Nikolaj Ehlers’ two-goal performance, including the overtime winner, for the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference final, inspires the re-litigation of his Winnipeg Jets tenure.“What fools the Jets were to let him walk,” some say.“He was never a playoff player,” say others.By firing up the take machines about Winnipeg’s past, we miss out on an important discussion about the future. Whether or not Ehlers’ chaotic scoring style, neutral-zone zig-zags and offensive-zone loops culminated in your preferred brand of hockey, he is a useful tool in an argument Winnipeg needs to make with itself right now.If the Jets are meant to have any success at all — if they’re meant to make the playoffs and then win enough to establish themselves as legitimate contenders — they’re going to need to get contributions from players at every position in their lineup. Ehlers’ success, chaos and all, should remind us it is insufficient to look at some groups of players as “players who win ” and others as “players who don’t.” Build a good enough team and you can win with anybody who helps — whatever their style of play, whatever their minutes, from Ehlers in Carolina, to Nate Schmidt and Paul Maurice in Florida, to Cole Perfetti and Kyle Connor in Winnipeg right now.The Jets weren’t eliminated in the second round last year because Ehlers or Connor or Mark Scheifele weren’t this ineffable thing called a “winner.” They weren’t eliminated because they lacked some ethereal quality offered by the spirits of Luke Schenn, Tanner Pearson and Jonathan Toews. They lost because they didn’t have enough great players to assure otherwise — and because hockey is a chaotic sport where one great team can beat another in six games if it gets off to a hot start and Mikko Rantanen scores a hat trick in Game 1.The biggest problem wasn’t Ehlers, Connor or Scheifele. It was that Winnipeg didn’t have two more players as good as those guys were.Coaching, deployment and systems all matter, too, but the biggest requirement for a team to win games is for it to have more good players than its opponent does. If Dylan Coghlan can go 1,615 days between NHL goals, including a season with the Jets and Moose, but then become Vegas’ Game 1 hero against Colorado, the lesson has more to do with Vegas’ roster quality buying him the opportunity to play in Round 3 at all than it is about Coghlan’s intrinsic quality as a playoff magician.There are clutch players in this world. They’re worth celebrating. I think we try so hard to find them and then categorize them into neat, simple boxes that our emotions tend to write oversimplified (and often false!) narratives in our search.Winnipeg’s goal, in an ideal offseason, would be to favour a rational approach. It would be to add quality wherever the Jets can find it, while acknowledging the Jets are in tough on the UFA and trade markets. And it would be to accept incremental improvement, because a roster with multiple holes isn’t going to be fixed by a single spectacular, nigh-mythical acquisition. Give Jack Eichel to the 2025 Jets and they’re Stanley Cup favourites, but add him to the Jets’ roster as it stands today and Winnipeg would still need to strive for improvement.How do the Jets win this offseason and improve the roster they have today?Win at the 2026 draftThere will be great prospects available to the Jets at No. 8, if they make the pick. There are compelling trade scenarios for that pick, too, with precedent including great work by the Montreal Canadiens to acquire Noah Dobson and by Carolina to acquire K’Andre Miller at last year’s draft. There is even the possibility of trading up to No. 2, given San Jose GM Mike Grier’s willingness to listen to offers.I think Winnipeg doesn’t have the trade chips to win that bidding war, but there are other ways to “win” the draft. The Jets have the following picks: