looks like a different player than he was in New York, showing the offensive skill he's been known to have, but also becoming much better defensively. If he can keep growing like this, he's not far from being a legit top-pair guy.

After him, Dylan DeMelo had a fine season defensively, as he usually does, but he was getting the short end of the ice-time stick. He basically played borderline third-pair minutes for most of the season and though he got more ice time in the postseason, he was still getting low-end second-pair minutes. This guy is, truthfully, probably the best defensive defenceman the Jets have, and he was playing under 19 minutes a night. There is a reason they got absolutely wiped by the Canadiens.

I stand by a statement I made at the start of the season: Ville Heinola has a non-zero chance of being Winnipeg's best defenceman *right now*:

Heinola should be in Winnipeg's lineup and there's a non-zero chance he's their best defenceman right now.

— Michael Clifford (@SlimCliffy) January 5, 2021

Whether I'm right or wrong, I don't know. What I do know is that there are a lot of defencemen that the Jets use regularly – Poolman, Forbort, Beaulieu, Morrissey – are flat-out bad (or, more generously, have been playing poorly for a while). The kindest thing to say of that quartet is that Poolman probably has some defensively value. Everyone else is varying degrees of bad basically in most facets of the game. Again, there is a very good reason why this team was absolutely throttled.

The Jets keep going on and on about their internal metrics but there's no way to spin what happened this year with their blue line, regular season or postseason, outside of Pionk and maybe DeMelo. They all contributed to this team being very, very average, and by the end of the year, embarrassingly bad. Most of this blue line needs to go.

Second-line centre

As has been the case for a while, the second-line centre role is a big, glaring need for Winnipeg. Let's talk about that for a second.

Pierre-Luc Dubois never really got off the ground in Winnipeg. He showed up and was almost immediately stuffed on the wing for a handful of games. I am not a professional hockey coach, but if my team had just traded Patrik Laine for the team's future 2C who had been a 1C for two years, I would play him as the 2C every night to ensure he can start mixing chemistry with his wingers for the future. Alas, I am not a professional hockey coach.

Dubois did get some run later in the regular season as the 2C but a balanced top-6 never really materialized and teams without depth infrequently make deep postseason runs. The bright side is nearly the entire top-6 will be back for next year, so Dubois will get another kick at the can here. The team also has Cole Perfetti on the rise, and he is potential centre depth for the future. For the near-term, though, Dubois needs to show more of what he did in Columbus and less of what he did in Winnipeg. Just beware of him reaching 60 points again. He is unlikely to get significant PP time and that hurts a lot.

Blake Wheeler

Quite simply, Wheeler was one of the worst players in the league this year. Here are his offensive and defensive impacts this year from Evolving Hockey:

That translated across the board for Wheeler to very poor results. It resulted in his second-highest shots against/60 minutes when on the ice at 5-on-5 for his career, in a season where shot rates across the league declined. His expected goals against/60 when on the ice was the highest among all forwards in the NHL this year by a wide, wide margin, coming in with a considerably worse rate than our normal extremely-bad defensively wingers like Patrick Kane, Phil Kessel, and Laine.

That is the dichotomy of Wheeler at the moment. In the fantasy game, he was still very good, with 46 points in 50 games, over two shots per game, and well over a hit per game. That level of production will play in fantasy leagues.

The question is whether he can keep putting up seasons with terrible underlying metrics and yet still be a great fantasy option. As long as the coaching staff keeps playing him 18 minutes a night on the top line, top PP, and with the empty net, he's going to keep racking up easy points. In the fantasy game, it doesn't matter if the points are easy or hard, we just want the points. And as long as Wheeler maintains his role, he'll get the points.

It is a fair question to ask because coaches can generally tell when players are struggling and will adjust ice time accordingly. That never happened with Wheeler because he's generally been a great player in the league. For that reason, I'm willing to give him a mulligan in what was a very difficult regular season. We have no idea what was going on behind the scenes.

All that said, if he starts next year the same way he played most of this year, I don't know how they keep playing him 18-19 minutes a night. Not if they want to have a strong regular season. He is an interesting case because of his divergent value between real life and fantasy.

I will talk about the Jets more this summer, obviously, but that's a start. What do you see as their issues?