Josh Morrissey’s place in the NHL Network’s annual top-20 defencemen ranking turned heads for all the wrong reasons this week.
The Jets’ No. 1 blueliner landed at No. 16, a full 10 spots lower than he was last summer, despite another season in which he carried a massive workload and remained central to everything Winnipeg did from the back end.
That drop is hard to square with what Morrissey actually produced. His numbers came down from the peak of his breakout 2022-23 season, when he put up 76 points, and from the 69 he posted the following year.
Even so, the 31-year-old still managed at least 10 goals and 55 points for the fourth straight season. Among active NHL defencemen, only Cale Makar and Rasmus Dahlin have matched that kind of run.
He also wasn’t being eased into anything. Morrissey averaged a career-high 24:43 of ice time per game and continued to do the heavy lifting for Winnipeg in every situation that matters: the power play, the penalty kill, late-game shifts and tough matchups. He was still the guy the Jets leaned on most from the blue line.
The context around his season matters, too. Winnipeg slipped after winning the Presidents’ Trophy in 2024-25, and Morrissey’s trip to the 2026 Winter Olympics ended quickly when an upper-body injury in Canada’s opening game against Czechia knocked him out for the rest of the tournament and followed him back to Winnipeg.
Still, none of that adds up to the NHL’s 16th-best defenceman.
There’s no denying the position is loaded, and there’s a real case that some younger stars have climbed past him. But dropping him 10 places in one year feels like a stretch, especially when his “down” season still produced 14 goals and 55 points.
Morrissey has lived in this lane before. Long before he became a regular Norris Trophy candidate, he was one of the league’s more overlooked defencemen. Now, after another year of strong production and heavy minutes, he finds himself back in that familiar spot.
He enters 2026-27 healthy, still the engine of Winnipeg’s blue line, and with a clear message from NHL Network to carry with him: 15 defencemen are supposedly better. Morrissey gets the whole season to argue otherwise.
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