Kevin Cheveldayoff has been careful all summer. He will confirm that the Winnipeg Jets are listening on Connor Hellebuyck. He will not confirm a trade request, will not call anything imminent, and told reporters in June only that “certainly, as an organization we’re going to listen.” Every word of that is technically true and none of it tells you anything.
The transactions do. Here is what a reader will not get from the rumor mill: read Winnipeg’s July in the order it actually happened, and the front office has already built the depth chart for a team without its franchise goaltender. The Jets did not react to a Hellebuyck trade. They pre-positioned for one, then declined to say so.
A Presidents’ Trophy Team Does Not Usually Shop Its Best Player
Start with why this is even a conversation. Winnipeg went 35-35-12 for 82 points last season and missed the playoffs entirely, only the fifth time in NHL history that a Presidents’ Trophy winner has missed the postseason the very next year. An 0-7-4 collapse from mid-December to early January buried them. They clawed back to within a point of a wild-card spot and could not finish the job.
Hellebuyck was not the reason, but he was not the fix either. He played 57 games and posted a .895 save percentage and a 2.86 goals-against average, the worst full season of a career that sits at .916 across 625 games. He had a knee procedure in November. The team that was built around a Vezina-winning goalie stopped being good, and the goalie stopped being untouchable at the same moment.
McIntyre, who covers this team every day for the Winnipeg Free Press, puts the odds of a trade north of 95 percent. Notice what convinced him. Not a leak, not a demand, not a price. A depth signing the Jets chose not to make.
Skinner In, Comrie Out, Perfetti Locked Up
Put the summer in sequence and the argument makes itself.
On July 1, Winnipeg signed Stuart Skinner to a two-year, $7.5 million contract, a $3.75M cap hit. Cheveldayoff has denied the move was driven by Hellebuyck’s situation. On that same July 1, the Jets let Eric Comrie leave for San Jose. Then on July 15 they extended Cole Perfetti for five years and $30 million, settling a core forward’s number independent of anything happening in the crease.
Teams do carry two goalies. But a club that expects to keep a starter at $8.5M does not spend another $3.75M on a goalie who started the 2024 and 2025 Stanley Cup Finals and carried a real workload as part of Edmonton’s goaltending picture. It signs a cheap backup. Winnipeg had one of those in Comrie, Hellebuyck’s longtime partner, and chose not to keep him. You do not replace the security blanket and add a starter’s insurance policy unless you have priced the possibility that the starter leaves.
The No-Move Clause Says Cheveldayoff Is Not the One Driving
Here is the objection worth taking seriously, and it is the one that goes straight at the argument above. Hellebuyck holds a full no-move clause. He cannot be sent anywhere without his signature, and it does not soften to a 10-team no-trade list until July 1, 2027. So how can any of this be Winnipeg’s plan? Maybe Skinner is just a goalie signing, and the front office is reacting to a player who has already decided.
That is close to right, and conceding it makes the read sharper rather than weaker. Cheveldayoff is not directing this. He is doing price discovery on an asset that can veto its own destination, which is precisely why the closest deal died the way it did.
That was April. The awkward conversations arrived on schedule. But a front office that was merely reacting would have waited for a deal before reshaping the crease, and Winnipeg did the opposite. It moved first, in the same week the market opened, and then described those moves as unrelated.
The clause explains who decides. It does not explain why the depth chart changed before anyone decided anything.
Winnipeg Wants a Contender’s Return for a Seller’s Decision
Which brings us to the part the Jets still have wrong. Per David Pagnotta on the DFO Rundown, the ask is a second-line center and a second-line winger, in a perfect world, plus more. That is a shopping list for a team trying to get better right now.
Per David Pagnotta (DFO Rundown, July 2): "They want a 2nd line center and they want a 2nd line winger; if they're moving Connor Hellebuyck, in a perfect world they're getting two of those pieces plus."
The market has already answered. Carolina offered defenseman Alexander Nikishin and a first-round pick and was told it was light. Buffalo got closest, then the Hellebuyck trade that collapsed died at the draft over pick placement, with Winnipeg unwilling to move off its own top-10 selection. The Sabres kept the No. 4 and took Daxon Rudolph. Buffalo’s goaltending is still unsolved, which tells you how badly both sides wanted it and how little that mattered against the price.
Five seasons and $42.5 million remain on the contract of a goalie coming off the worst year of his career, and the only window in which Winnipeg controls nothing about where he goes runs until next July. Watch for whether the Jets lower the ask before training camp. If they hold the line into September, they will have spent an entire summer preparing for a departure they refused to price for, and Skinner will start opening night either way.
