The best things in life are free, but the Winnipeg Jets will have to pay if they want to bolster their roster at the 2025 Trade Deadline.
The club has excelled this season to a degree few predicted, currently sitting in first place in the Central Division and Western Conference. Thus, they should be looking to add a few pieces on or before the March 7 deadline for the stretch drive and what they are hoping will be their first long playoff run since 2018.
However, reinforcements don’t come cheap, especially at and around the deadline, where rebuilders and teams below the playoff line know what contenders want and can command a good return for their most-sought-after players.
Here, we’ll take a look at what the Jets have to offer those teams.
Their 2025 First-Round Pick
General manager (GM) Kevin Cheveldayoff, long an adherent to the draft-and-develop model, is not one to trade his first-round pick at the deadline very often. However, he has a growing track record of doing so when he believes his team can compete.
He first traded away his first-round pick at the 2018 Trade Deadline when he sent it to the St. Louis Blues for Paul Stastny. He has done it twice since, dealing his 2019 first-rounder to the New York Rangers for Kevin Hayes in 2019 and his 2024 first-rounder to the Montreal Canadiens for Sean Monahan last February. The Stastny and Monahan additions worked out nicely, the Hayes one did not, and all three turned out to be rentals who moved on in the offseason (Stastny returned two seasons later via a trade with the Vegas Golden Knights.)
Trading away a first-round pick is risky for a GM in a market like Winnipeg that has trouble attracting high-profile free agents but not nearly as much trouble getting drafted-and-developed players to re-sign long-term (such as Kyle Connor, Connor Hellebuyck, Josh Morrissey, and Mark Scheifele.) It’s even riskier for a team like the Jets that has flamed out in the first round each of the past two seasons. However, it can be the most effective thing to dangle in front of rebuilders and is somethings the only thing that can get a team what they want without trading away a roster player.
Their 2026 Second-Round Pick
Cheveldayoff doesn’t have a 2025 second-round pick — he traded it to the New Jersey Devils for Tyler Toffoli last March — but has his 2026 second-rounder in hand.
A second-round pick usually isn’t enough to get a Grade-A player, but can still garner someone effective. Cheveldayoff traded a second-rounder to the Nashville Predators a little bit ahead of the 2023 Trade Deadline and got Nino Niederreiter, an extremely consistent player and now a stalwart of the Jets’ third line, in return.
A second-rounder (along with a third-rounder) was also enough to bring Toffoli, a proven scorer and one of the biggest pieces of trade bait at last year’s deadline, into the fold, and the Devils even retained half of his salary.
Mason Appleton
Mason Appleton alone isn’t enough to garner a big return, but could be included as part of a package. The 29 year old, a pending unrestricted free agent (UFA), has had a decent season with seven goals and 10 assists for 17 points in 44 games.
He is a regular member of the Jets’ strong third line, playing right wing alongside Niederreiter and Rasmus Kupari (who is filling in due to captain Adam Lowry’s injury.) However, the fact the third line didn’t miss a beat with Alex Iafallo on it when Appleton missed 11 games with a lower-body injury from late December to mid January highlights the potential to move the latter without throttling the line’s effectiveness. Iafallo is also a pending UFA, but Appleton’s modest $2.16 million cap hit is easier to move than Iafallo’s $4 million.
Appleton does have some offensive upside and overall is a well-rounded player. He has 133 points in 373-career games between the Jets (in two stints) and the Seattle Kraken.
Colby Barlow
Sometimes a team in win-now mode needs to trade a top prospect to get help now, and Colby Barlow seems less untouchable than Brad Lambert or Nikita Chibrikov (who is out for the season with a lower-body injury) at this point.
Related: Winnipeg Jets’ Top 10 Prospects for 2024-25
Barlow is by no means completely expendable, and this author certainly won’t assert anyone yet to turn professional is a draft “bust,” but the winger doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the Jets’ short-term plans.
There’s also no denying the 2023 first-round pick has had an up-and-down season. After a so-so Jets training camp, he had a slower-than-expected first half to his final Ontario Hockey League season with the Oshawa Generals, who acquired him from the Owen Sound Attack before the campaign began. He has picked it up in the new year and now has 27 goals and 19 assists for 46 points in 46 games, not terrible by any means, but considering he had 40 goals in 50 games last season and 46 in 59 in 2022-23, it’s a downturn in production.
Barlow was also left off Canada’s 2025 World Junior Championship roster for his second-straight year (last season, he had an injury.) Canada’s 2025 player selection was poor and they left a lot of talent off the roster, but that’s an entire separate conversation that’s been had many times since Canada lost in the quarterfinal to Czechia for the second-straight tournament. Nonetheless, it shows his stock has fallen in some’s eyes.
Thus, the Jets find themselves at a bit of a odd spot with Barlow. He still has value — most notably a wicked shot and leadership skills from captaining the Attack for two seasons — but it won’t be long before other teams realize his perceived value is dropping (if they haven’t realized already.) Lower perceived value equals lower return.
Barlow turns 20 on Feb. 14 and was thus not eligible under the NHL-CHL agreement to play for the Manitoba Moose this season. If the organization doesn’t see him challenging for an NHL roster spot until 2026-27 at the earliest, after he gets a full season in the American Hockey League under his belt, they may be better off dealing him. They’re in a holding pattern to see if he’ll take another step forward, and all holding patterns eventually have to end.
Logan Stanley
The Jets’ organization has, for years, extended Logan Stanley a level of loyalty that defies logic. No head coach since he was drafted in the first round in 2016 has been able to resist caving to the temptation of dressing him over better options.
The organization’s continued attempts to shoehorn Stanley into the lineup despite the now-26-year-old’s glaring weaknesses seems to be a combination of them succumbing to the “sunk-cost fallacy” and to a “big-guy” bias. It has continued this season under first-year head coach Scott Arniel, with Stanley not only getting into the lineup over Haydn Fleury, Colin Miller, and Ville Heinola, but even getting second-pairing minutes despite not being one of the best six defensemen on the roster.
Stanley playing on the second pairing only happened because Fleury, Miller, and Dylan Samberg were all on the injured reserve at the same time. However, now that all three are now healthy and the blue line now features nine players jockeying for six spots (really, five jockeying for two because the top four is set) Stanley is a logical player to deal. He has also requested a trade out of Winnipeg before.
NHL defensemen tend to reach their peak effectiveness in their age-27 season and decline thereafter, so Stanley will not become more than he is right now. It’s high time for the organization to realize that trading him for whatever they can get is better than continuing to play him and losing other defenders due to their unwillingness to waive him (Johnathan Kovacevic and Declan Chisholm were both waived instead of Stanley in past seasons and claimed by other teams.) It would be an example of addition by subtraction and finally remove the temptation to play him just because he’s 6-foot-7 and “heavy.” he cannot be in the lineup come playoff time, because that will be a disaster.
If other teams overvalue size on the blue line as much as the Jets have in Stanley’s case, they could actually fetch a decent return with him as part of a package.
Who/what assets do you think the Jets should trade at the 2025 Trade Deadline? Comment below!