It would be hard to imagine a worse spot than the one the Winnipeg Jets were in late Tuesday night. They had gone winless in nine games. They'd lost the last one by seven goals. With three minutes left, they trailed Montreal 4-0. In the history of the NHL, 5,215 teams had been down that much with that little time. Not a single one had come back.
Then came Winnipeg. Four goals in the final 2 minutes and 40 seconds. A fifth in overtime to win. One of the sorriest teams in the league had just pulled off the greatest comeback hockey has ever seen. "We needed something to happen," the coach said, some kind of crazy thing. It took a whole host of crazy things.
It started with a fight
Tyrel Bauer is one of the NHL's most fearsome fighters. He dropped his gloves and fought a Montreal enforcer to a draw. His teammates say it fired them up. Then Bauer did something fighters rarely do. He scored, with 2:39 left. Just over 40 seconds later he set up another goal. That's a Gordie Howe hat trick, a fight, a goal and an assist in one game. Suddenly a comeback was faintly believable. Every number still said no. Winnipeg averages just 2.44 goals a game, third-lowest in the league. Four in three minutes was absurd.
Kyle Connor scored twice in the final minute, two surgical shots from nearly the same spot on the ice. The game was tied. In overtime Dylan Samberg glided into open ice and fired home the winner. Bauer said he'd rarely wanted to win a game more, blood still on his knuckles. Did the punches save the day? Not really, his coach said, but he wouldn't discount them either.
Our read
This is a Behavioral story. With three minutes left, every fan in that building had made a decision. It's over. Some of them left for the parking lot. The record said they were right 5,215 times out of 5,215. The people who left missed the only time it was wrong.
Investors do the same thing at the bottom of a bad stretch. Last week chip stocks had their worst days in months. This week the Dow had its best day since April 2025. Nobody knows which minute the game turns. That's why the money you need soon shouldn't be in the game at all, and the money you don't need soon shouldn't leave when the score looks hopeless. Here's the check this week. Look at your last statement and find the one holding you've been tempted to dump because it's down. Write one sentence on why you bought it. If the reason still holds, it stays. If the reason is gone, that's a real sell, not a panic sell. The difference is the whole lesson. Our model books changed little this week: a CoreWeave trim and two small swaps, nothing in the North Star. Fifteen minutes with that one holding is usually enough to tell which kind of sell it would be.