The Presidents’ Trophy-winning Winnipeg Jets take on the St. Louis Blues in the first round of the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs.
There are a few questions that emerge from this matchup. Last season, they finished with 110 points and home-ice advantage. However, after a high-scoring Game 1 against the Colorado Avalanche, they proceeded to lose their next four games.
Netminder Connor Hellebuyck had a great regular season, posting a .921 save percentage and 2.39 goals against average in 60 games en route to his second Vezina Trophy. Hellebuyck didn’t find the same success in the Jets’ first-round matchup, though, allowing 24 goals in five games with an .864 save percentage.
It was the second consecutive season where Hellebuyck played well in the regular season before his postseason play took a hit. In 2023 against the Vegas Golden Knights, Hellebuyck had an .886 save percentage in five games, with 18 goals allowed.
Of course, Hellebuyck is the type of netminder who can steal a series. There’s no better example of that than in the 2021 postseason, when he had a .950 save percentage in a four-game sweep of the Edmonton Oilers.
Aside from that four-game sweep of the Oilers, it’s been a long time since the Jets won a series. After the first round in 2021, they were swept by the Montréal Canadiens. The year before that, they fell in four games in the qualifying round of the 2020 postseason.
The last time the Jets had a serious run was in 2018. In the first round, they defeated the Minnesota Wild in five games, followed by a seven-game battle against the Nashville Predators in the second round. However, they ran into a hot expansion team in the Vegas Golden Knights, who’d be the airportless Jets in five games to go to the Stanley Cup Finals in their first season.
Since the league expanded from six teams, there has been just one other expansion team to make the Stanley Cup Finals in their first season, the St. Louis Blues all the way back in the 1968 postseason.
The Blues have had a shockingly similar season to the season they won the Stanley Cup in 2019. It wasn’t quite as extreme as being in last place in early January, but after 22 games, they had a 9-12-1 record, the eighth-fewest points in the league. They hired Jim Montgomery on November 25, played middling hockey until they got hot towards the end of the season.
On March 14, the Blues sat two points out of a postseason spot with an additional game played. They won 13 of their last 16 games, which included a 12-game winning streak. They needed every single one of those points as well, as the Calgary Flames had a run of their own, going 9-2-3 over their last 14 games. 
It’s easy to draw parallels to the Stanley Cup-winning Blues in 2019. The parallels continue, though, as the first round matchup the Blues had that season was against the Winnipeg Jets, defeating them in six games.
While this series won’t have the same hype as the Battle of Florida, Battle of Ontario, the matchup between the Colorado Avalanche and Dallas Stars, or the Edmonton Oilers against the Los Angeles Kings part 4, it’ll be interesting nonetheless. The Blues need to prove their win streak wasn’t a fluke, and the Jets need to prove that they aren’t just regular-season pretenders.

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Ryley Delaney is a Nation Network writer for Oilersnation, FlamesNation, and Blue Jays Nation. They can be followed on Twitter @Ryley__Delaney.