Jets get their history back, and Arizona's sits on a shelf

Winnipeg finally gets to count Dale Hawerchuk as one of its own, and it's about 30 years overdue. But the most interesting line in Thursday's announcement is about the team that isn't in it. Arizona's 28 years stay parked with a dormant franchise, and that's the league keeping a seat warm in the desert.

Here's what changed. The NHL and the Jets merged Winnipeg's record book to cover the original Jets' NHL years (1979-96), the Atlanta Thrashers (1999-2011) and the current club. The Coyotes' Arizona years (1996-2024) are out, and their own book now reflects only the desert.

File under: Board room.

Scheifele loses three records and gains a chase

Mark Scheifele woke up Thursday as the franchise leader in goals, assists and points, and by lunch he wasn't. Hawerchuk owns goals (379) and points (929), and Thomas Steen owns assists (553).

Scheifele sits at 372 goals, 535 assists and 907 points. He needs eight goals to pass Hawerchuk, 19 assists to pass Steen and 23 points for the big one.

The read: he gets all three this season, and the points record falls before Christmas. At the pace he's kept for 961 games, 23 points is roughly two months of work.

The best part is who he's chasing. Scheifele played for Hawerchuk in Barrie from 2010 to 2013, and Hawerchuk died in 2020. "I'm chasing a different guy," Scheifele said, per The Hockey News. "A guy that meant a lot to me and this community."

That's the Winnipeg version of this story, and it's a good one. In that market, the record book following the franchise to Phoenix in 1996 always felt like a second loss. Now it's home, and the guy chasing it knew the man who set it.

The Arizona footnote

Here's the part the rest of the league should read twice. Had the Coyotes moved the normal way, their history would have gone to Utah. They didn't, because the franchise was deactivated rather than relocated.

Daily Faceoff laid out what that means: the Coyotes' records stay with the dormant franchise until it's reactivated, and then become that club's history. That part is on the record, in the league's own structure.

Everything past it is Smoke. John Chayka, the former Coyotes GM who now runs the Leafs, told the Toronto Star that Arizona has a great fan base and that the arena is still the biggest problem. Nobody has reported a building, an ownership group or a timeline.

The read: the league just tidied its shelves and left one labeled "Arizona, some assembly required." That's an option, not a plan. I'd treat any Arizona return as smoke, not fire, until somebody names an arena.

What the numbers say

Scheifele's 907 points came in 961 games, just under a point a night across 15 seasons. He needs 23 more to pass a Hall of Famer. At 33 he doesn't need a career year to get there, just an ordinary October and November.