What Evander Kane's Injury Means for the Jets' Season, His Future in Winnipeg

It’s not very often that a star player misses a game without explanation. And yet, somehow, that’s only the start of the maelstrom surrounding Winnipeg Jets’ winger Evander Kane.

On Thursday Sportsnet’s Chris Johnston broke the news that Kane had pulled himself from a game against the Vancouver Canucks after an altercation with teammates. Trade rumours, which were already swirling, kicked into high gear.

On Friday, this came:

What seems indisputable is that his latest news dramatically changes the situation, but what is less clear is exactly how it changes it.

What does this mean for the Jets as they push hard for their first playoff spot since coming to Winnipeg? Is a Kane trade before the deadline possible, or does this latest news necessitate pushing such a trade forward to the summer? Is it realistic to think that Kane could return to the team at some point?

Let’s take the latter question first: Can Kane stay with the Jets?

It’s hard—if not impossible—for any outsider to accurately assess the inner dynamics of Winnipeg’s team, so our perspective is necessarily limited. What we can say with a reasonable amount of certainty is that both the team and the player need to put a lot of effort into making a reconciliation work, and from that perspective, Kane’s decision to elect for surgery is interesting.

Here’s how Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman put it before the announcement was made:

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Kane did not practice Thursday, meeting with doctors to discuss the severity of his injuries. There is some belief he is so angry over this treatment he will shut it down for the rest of the season. (Kane, like everyone else in the organization, did not respond for comment.) For his sake, hopefully someone talks him out of it. He is legitimately injured, but sitting out in this context does not help him at all.

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Is Kane interested in making a return to Winnipeg work?

Since his run-in with teammates, he’s pulled himself from one game and opted for surgery to correct an injury he had previously been playing through. It may be that the difficulty of playing through pain had just become too much, but the timing suggests that he may no longer be invested in the team. If that is in fact the case, there’s simply no way to make a return work.

It’s thus a reasonable working hypothesis that a trade is inevitable, which shifts our focus to timing. Here’s what Johnston had to say about that on Friday:

A summer trade has several advantages over a midseason deal. Salary considerations are less pronounced and executives won’t be worrying about Kane’s injury, both of which widen the field of potential trading partners and presumably increases the expected return.

The big advantage of a midseason deal is that the Jets could presumably bring in immediate help.

Kane is a young forward with a long-term contract, which makes him appealing to a lot of rebuilding teams who presumably would not be averse to trading current assets for a player who can help them next year and for a long time to come.

The Jets could, for example, offer Kane one-for-one for an inferior long-term asset and ask a rebuilding team to throw in a pending free agent to take Kane’s spot in the here-and-now as a sweetener.

If Winnipeg could pull off such a trade, in the short-term they might actually be better.

Kane is an excellent player at his best, but fighting through shoulder surgery has clearly taken its toll. Kane’s been less than half as likely to pick up a point on any given five-on-five shift this season than he was a year ago. Things have gotten so bad that he’s getting outscored on a per-shift basis at evens by Chris Thorburn.

It's also worth noting that if a pending free agent were included in the trade, it would give the Jets a chance to re-sign that player. That has value from a hockey perspective and undoubtedly would make the move easier to sell to the fanbase. 

A midseason trade has to be appealing to the team. Not only would it put an end to the soap opera currently playing out, but it would improve the club’s chances of making a long overdue playoff appearance.  

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com and BehindtheNet.ca.  

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.