Did the Olympic Break Reset the Winnipeg Jets?
Every hockey season hits that point where things start to feel heavy. The games pile up. The travel piles up. Even good teams can start looking a little flat. For the Winnipeg Jets, the Olympic break may have arrived at exactly the right moment.
When defenseman Dylan DeMelo talked to reporters after practice this week, he didn’t make it sound complicated. The Jets didn’t come back with some new system or big philosophical change. Nobody flipped the whiteboard over and rewrote how they play. What really changed, he said, was the mindset.
The Jets players got away for a few days, and that made a big difference.
The players got away for a few days. Some went on vacation. Some just unplugged from hockey. Whatever they did, it helped. DeMelo admitted that the first two-thirds of the season had started to feel like a grind—not so much physically, they’re built for that—but mentally.
That’s the part fans don’t always see. A long NHL season can wear on your head before it wears on your body. Your mind starts telling you you’re tired even when your legs might still be fine. That’s when teams start gripping their sticks a little tighter, and games start feeling harder than they should.
The break gave the Jets a chance to reset. When they came back to the rink, DeMelo said the group felt refreshed. Clearer heads and better energy—the kind of feeling you usually see in September when everyone shows up for training camp.
They didn’t try to reinvent themselves. The message was pretty simple: play faster, get after pucks, and stop overthinking things. Just go out there and compete.
The Jets feel like they have nothing to lose.
And maybe the most telling thing DeMelo said was this: the Jets feel like they’ve got nothing to lose right now. That’s actually not a bad place for a team to be.
When players stop worrying about every mistake and start just playing the game again, things can turn around quickly. You could see a bit of that in their play coming out of the break. They looked a little looser. A little quicker. Like a team that had rediscovered its legs.
And when you start stacking a few wins together, that feeling spreads fast around a dressing room.
The Jets’ players know it's going to be tough to make the postseason.
Nobody in Winnipeg is pretending the job is finished. There’s still plenty of season left and plenty of work to do. But sometimes a few days away from the rink can do more good than a dozen practices.
For the Jets, the break seems to have brought something back that had been fading a bit. Energy. Optimism. And maybe just a little bit of belief again.