Winnipeg Jets’ 3 Best Contracts for 2025-26 – Hockey Writer – Winnipeg Jets

Every NHL team needs to offer players who are worth the money or exceed their salary, and the Winnipeg Jets are no exception. General Manager Kevin Cheveldayoff has locked few players into relatively friendly deals, and no albatross contract (at least compared to some other clubs) has hampered him.

Here we will introduce three best contracts on the 2025-26 team book as they try to follow up with another powerful trophy to the president’s award-winning season.

3: Gabriel Vilardi: 6-year deals for the remaining 6 years, $7.5 million AAV

Last month, Cheveldayoff got some work on locking Vilardi as the six-year extension. With this deal, Jets locked in a unique talent for a very reasonable price for most of the time hoped to be on the rise, below his $9.6 million market value, according to sports.

Last season – since he was awarded from the Los Angeles Kings in June 2023, he was part of the Pierre-Luc Dubois trade, his second season with the Jets – the 25-year-old right-wing winger has created new career-highs (27), assists (34) and points (61) in 71 games, and added goals and three assists in nine playoff games. He mainly played in the front line with Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele, one of the league’s most productive games, with 245 points together.

Related: Jets have great value in Vilardi signatures

In 2.0 history, Jets players have not had players like Vilardi, and perhaps no other players in the NHL. While he isn’t the fastest skater or sniper, he’s a very effective scorer – almost all the goals come from within a few feet of the network and his hands are cruel. Although he scored 36 points with even strength, his unique and pleasant skills stand out most in the power game.

Adam Lowry said Vilardi could stick to a phone booth last season, and his wizard was within the witchcraft range of the online, making him a huge threat, as he was the net free throw position, and his appearance was key to the team’s best league-best 28.90 strong efficiency. He completed the team’s highest 12 powerful goals and also scored 13 powerful assists.

The mid-1920s to early 1930s were a golden age for most players, and the Jets hoped he would continue to blossom and to be in the current competitive window with perennial points of each game and the front line.

2: Josh Morrissey: 8-year deals for 3 years remaining, $6.25 million AAV

The deal is now in eighth grade, when Morrissey put his ink in 2019, but has since become spectacular.

To have a perennial top ten Norris Trophy Terminators and elite offensive defensive players with less than 7% salary cap, which every team will kill, and that’s exactly what the Jets have contracted with Morrissey.

The 30-year-old is the undisputed leader in the Jets’ defensive core and has now been in many seasons with Dylan Demelo to form one of the best pairs in the league. The left shooter is in a campaign, and in 80 games he scored 62 points (14 goals, 48 assists) in ice time’s career-high 24:23, and since now retired head coach Rick Bowness encouraged him to jump in the game and attack more offenses ahead of schedule in 2022-23, he has scored 207 points (40 goals) and 167 attacks.

Related: NHL’s top 10 defensive pairing in 2025-26

From watching Morrissey, he has performed well on both sides of the hockey, and he deserves every dollar he earns, and more. In addition to his ability to kill games quickly and transition to offense, he is also an excellent skater, an excellent hockey handler, and a higher-than-average holding metric. Many teams paid millions of dollars for players with similar skills and production (such as Evan Bouchard, Adam Fox and Mikhail Selgachev.)

1: Connor Hellebuyck: 7-year deals for 6 years, $8.5 million AAV

He is a three-time defending the Vezina Trophy champion, defending the back-to-back William M. Jennings Trophy champion, defending Hart Trophy Winner (also the goalkeeper who snatched the game for the first time in a decade), but is only the fifth-highest goalkeeper in the league.

While Hellebuyck’s last three playoff performances still have a lot to go into – and his preference for wilting in the playoffs is that we sprinkle a lot of virtual ink here thw – His praise and overall work is enough to make his deal the best. He reached a new level of advantage last season and played a key role in helping the Jets win the team’s first presidential trophy, with an average of 47-12-3, 2.00 goals, .925 savings percentage, eight closing rates, eight goals and 41.6 goals.

Hellebuyck is a long-time mainstay, winning 322 in 558 career games, winning 57.7 with a 57.7 win and getting a high-quality start 60% of the time. He has stole countless games for the team since his 2015-16 NHL debut, especially in the past seasons, with the Jets’ defenseman and commitment much bigger than they are now.

Even after the disappointing 2022-23 season, he doesn’t seem to have a chance to sign an extension after the 2024 expiration, but he chose the seven-year extension so he can continue chasing what’s most important to him: the Stanley Cup. He could have obtained more of the fact that he could have been in the open market, which could have exceeded $1 million a year, and instead chose to stay in Winnipeg and become possible, it proved his priority position.

While the deal could be bad at the end, if Hellebuyck did get off in his 30s, it might take the last year or two of the buyout, now it’s a steal.

Honorary mentions:

• Adam Lowry: 1 year left with AAV remaining – Lowry did everything he could to do more at a very reasonable price. He is a true leader of people and organizations don’t have to worry about leaving as an unrestricted free agent (UFA).
• Kyle Connor: With 1 year remaining with AAV remaining, it’s a reasonable sniper who has achieved over 30 goals in seven of the past eight seasons and is an underrated playmaker. It doesn’t make the top three, because now, if no new deal was reached before this, Connor will be the UFA’s anxiety next July 1.
• Dylan Samberg: Three years remaining with AAV remaining – $6 million of players who have grown into the top four defense will be better when the salary cap rises sharply at the end of the deal. It won’t be our top three because the term isn’t very long.