Anyone else notice JTR squads received some kind of boost?

My guess would be that what he seems to be experiencing would indicate, to me, that those RJT teams have been getting increasingly better mods over the past week or two. Even small bumps in speed to the main 3 on that team can help to significantly increase the ID cooldown and TM manipulation engines of that team. I would suggest checking the average speed of those in your shard and see if they haven't starting getting speeds of 260 or even 270 on BB8 and r2's in the same range.