20/20: Jets and Hellebuyck even series

The Jets won the vital races and the league MVP did his job in net.

The Winnipeg Jets defeated the Dallas Stars 4-0 in Game 2 on Friday.

The series is now tied 1-1.

Here is the 20/20.

1. I was attending a coaching conference two summers ago, and one of the coaches at the conference described hockey as a game of 1,000 races.

It’s something that’s really impacted about how I think about the game.

From winning the long race for the puck, to racing to position, to simply getting a better footing than the other player, there are hundreds of micro competitions that define a hockey game, one little race at a time.

And as this coach said to me, if you can win more than 500 of those 1,000 races on a regular basis, you’ll typically win more games than you lose.

I bring this up because in Game 2, it felt like the Jets won 80 percent of the micro races.

It felt like a combination of the Stars being a step slow and the Jets being a step faster, and it was just disastrous for Dallas as Winnipeg evened the series.

2. Connor Hellebuyck had his best game of the postseason.

The likely Hart Trophy winner stopped 22 of 22 shots, he also added a couple stops to his personal highlight reel, which isn’t common for Hellebuyck.