AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Good riddance Connor Hellebuyck

So Connor Hellebuyck, a goaltender known for spectacular regular season play and embarrassingly horrific post season play, finally went public with his demand to be traded from the Winnipeg Jets.

Nobody should lament the loss of a goaltender who has continually broken the hearts of Jets fans for many, many years.

Let’s leave aside the whole idea of him dishonouring the contract he willingly signed three years ago, when he promised Winnipeggers, Manitobans, the franchise, Jets fans and his teammates that he would play in Winnipeg for eight more years. He’s an American prima donna who clearly has no integrity and no desire to live up to the terms he negotiated and to which he signed his name.

We’ll leave his selfish, American entitlement on the shelf and discuss his trade request solely through the prism of his play on the ice.

The brutal honesty is that when games mattered the most, Hellebuyck was not a very good goaltender. On many playoff nights he was downright terrible. The most recent example was his play against St. Louis a couple of years ago. Hilariously misnamed by the establishment media as the “best goalie in the world,” he was pulled in all three games in St. Louis.

That label arguably makes sense in the regular season, but it sadly never even remotely applied in the playoffs.

The story line on Hellebuyck hasn’t changed. He has a great regular season, expectations run super high for the playoffs, only for those hopes to be shattered because he played nowhere near the way he played in the regular season.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Yes, he’s won some very impressive individual awards. But every one of them was for the regular season. He hasn’t won any playoff awards because he’s been consistently inconsistent in the post season.

Hellebuyck has almost always been out-goalied in the playoffs. The sample size is long and nightmarish.

He never – not once – put the team on his shoulders and singlehandedly won a series the Jets didn’t deserve to win. The best goalie in the world should be able to steal a series or two over the course of 12 seasons.

All netminders have idiosyncrasies, but Hellebuyck has shown on at least two occasions that his ability to assess the quality of his play in the playoffs is completely unhinged from reality.

When the Jets lost to Colorado in 2024 in five games, Hellebuyck’s play was so abysmal, the Avalanche scored the most goals in a 5-game series in 45 years. And how did he evaluate his play? By saying he had just played the best hockey of his career. Huh?

And last season, when the Jets went from winning the President’s Trophy to not making the playoffs, Hellebuyck had the audacity to say there had been no drop off in his play after the Olympics.

Both comments are demonstrably not true and reveal a shocking level of self-delusion.

Hopefully the Jets get a nice bundle of players in return, but no Jets fan who objectively looks at Hellebuyck’s playoff track record should be sad that he wants out.

Simply put, Hellebuyck hasn’t delivered. Let him under deliver and break the hearts of fans somewhere else.

If he led the Jets to a league final once or twice, then it would be very sad to see Connor on another team. But that hasn’t been close to happening in eight frustrating years.

Throughout his career, the Jets have only been a legitimate Stanley Cup contender one time, and that was nearly a decade ago. Hellebuyck’s woeful playoff performances since then have never given the Jets a whiff of a real chance.

The Jets were pretenders, based on Hellebuyck’s stellar, award-winning regular season play. After the 2018 playoffs when the Jets went to the division finals, he has never – not once – taken the Jets on a deep playoff run. Not. Even. Close.

Since he signed with the Jets in 2014, the Jets have won exactly four playoff series. And we’re supposed to be sad to see a wildly overrated goaltender, who frequently chokes in the playoffs, leave?

Not here. The painful truth is that Hellebuyck is not a very good playoff performer. Period. Fantastic in the regular season but substandard and horribly inconsistent in the post-season.

Good riddance Connor. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, or worse, go between your legs.