Inside the Connor Hellebuyck trade: Devils GM Sunny Mehta's full-court press ends the Jets saga New York Times (Online) Chris Johnston Kevin Cheveldayoff can finally count on getting a good night's sleep again. The Winnipeg Jets general manager carried the weight of an unresolved Connor Hellebuyck trade saga with him from spring through to fall, trying to hammer out a return the organization could move forward with while knowing he was unlikely to win any trade that sent a franchise goaltender and Hart Trophy winner the other way. As the process dragged along, Cheveldayoff would often find himself reminding Hellebuyck's agent, Ray Petkau, that he couldn't simply compel rival teams to step up and make aggressive offers. The market was the market. There were only going to be so many teams chasing a goaltender, even one as accomplished and elite as Hellebuyck, and the Jets remained in a holding pattern as the season began and the weeks started to tick by. Gradually, then suddenly, the Hellebuyck market came alive over the past 48 hours when New Jersey Devils GM Sunny Mehta mounted a full-court press. “When Sunny got serious, he got serious real quick,” Cheveldayoff said. Even though Mehta has been around the NHL for more than a decade, working as a director of analytics and assistant GM, he's only a few months into his post as Devils GM. His counterparts are still feeling him out and adjusting to his style. What Cheveldayoff found was a straight shooter eager to get down to business, and after a busy Thursday of going back and forth on details, they finalized a seven-piece trade that made Hellebuyck a Devil on Friday morning. While that coincided with the end of a team-issued suspension, which began on Sept. 16, for failing to report to training camp, the deal didn't have to go down exactly when it did. As a contingency, Cheveldayoff had also reached an understanding with the Hellebuyck camp about delaying the player's arrival in Winnipeg for a physical until some point next week in what would be a quieter period for everyone with the team heading on a road trip following Sunday's Heritage Classic outdoor game. The level of interest from the Devils pushed this across the line. As much as they had been lightly linked to Hellebuyck in trade speculation, they were not mentioned nearly as prominently as the Carolina Hurricanes, Buffalo Sabres or Utah Mammoth. That was partly due to the fact that Mehta had publicly discussed his reluctance to invest heavily at the goaltender position because of its unpredictable nature. A few important qualifiers need to be applied to that rule of thumb, though. The opportunity to acquire a three-time Vezina Trophy winner doesn't come along too often. Plus, Mehta saw his Devils, off to a 6-4-0 start, underperform their expected results across the first 10 games. Despite being among the NHL's top-ranked teams in a number of key underlying defensive metrics, they sat with the 28th-best goals saved above expected mark when he made the trade for an Olympic champion goaltender, reuniting Hellebuyck with Team USA teammate Jack Hughes in the process. Mehta has taken control of a team with an expectation to become a contender in short order and with plenty of assets, thanks in part to his Simon Nemec deal with the Calgary Flames in June. In acquiring Hellebuyck, the Devils gave up plenty of quantity but not any individual asset in the same range as what they got back. The keys to the deal for Winnipeg were getting Alexander Command, selected 12th in June's NHL Draft and a prospect the Jets had rated highly on their own draft board, plus players who can help now. Dawson Mercer will get more opportunity with the Jets than he'd been receiving in New Jersey's forward group, perhaps allowing him to return to the 27-goal form he showed in 2022-23. The offers that came in from the Hurricanes and Mammoth didn't include a young forward better than him. Talks with the Sabres went deep ahead of the draft in June but included multiple picks, which went off the board once the teams used them to select players. The season-ending injury to New York Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin opened up some potential new avenues to explore this month, but it didn't lead the Jets to the solution they were looking for. “We looked at this lots of different ways, with lots of different teams,” Cheveldayoff said. “We talked about three-team trades. We talked about lots of different things. Things kind of maybe shifted a little bit when the Rangers ended up having a goalie situation. Not often does that really shake up a league when a superstar goaltender goes down like that.” The biggest shakeup came back in the spring when Hellebuyck came to the Jets with his trade request in the first place. He was a homegrown player selected in the fifth round of the 2012 draft — “we took a chance on some gangly guy out of Odessa,” Cheveldayoff said — and he developed into a bona fide superstar in the NHL's smallest market. In bidding him farewell, the Jets GM highlighted all of the good moments Hellebuyck helped create for the organization, rather than dwelling on how he exited it. “One thing we can never forget is he was a big part of our family,” Cheveldayoff said. None of it was an easy process. The Jets knew from the get-go there'd be no true value-for-value trade, no matter how long they waited. Under those circumstances, they simply did the best they could.