Josh Morrissey scored, but it wasn't enough, as the Jets fall 2-1 to Vegas to end the 2017-18 season Full Story
The Winnipeg Jets’ magical playoff run has come to a sudden end.
The Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Jets 2-1 in Game 5 to win the Western Conference Final four games to one on Sunday at Bell MTS Place. The Jets lost the final four games of the series.
“We had a great opportunity and that team, it was their time,” Jets captain Blake Wheeler said.
“They made it really tough for us. We had to work for everything we got and even when we broke them down, we couldn’t seem to ever gain the type of momentum we needed to get this thing on our terms.”
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Alex Tuch and Winnipeg’s Ryan Reaves scored goals for the Knights in the clincher as they opened the scoring for the fourth consecutive game.
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Josh Morrissey had the only goal for the Jets in the loss. The Knights held the Jets to just six goals combined over the last four games of the series.
“Obviously, I’m frustrated with myself because I couldn’t score,” Patrik Laine said. “I couldn’t help the team to win with my abilities, but there’s always next year.”
The Jets’ power play failed on all four opportunities in Game 5 while the Golden Knights were 0 for 2 on the man advantage.
“Once they got the lead, they did a good job of kinda almost playing a trapping game and trying to force us to do too much ourselves,” Paul Stastny said. “And sometimes we got in trouble, one guy trying to go through five guys, and that never works.”
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The Jets didn’t even have a lead in any of the contests after their Game 1 victory.
“Every game was tight,” Mark Scheifele said. “Every game was a matter of inches almost. They capitalized when they needed the chance. It just sucks.”
The shots were dead even in the Game 5 clincher as both teams registered 32 shots. Connor Hellebuyck made 30 stops for the Jets.
“I still think we did things right,” Hellebuyck said. “We got our chances and luck was on their side definitely. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even their two goals tonight were two tips. I don’t know. It’s tough to swallow.”
But the Jets just didn’t look like the same team that eliminated the Nashville Predators and it’s pretty clear the grueling seven-game series took its toll on the team. While he wasn’t making excuses, head coach Paul Maurice admitted they weren’t as sharp in the conference final.
“There were things that didn’t happen for us in this series,” Maurice said. “That I think, some of it was mental, but it was the physical fatigue caused by having to spend as much as we spent to get here.”
The expansion Golden Knights advance to the Stanley Cup final in their first year of existence.
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For the fourth straight game, Vegas opened the scoring. Just past the five-minute mark, Morrissey turned over the puck in his own zone. Ryan Carpenter immediately spotted Tuch and he lifted the puck over the shoulder of Hellebuyck and the Knights once again had the lead.
With just 2:46 left in the first Bryan Little won the face-off in the Golden Knights’ zone and Morrissey blasted the one-timer past Marc-Andre Fleury for his first goal of the playoffs. It was 1-1 after one period and the shots were 13-8 in favour of Winnipeg.
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The Golden Knights regained the lead with a little under seven minutes left in the middle frame. Reaves tipped in the point shot for his first goal of the post-season. Luca Sbisa and Tomas Nosek picked up the assists and it was 2-1 for Vegas after 40 minutes.
Neither team scored in the final frame as the Golden Knights clinched their third series victory of the playoffs.
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The Jets made three lineup changes from their Game 4 loss. Joel Armia returned after sitting out Game 4, while Dmitry Kulikov and Joe Morrow both made their first appearances of the series. Andrew Copp, Toby Enstrom and Ben Chiarot were all scratched.
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Apparently the hockey gods have a wickedly cruel sense of humour.
How else do you explain a script that raises the hopes of a reborn NHL city to within a few wins of their first Stanley Cup Final in more than two decades of trying, then dashes them?
And the dream isn’t dashed by just any team, but one in its first season in the league.
And just to pour a little more salt into the wound, a Winnipeg native and son of one of the city’s all-time football greats, a man who hasn’t scored a playoff goal in three years, scores the winner in the deciding game – right in downtown Winnipeg.
The Vegas Golden Knights and Willard Reaves’ kid, Ryan, will play for the Stanley Cup, after Sunday’s 2-1 win clinched their Western Conference Final in a startling five games.
The Winnipeg Jets, with all their firepower – Patrik Laine had more goals this season than Reaves has in his entire, eight-year NHL career – are done.
“Pretty empty. Emotionless,” is how Jets captain Blake Wheeler described the feeling, 10 minutes after the final horn signalled the end.
The picture 10 minutes earlier was worth another 1,000 words, at least.
Wheeler and Mark Scheifele down on one knee, Bryan Little leaning on his stick like Ken Dryden used to, Paul Stastny bent over at the waist – all exhausted and empty.
“Physically, emotionally – you just gave your all,” Stastny said of the moment. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”
Perhaps youth caught up to the Jets, players like Laine, Nik Ehlers and Kyle Connor unable to make the impact on the scoresheet they had up to this point.
Of course, vets like Little, Adam Lowry and Mathieu Perreault will lament the same thing.
Perhaps inexperience with the moment contributed, particularly in a dreadful start that spotted Vegas, playing with nothing to lose, the dreaded first goal, yet again.
“Nerves, it seemed like,” Stastny said of the opening 10 minutes, in which his team moved more like tanks than Jets. “Playoff jitters.”
Something snapped them out of it, though, and they began buzzing, tying it late in that first period.
But the sticks went silent, after that.
And this time it wasn’t Vegas goalie Marc-Andre Fleury stealing the show.
Inexplicably, the Jets’ big push never came.
“Throughout this whole thing until that buzzer blew, I never thought we were out of it,” Wheeler said. “It just seemed like every time we grabbed some momentum, they took it. You have to give them a ton of credit for doing that. It’s the sign of a good team.”
What are the Jets, then?
All that effort, all that talent – and just six goals to show for it over their last four games, combined.
Scoring was never this hard during the season, or during the first two rounds of the playoffs.
But the Jets’ hands failed them in this series, either a half-second too slow with the shot, or the pass, or a whiff altogether – with a Golden Knight usually in their face a half-second later.
“We had to grind and work and work for the chances that we did get,” head coach Paul Maurice said. “There’s a cost to that. And it stacked up, coming off of what we did to get here.”
Maurice had tried to shake some goals from the tree by making three lineup changes, including two on his blue line, but to no avail.
The depth scoring that made the Jets so dangerous from October through mid-May dried up.
“You’re not scoring, you’re not winning,” Perreault said, one goal in nine playoff games something that’ll stick in his craw over the summer. “It’s hard to believe it’s all over. We really thought we were going to do it this year. We had that great feeling. We felt like we had the team to do it.
“We tried so hard, too. We left it all out there. It’s so disappointing when you put so much effort into it and the result’s just not there. It’s hard to swallow.”
So was the winning goal by Reaves, basically a linebacker on skates who hadn’t scored a playoff goal in three years.
“Hearing the boos after I scored was probably my favourite moment of this series,” Reaves said. “It’s been a little weird. I have a couple cousins that came in Jets jerseys, a best friend came in a white T-shirt. So they’re going to hear about that.”
Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck couldn’t believe the double-deflection went where it did, any more than he could believe the series went the way it did.
“I didn’t see much,” Hellebuyck said of the shot. “But any time a guy tips it and it goes bar-south, you know something’s going right for them. Luck was on their side, definitely. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
With any luck, the Jets will be back in this position before too long.
But there are zero guarantees.
And not because of any hockey gods.
You write your own script in this business, make your own luck.
Vegas simply did it better.
pfriesen@postmedia.com
Twitter: @friesensunmedia
