The Winnipeg Jets approach the draft — and the flurry of transactions that could accompany it — facing two conflicting realities.The first is their desire to be a competitive, playoff-bound team. The second is the size of the gap between missing the playoffs and becoming a perennial Stanley Cup contender with multiple playoff runs on its resume. The Carolina Hurricanes know this distance because they’ve crossed it and won; today, we’re turning to them for Winnipeg’s flight plan.Back in 2017-18, when Winnipeg’s veterans and youth were so outstanding that losing to the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference final was a legitimate shock, the Hurricanes missed the playoffs for the ninth straight time. Now they’re Stanley Cup champions with a ton of cap space and the most wins by any NHL team in the eight years since Winnipeg’s 2018 run.What can the Jets learn from Carolina’s ascension?More pressing: What can Winnipeg learn in time for the draft and pivotal offseason ahead?These Canes were built differentShayna Goldman and Max Bultman‘Pretend we don’t know anything about you’Rod Brind’Amour asks his team to play a physically demanding brand of hockey, using pace to pressure the puck and create turnovers. It’s worked brilliantly — Carolina’s forecheck is the class of the NHL — and you might expect Brind’Amour’s approach to be equally taxing.But when it came time for Brind’Amour to introduce star defenceman K’Andre Miller to Hurricanes hockey, Brind’Amour started by giving Miller a blank slate.“At the start of the year, we told him, ‘Pretend we don’t know anything about you. What kind of player do you want us to think you are?'” Brind’Amour told TNT’s Jackie Redmond. “And I thought from day one of training camp, he was our best player. He wants to take his game to the next level and learn as much as he can. He’s always asking questions and as a coach, what more could you want?”Carolina is known so well for its style of play, it’s easy to forget the philosophy: What can players do well? Whatever their weaknesses may be, do they have strengths that can be exploited in the right circumstances?In Carolina, a lot can be forgiven if players are fast and willing to buy into the team’s systems.In Winnipeg, we’ve watched as players’ weaknesses get used as reasons to ignore the fact that they help. Nikolaj Ehlers’ lack of predictability and propensity for giveaways kept him off the top line. Cole Perfetti’s lack of size saw him give up minutes to Mason Appleton late in games. Elias Salomonsson’s youth made him an AHL player. But the Hurricanes turned speedy castaways like Ehlers, Miller, Taylor Hall and Eric Robinson into Cup champions.A takeaway might be: If a player can help — and if that help shows up in the results — keep an open mind about what helping looks like.Who will look better here than somewhere else?“Our pro scouting staff has really focused on identifying players who we think will look better here than they would somewhere else,” Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky told The Athletic in 2025.In 2025-26, the Jets got underperforming versions of Jonathan Toews, Gustav Nyquist and Tanner Pearson. They also received substandard performances from several veterans. There are nuanced explanations available which acknowledge injury, regression and Ehlers’ departure. But there’s also an important takeaway: There’s a disconnect between how Winnipeg wants to play and what its personnel allows.Winnipeg focuses on protecting the guts of the ice. The Jets primarily play zone defence, seeking to outnumber teams down low and to trap them in the corners, but their lack of pace slowed their forecheck and hurt their transition defence. Teams got into their zone too easily last season with pace and possession, which in turn made it harder for Winnipeg to get into defensive position. So what gives?If you can’t win the game you’re playing, change the game. The Jets need to return to pace — or, if they can’t, they need to play a more passive, trapping style in the neutral zone.A takeaway might be: Whether your identity comes from player strengths or coaching philosophies, make sure those two things align.How Carolina built the Hurricanes to win the Stanley CupSean Gentille and Jayne OrensteinThe Rantanen trades that built a championThe first Mikko Rantanen trade shocked everyone. It cost Carolina Jack Drury and Martin Necas — a player the Jets had interest in — and a bit of public scrutiny. When Rantanen decided he didn’t want to sign with the Hurricanes, critics suggested Tulsky had failed.So he traded Rantanen to Dallas for Logan Stankoven, two first-round picks, and two third-round picks.He then packaged one of those first-round picks with Scott Morrow and a second-round pick to acquire Miller. Hall and Stankoven scored 19 and 16 points each in the playoffs, while Miller led all Hurricanes in ice time as Carolina’s No. 1 defenceman.Let’s go back to the criticism — that Tulsky had taken a huge swing and missed. Remember that he made his swing in January, long before the trade deadline. He had time to work with and was prepared for multiple possibilities.“I wasn’t worried about it at all,” Tulsky told The Athletic in 2025. “Look, truthfully, there were no bad outcomes there. The worst-case scenario was we didn’t see a trade we liked, and we kept (Rantanen) and we had a good playoff run with him … The only question was whether we could find a trade partner who was willing to offer something up that was more attractive to us than that, and we did.”Tulsky’s “failure” turned into multiple pieces of a championship team because he didn’t treat his blockbuster like a finished product.This brings us back to Necas, whom Winnipeg inquired about in trade talks for Ehlers. Elliotte Friedman reported the Jets backed down because they didn’t think they could get a long-term extension out of Necas.A takeaway might be: Swing big and swing big again. Keep your top players or get assets back in return. Be willing to “fail” if there’s still time to win.How Carolina approaches drafting and developingThe concept of trading for Rantanen with enough time to trade away Rantanen is more proactive than what we see in most markets. The Hurricanes are also aggressive in how they use — and move — their draft picks.As Thomas Drance wrote this week: Despite Carolina’s sustained run of success between 2018 and 2025, the Hurricanes made 73 selections across eight separate draft classes. That’s an average of more than nine picks per year, managed while the Hurricanes were regularly swinging aggressively to acquire players like Vincent Trocheck, Shayne Gostisbehere, Brady Skjei, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Jake Guentzel, Hall and Rantanen at or around the trade deadline.The Jets’ haul in that same eight-year time frame? Forty picks. That’s four extra players entering the Hurricanes system every single year. And whereas the Jets’ picks have turned into an average number of NHL players relative to their draft position, Carolina has yielded a below-average number of NHL players relative to its draft position by the same analysis.Part of the Jets’ issue is how often they’ve traded picks in search of immediate help. Part of it is a hesitancy to trade veterans on expiring contracts (prior to this season’s trades with Buffalo) to get picks back. But Carolina’s abundance is helped most by its willingness to move up and down at the draft, in response to their analytical modeling of pick values. That’s an area the Jets have avoided.Another Hurricanes strength is the willingness to trade prospects before they’ve been buried on the farm. Necas, Eetu Luostarinen and Jack Drury are three homegrown talents, all traded at age 25 or younger. Winnipeg waited themselves into lowering 2015 first-round pick Jack Roslovic’s trade value and will lose 2019 first-round pick Ville Heinola for nothing on July 1, despite trade requests that go back multiple seasons.When the Hurricanes do commit to a prospect like Seth Jarvis, taken 13th in 2021, they double down. By the end of Jarvis’ third season with Carolina, he’d played more minutes with star centre Sebastian Aho than Cole Perfetti had played in the NHL. Give Jarvis credit (and note Perfetti’s injuries). But Carolina appears to have had a better plan to get the most out of their pick.A few takeaways might be: Give your scouts more darts. Participate more proactively in draft pick markets. Be more aggressive, whether it comes to doubling down on your own prospects or moving on from them if need be.Robot submarines and other approaches to winningThere are several great stories about Tulsky’s outside-the-box approach to the NHL. This one by James Mirtle may be the best of them.Consider its lead anecdote: When the NHL released millions of player tracking data points in 2021, Tulsky recognized that it would take a special skill set to turn it all into something he could use.As Mirtle wrote, Tulsky was already the Hurricanes’ assistant GM and had built a small analytics department in the organization. But because of what he saw in the tracking data, Tulsky believed his next addition needed to be someone who was working on autonomous vehicles — perhaps “a robot submarine” — and had an advanced mechanical engineering background.“I knew that that was the kind of problem that put people thinking about the kinds of data that we had and the kinds of problems we faced,” Tulsky said.To find such a person, Tulsky began a deep search through universities’ mechanical engineering departments. It would be difficult to draw a straight line from that search to the Cup — let’s be realistic with our assertions — but Tulsky’s creative problem-solving approach needs to be highlighted.The Jets punch above their weight in terms of adapting best practices. They do use analytics. But consider the shift between identifying trends in Sportlogiq data packages and Carolina’s proactive creativity. If resources were not an issue — in the ultimate blue-sky scenario — what kind of thinker or skill set would be Winnipeg’s greatest asset? Go get it.A takeaway might be: If you’re going to win as a small market team, you need to be better at at least one thing than everybody else. What’s Winnipeg’s one great skill?