TALKING POINTS

• What a start to the game! It couldn’t have gone any better and served as instant notice to Vegas that they were in a series very much unlike anything they experienced against Los Angeles and San Jose.
• Winnipeg’s power play looked more at ease not having to deal with Nashville’s ferocious stick work and checking and again we’re back to the “pick your poison” situation. For the first Jets power-play goal, Vegas took away the Scheifele option and shaded high to Byfuglien but that opened up the pass to Laine that he made no mistake on. On the Jets second power play goal, they shaded over to Laine and still took away the pass to Scheifele option, but that allowed Buff to feather one in and while Vegas did cut off passing lanes to Scheifele, they didn’t have an actual man on him so he was able to score on the deflection.
• The “best part” of that whole goalie interference issue in that first period was was half of people – fans and media alike – were sure it wouldn’t count, and half of the people thought it should and no one knew how the NHL would call it because they’ve been so all over the board with those calls that it was impossible to know. Maybe that’s what the NHL wants? Does the NHL know how they are going to call these things most of the time? And why does it take over six minutes to figure it all out?
• For the record, that should have been a good goal. Contact with MAF didn’t happen until after the puck crossed the goal line. That said, the NHL would be so very wise to adopt the IIHF’s rules on goalie interference were entering the crease before the puck instantly ends the play.
• Nik Ehlers is so overdue for a goal, but he’s still skating really well and creating chances. Just no actual goals.
• Make no mistake, Vegas was flat to start the game and couldn’t recover after falling behind by three goals, but I’d also point out that the Jets can match the speed of the Golden Knights and thus it looks like Vegas isn’t playing as fast as they usually do.
• Not that the Jets went into prevent defense in the later half of the game, but once they got up 4-1 almost at the midway point of the game, they gave Vegas virtually nothing to work. Vegas did start getting majority of shots and scoring chances – they did out chance the Jets 5-0 in the third period – but none of them were high danger chances. The Jets will let you shoot the puck, but they are going to typically dictate where from and give you zero chance to get a rebound.

SCORING SUMMARY

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CHARTS N STUFF

Matchups are limited to 5-on-5 situations. Tile size is scaled by Time On Ice and colour is scaled by adjusted Expected Goals differential. Blue represents a home team advantage and red represents a road team advantage.

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