Something curious is going on in Winnipeg. Patrik Laine, the heir to Alex Ovechkin as the best goal scorer in the NHL, is locked in a hellacious goal-scoring slump, with just two markers in his last 25 games. Before Winnipeg’s game against Montreal last Thursday, Paul Maurice made a move: he pulled Laine from Winnipeg’s fantastic PP1, replacing him with Jack Roslovic. Laine’s removal from PP1 is a pretty big deal because, well, you don’t see Ovechkin being pulled from PP1 all that often. You wouldn’t expect his eventual successor as the NHL’s best goal scorer to be either. And yet, here we are.



Winnipeg’s PP1 has had pretty consistent personnel this year. In fact, no four-man forward group has spent as much time together as Winnipeg’s group of Laine, Blake Wheeler, Mark Scheifele and Kyle Connor. If you look at Scheifele’s most common teammates at 5-on-4 this year, it’s a pretty standard group of forwards, although...