Winnipeg must break a horrid trend when its Stanley Cup playoff series with the Dallas Stars resumes on Tuesday: The Jets must find a way to win on the road.
Trailing 2-1 in their Western Conference semifinals series, the Jets have lost all four road playoff games this year. In fact, they have lost their last eight road playoff games dating back to April 2023.
“We know that on the road we have to be better,” coach Scott Arniel said after Monday’s optional skate in Texas. “We have to be more consistent. At the end of the day, this group has all year long been able to respond. We have good leadership and guys recognize there are areas we have to be more consistent.”
The Jets were in a good position to snap that skid and take the edge in the series when they were tied 2-2 in Sunday’s clash. But a pair of goals less than a minute apart — including a controversial tally by Alexander Petrovic that held up as the winner — broke the game open, and it finished 5-2 for the Stars.
Another loss would have Winnipeg, which finished atop the league’s regular-season standings, on the ropes. A victory would even the series and become essentially a best-of-three with the Jets holding home-ice advantage.
“Unfortunately we’ve had some tough breaks on the road,” Jets defenseman Josh Morrissey said. “And it hasn’t gone the way we wanted on the road, but we’re very much in a series right now … and (Tuesday’s) game is massive.”
The Stars are two wins away from reaching the conference finals for the third consecutive year.
Sunday’s victory was the right response for a Dallas squad that lost Game 2 by a 4-0 score. Now the quest is to prevent Winnipeg from pulling even.
Coach Pete DeBoer has an easy message for his charges.
“In a series, you want to keep putting the other team under that must-win pressure. No one wants to fall behind by two games,” DeBoer said on Monday. “We put them under that pressure in the first game and they responded. We put them under that pressure again. I know they’re going to respond and I hope our game is going to be better than Game 2 when we had them in that spot.”
Although Petrovic was the hero with the game-winning goal, the Stars are benefiting greatly from the performance of Mikko Rantanen. The standout forward scored once and assisted on two goals Sunday, his fifth outing with three or more points in the last six games.
Rantanen, who was atop the league’s playoff scoring race with 18 points prior to Monday’s games, has collected nine goals in the last six outings and factored in 15 of his team’s last 17 goals.
As much as the Stars were hoping for big things from Rantanen when they acquired him from the Carolina Hurricanes just before the trade deadline and signed him to an eight-year contract, even they could not have imagined his impact on their club.
Rantanen shrugged off any praise by saying, “I’m trying to stay in the moment.”
“When you have a star player like that, it definitely changes a little bit of the identity of your team,” DeBoer said. “I think we’d been around four lines and waves of pressure and work, like a Carolina-type identity, and when you have a player like that … you have to coach your team a little bit differently. You have to get him out more.”
