More road woes push Jets to brink of elimination ...Middle East

DALLAS — The Winnipeg Jets must be good to be able to lose all these playoff games.

Over this season and the last two, no National Hockey League team has won more regular-season games than Winnipeg’s 154. And, yet, no team has lost more consecutive road playoff games than the Jets, who on Tuesday had their best road performance of the current Stanley Cup tournament but still lost 3-1 to the Dallas Stars, imperilling their season.

It was the first time in Winnipeg’s unfathomable nine-game road losing streak that the team allowed fewer than four goals. And the ninth time they have scored two or less.

“We had 70 shot attempts and scored one goal,” Jets head coach Scott Arniel, who inherited the road kill from previous coach Rick Bowness, lamented after the Stars boosted their second-round series lead to 3-1. “If we can’t find more than one goal, we’re not going to win hockey games, especially against this hockey team.

“I liked a lot of what we did five-on-five. I liked a lot of the opportunities that we created. I loved our first period. We got off to a great start, had them hemmed in, had some great looks. (Jake) Oettinger made some big stops. But like I said, we had 70 shot attempts. We’ve got to get … more than one goal off of those. Maybe that’s driving harder (to the net), finding those rebounds, screening, whatever it is. We’ve done it in the past and we’ve got to find a way to do it the next game.”

Dallas goalie Oettinger stopped 31 of 32 shots on net and was the second-best player Tuesday, behind only hat-trick hero Mikael Granlund, who single-handedly tripled the output of the entire Jets roster.

Winnipeg goalie Connor Hellebuyck was better than he has been, but still allowed a softie to open the scoring and was probably not among the top 20 players on Tuesday.

Hellebuyck was beaten three times on 24 shots, but couldn’t be faulted on the lasers Granlund perfectly fired into small windows for his final two goals. The killer was a one-timer into the roof of the net at 7:23 of the third period at the end of what had been an exemplary Winnipeg penalty kill of three seconds less than the four-minute, double-minor Jets defenceman Haydn Fleury took for high-sticking Roope Hintz at 3:26.

But Granlund’s first goal, an unscreened 32-footer at 8:36 of the first period, was another groaner like the several from distance Hellebuyck has surrendered in these playoffs.

Asked if he was aware from the Stars’ pre-scout that Hellebuyck has been vulnerable from distance, Granlund said: “Honestly, no clue. I was just shooting it somewhere and it went in. Obviously, we go through a little pre-scout but, you know, you just try to find a hole. And I was lucky it went in.”

“I need to review it,” Hellebuyck told reporters. “His stick snapped into our guy’s shin pad, but I had a clean enough look. It was just a damn perfect shot, just above my pad and below my glove. I don’t know, I need to review it.”

Arniel didn’t need to see it again.

“Obviously, probably wants the one back, the first one, the wrister coming in,” the coach said of his goalie. “Man, the one, three seconds left on that four (minute penalty), it was an unbelievable kill by us. That’s a seeing-eye shot, that’s a heckuva shot. I mean, right under the bar from the short side. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to get (Hellebuyck) some run support.

“He’ll do his job. We’ve got to get him some run support. We’ve got to get him the lead, we’ve got to get out in front. Make this team chase us, instead of us chasing them like we have in the last couple of games.”

The Jets will be chasing from now on.

They need to sweep the series’ final three games to advance to their first Western Conference Final since 2018, and the good news is only one of those would be away from home.

Game 5 is Thursday in Winnipeg, where the Jets are 5-1 in the post-season.

“Just win one game,” Hellebuyck said. “Leave it all out there. I leave it all out there every night. I’m doing my best. Sometimes it’s a heartbreak, but all it takes is one little change, one little bounce and things can start going our way.”

Oettinger wasn’t quite perfect.

He was fooled by Nikolaj Ehlers’ sharp-angle shot that made it 1-1 at 1:02 of the second period. But nearly all of the toughest saves were made by Oettinger — none bigger than his stop on Jets sniper Kyle Connor on a shorthanded breakaway about two minutes before Granlund’s clinching goal.

“He was probably our best player tonight,” Dallas coach Pete DeBoer said of his goalie. “He was so solid. You know, he made a lot of really tough saves look easy. And the breakaway save was … the turning point of the night. They score there, the momentum flips and who knows what happens down the stretch. So he was fantastic.”

In his first game back from knee surgery three-and-a-half months ago, Dallas defenceman Miro Heiskanen teed up Granlund’s third goal and logged 14:52 of ice time as DeBoer used seven blue-liners.

DeBoer said he could tell Heiskanen is still working to find his game because he couldn’t catch Connor on the key breakaway. But Heiskanen will probably be better in his second game than he was in his first. Outplayed for stretches of Tuesday’s game, in which shot-attempts finished 72-45 for Winnipeg, the Stars team might be better, too.

At least it’s a home game for the Jets.

“If I had the answer to why,” Ehlers said of the nine-game road losing streak, “we would have gotten one at some point.

“The message is pretty clear to everyone: We need to go home and win and we know that. Obviously, going to Dallas and losing two is not what we were looking for. We had some good moments, but at the end of the day, we lost. So we’ve got to go home, recharge, get ready for the next one.”

And hope there’s another one after that.

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