Whiteout fades to black

The Winnipeg Jets welcomed the return of the whiteout by storming back late in a game they trailed by two goals. But they couldn’t weather the storm against a relentless Vegas Golden Knights club that managed to find a way to break the hearts of a sold-out crowd at Canada Life Centre Saturday with some overtime heroics.

Michael Amadio scored 3:40 into double-overtime to seal a 5-4 victory for the visitors, who narrowly escaped what would have been an epic third-period collapse. Instead, the victory gives the Golden Knights a 2-1 lead in the first-round, best-of-seven series that will resume in Winnipeg for Game 4 Monday night.

The Jets trailed 4-1 through the first 40 minutes, setting the stage for a wild comeback in the third frame. Nino Niederreiter scored two minutes into the period, before Mark Scheifele made it a one-goal game on the power play and Adam Lowry evened the score with 22 seconds remaining.

“That was a hell of a hockey game. The crowd was fantastic. The guys laid it all out there on the line tonight, they played their hearts out. Very proud of the way we played,” said Jets coach Rick Bowness. “We’re down early, we fought back. There is no quit in this group.”

Kyle Connor scored in the first period to round out the scoring for the Jets. The Golden Knights countered with a pair of power-play goals from Jack Eichel, with Chandler Stephenson and Keegan Kolesar each adding a goal for the visitors.

Adding insult to injury, the Jets will be without No. 1 defenceman Josh Morrissey for the remainder of the series. Bowness delivered the devastating news in his post-game address, explaining that Morrissey had suffered a significant lower-body injury.

Let’s dig deeper into this one.

1) Morrissey pulled up lame minutes after puck drop, logging just 74 seconds of ice time, including 38 on the power play. He was ruled out of the game by the first intermission.

Morrissey appeared to injure his right knee after colliding with the left knee of Golden Knights defenceman Zach Whitecloud. He retreated to the bench immediately after but felt good enough to take the ice on Winnipeg’s first power play, calling it quits after a brief shift.

Morrissey averages a team-high 24:14 of ice time, while playing key roles on both the power play and penalty kill. As a result, the Jets had to spend a majority of the game rolling five defenders, with the likes of Neal Pionk (41:08 of ice time) and Dylan DeMelo (36:31) picking up the slack.

The Jets had already been dealt bad news on the injury front, with Nikolaj Ehlers ruled out for a fourth straight game with an upper-body injury. Bowness said in his pre-game availability that Ehlers still hasn’t been cleared to play by team doctors.

2) You got to feel for rookie defenceman Dylan Samberg for his costly error that resulted in the game-winning goal.

Samberg tried to feed a pass up the left boards in the Jets’ end, only for it to deflect off the shin pad of Ivan Barbashev and onto the stick of Amadio. Amadio made no mistake from there, one-timing a knuckler past Connor Hellebuyck to end the game.

“We play again in two days, so you’ve got to erase it and look forward to that next game,” said Jets defenceman Brenden Dillon. “He’s played so great all year and he’s earned a big part of double overtime. We feel for him, but we’ve got to kind of erase this and get ready for the next one.”

Samberg had been playing some of his best hockey in recent weeks and had arguably his best game of the season in a 5-1 win in Game 1. But Bowness had been hesitant to put Samberg on the ice in the third period, with the Jets in desperate need of a goal, benching him for the last nine minutes.

“I talked to him right after. I said ‘Dylan, we’re where we are because of you. You helped us get here. You helped us get to double overtime,’” Bowness said. “You get in those situations and the puck takes a bounce off a skate or a stick and it goes to them. We’ll keep playing him.”

3) The Jets weren’t the same team in the first two periods as they were in the third. Some said it might have been feeling too much emotion from playing in front of the loudest crowd in a long time, or perhaps it was jitters in such a critical game.

The Golden Knights took full advantage of the Jets’ sloppy play, scoring a pair of goals in the first and second frames to take a commanding lead into the third. The Jets registered a mere six shots in the first period and five in the second, compared to Vegas’ combined 26.

Hellebuyck finished with 43 saves, while Laurent Brossoit stopped 30 of 34 shots for the Golden Knights.

“You get behind 2-0 early in the game, but KC scores a big goal for us and we liked where we started to get to near the end of the first. The second period it was just managing pucks, the transition game, we just weren’t as sharp as we needed to be,” said Lowry, whose game-tying goal was his team-high fourth of the postseason. “It unfortunately went their way. But we’ve got a lot of belief in this group.”

Bowness did bring out the line blender in the second period, moving Niederreiter to the top line with Pierre-Luc Dubois and Kyle Connor, while moving Scheifele to the second line with Blake Wheeler and Vladislav Namestnikov.

“Every game is going to get harder and harder. The first 40 was not the way we wanted to play,” Niederreiter said. “But the third period was probably what we needed to do for the full 60 minutes and have that be our focus coming out in the next game.”

4) Special teams proved to be a sore spot for a majority of the game. That is, until the third period, with both the power play and penalty kill coming up big down the stretch, albeit in a losing effort.

Scheifele blasted a wrist shot high past Brossoit on Winnipeg’s fourth and final trip on the man-advantage, a goal that pulled the Jets within one. The Jets No. 1 centre had been booed by the fans just seconds earlier after bobbling a puck near blue line that resulted in losing the zone.

The power play finished 1-for-4 on the day and is now 3-for-10 in the series. But while it appears to be clicking at a high rate, the top unit has just one of those three goals, with Lowry scoring the other two.

Given how much time the first group gets on the power play, it’s imperative they get better. It might prove to be the difference in the series.

“We weren’t shooting enough. We’re all yelling, the fans are yelling, “Shoot the puck!” But we don’t see what they see,” Bowness said. “You can’t see that shot that looks so easy from up there. But again, we want more shots from the power play. Simple as that.”

Winnipeg’s usually strong penalty kill allowed a disappointing two goals, while killing off Vegas’ three other trips to the power play. Two of those kills came in extra time, both on penalties to Dubois.

“You want to respond,” Lowry said. “We’re excited for the opportunity, and there’s a lot of belief in this group that we can get it done and even the series.”

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Twitter: @jeffkhamilton

Jeff Hamilton
Multimedia producer

After a slew of injuries playing hockey that included breaks to the wrist, arm, and collar bone; a tear of the medial collateral ligament in both knees; as well as a collapsed lung, Jeff figured it was a good idea to take his interest in sports off the ice and in to the classroom.

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