(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The Winnipeg Jets are, at this moment, nicely ensconced in a playoff position, having taken 60 points from 51 games and leading the Kings by six points. As we know, six points is a long way out to find oneself at this point in the year.

As recently as a few weeks ago, they looked poised to continue a march up the standings and potentially even threaten for a spot in the divisional playoffs (though the idea of playing one of St. Louis or Chicago in the first round isn't that much more appetizing than Anaheim or Nashville). People were calling them on of the biggest surprises in the league, and praising to the heavens what Paul Maurice has done with this club.

And indeed, Maurice's work this year has for the most part been praiseworthy. They, the Winnipeg Jets of all the teams in the world, entered Sunday's games with the eighth-best possession numbers in the league and that surprisingly comfortable playoff spot, and a lot of that came because Ondrej Pavelec finally played himself out of a job (three years too late) and Michael Hutchinson was one of the best goaltenders in the league.

In fact, through the end of December, Hutchinson had the third-highest save percentage at 5-on-5 of any goalie with more than 600 minutes played (.949). This was, of course, in limited appearances — only 630 minutes, dwarfed by, say, Pekka Rinne (1,546) or Carey Price (1,433) — but still, you couldn't feel too badly about the Jets' chances going forward with this guy between the pipes, especially because he at least wasn't that other guy.

But Hutchinson, perhaps predictably, dropped off last month, with his ESsv% sliding about 20 points but more or less normalizing at the still-good level of about .925. The problem is that it's nowhere near elite at 16th in the league in January. Hutchinson always put up good numbers in the AHL and thus his crack at the starting job made a lot of sense, but now that he's regressing back toward being what he is — a potentially better than average goaltender at the NHL level, albeit marginally — we're going to start asking some harder questions about just how good these Jets really are.

The issue is a simple one: They've been pretty solid for the last few years, and really only held out of the playoffs by the organization's foolish insistence on starting Pavelec. In the last three seasons, his inability to stop pucks at anything approaching an reasonable rate cost the Jets a total of 15 points in the standings versus a league-average goaltender, and in the last two the additional points he cost (three and seven, respectively) would have put the team in the playoffs.

Hutchinson obviously papers over that issue just by being solid, and he's been a little better than that in point of fact. The odds that he gets much worse than this seem minimal based on his past performance. And the Jets don't have an easy out on the final 31 games of their schedule either, with four left against St. Louis; three with Vancouver; and two each with Nashville, Washington, and Chicago.

And the real concern is that the wheels have come off a bit lately at both ends of the ice. Their last three games, they've conceded 15 goals and scored just seven. Now, that followed a five-game winning streak so maybe it's just one of those things, but maybe the bounces are finally starting to go against them, too.

In terms of quality, the Jets are a solidly middle-of-the-pack team in the NHL or maybe a little better, but even before this little skid I'd have been wary of anointing them any sort of potential disruptor in the Western Conference. They're certainly not better than any of the teams ahead of them in the standings, both because they're behind them in the standings and they're just not as deep, and don't have the superstar players those clubs do. I think they're probably also a little worse than Vancouver and Los Angeles on paper. They're roughly on par with Dallas, I'd think, especially if the Stars' goaltending and defense can ever sort itself out in the way the forwards really have over the last month or so. They're at least clearly better than Calgary and Colorado, not that this is saying much.