Move over Broad Street Bullies and Big Bad Bruins.

The Winnipeg Jets have taken over as the thugs of the NHL.

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?

But it’s true.

At least, based on penalty minutes, where your local pucksters are leading the parade to the sin bin.

I’m not just talking about niggling, two-minute minors, either, where the Jets lead with a whopping 130, eight more than the next team and 52 more than Nashville, one of the teams they’re chasing in their division.

Few teams do majors and misconducts quite like Paul Maurice’s: only Anaheim (16) and Buffalo (18) have more major penalties than Winnipeg’s 15, and nobody has more misconducts than the six recorded by the Jets and Pittsburgh.

Seven teams didn’t have a single misconduct going into Monday’s action, and seven more had just one.

The Jets can also boast they own two of the dozen suspensions handed out by the NHL this season: Evander Kane on Monday received two games for his dangerous hit on the Ducks’ Clayton Stoner, 24 hours earlier.

That follows the one-game ban for rookie Adam Lowry for a similar hit late last month.

So this is all an anomaly, right? A blip in the statistics that’ll even out over time.

Nope.

It’s by design.

“We like to play on the edge a bit,” centre Byran Little said, Monday. “We like to make things hard on the other team. We’ve got some big guys, some fast guys that like to play physical. Sometimes we’re going to take penalties playing that way.”

It’s a far cry from the relatively meek and mild ways of the past.

Basically the same core group is now taking 15 penalty minutes per game, compared to 11 minutes the first couple of seasons in Winnipeg.

Pre-game ugly pills never tasted so good.

“I don’t think anyone would have predicted our goals-against, either,” Little said. “It’s kind of the way everyone’s bought into it. We’re going to play a very defensive game, we’re going to play physical and worry about what happens after that. And it’s been working for us.”

Hit first, ask questions later.

Questions to the man in charge, Monday, produced little evidence of concern.

The way Maurice sees it, playing his way will draw attention from the opposition, and the stripes.

“It is a piece of that. Because you play an aggressive, tight-gap game, you have more confrontations on the ice,” Maurice said.

The only thing he wants to cut down on: the one-handed stick infractions.

“The only other concern is when you get the reputation of being the highest penalized team,” the coach said. “You lose the benefit of the doubt: it must be a penalty because it’s Winnipeg.

“I don’t want to lose any of that other piece. And if we have to live for a while, the byproduct being we’re taking more penalties, then we have to do that. Because coming off it and playing a different game won’t be to our strengths.”

We found that out the first three years.

The Jets tried the cerebral approach under Claude Noel, with lackluster results.

Under Maurice they’ve become the bull in the china shop, instead of the guy doing inventory.

And a funny thing has happened along the way: they’ve grown closer.

“Any guy would do anything for any guy on this team,” is how Mark Scheifele put it. “Every guy looks to his right or his left and would take a punch for him, block a shot for him... that’s a huge thing this year.”

It used to be you never knew if the Jets would be “engaged” in a game or not.

But they’re gaining a reputation as a hard team to play against.

So Maurice will, for example, keep dressing both Chris Thorburn and Anthony Peluso.

And the Jets will keep scrumming and face-washing, and occasionally boarding, their way up the standings

As long as they keep killing off penalties at a good clip, they won’t worry about changing.

“If we’re battling for each other and it’s a roughing penalty or something... any guy on this team would kill a penalty for a guy stepping in for a hit or anything like that,” Scheifele said. “We’ll kill that penalty, any day.”

All for one, and one for all.

All they need now is a nickname.