BILLECK: Too many of Winnipeg's faults crept into Game 2

They got away with it in Game 1.

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And with a goaltender who could finally stop a puck on Tuesday night, the Winnipeg Jets were punished by the Colorado Avalanche for playing half a game.

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The Avs took Game 2 by a 5-2 margin, fending off a sea of white to earn the split as the series shifts to Denver for Games 3 and 4 later this week.

You can look at the result in a couple of ways:

1. The Jets had their nine-game winning streak snapped. They weren’t going to win 16 in a row in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and few teams venture off on heaters like the Jets were on.

2. The Jets fell victim to those self-inflicted wounds head coach Rick Bowness has harped on about all season.

Your view may vary depending on the colour of the glasses you wear.

But the truth is this: if the Jets want to respond in Game 3 on Friday, they will have to play the other half of the game.

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They earned a hard-fought 2-1 lead approaching the midway point of Tuesday’s game, doing so with the momentum that comes from killing off a four-minute double-minor.

All of those good vibes when Mark Scheifele one-handed in a centring pass from Gabriel Vilardi were killed off in the latter half of that second period.

The Jets caved to an Avalanche of pressure, resulting in a span of a little under six minutes where Colorado turned a 2-1 deficit into a 4-2 lead with 20 minutes to go.

They didn’t have much left in the tank for the third, firing just eight shots Alexandar Georgiev’s way.

When Colorado was trailing 4-3 after the second in Game 1 on Sunday, they came out with a flurry, shooting 21 times in the final frame.

On a night when the Jets found an early goal on a netminder whose confidence was close to nil after a historically bad performance on Sunday, it felt like the Jets let him off the hook.

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This isn’t taking anything away from Georgiev’s bounce-back effort. He was solid.

But it stands to reason that if the Jets would have kept their foot on his neck, it may have snapped with a second goal in quick succession.

Watch David Gustafsson’s first career playoff goal again. Georgiev is swimming on the play, caught in no-man’s land.

There would have been a bit of a letdown on the bench. The goal came just 3:15 into the game.

Winnipeg had two power-play opportunities before the period was through, but there was nothing doing there. They mustered just three shots on three attempts with the man advantage total.

The Jets came out precisely the way they would have wanted to, got the game’s first goal, and then seemingly rested on their good work.

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And that’s when Colorado went to work.

Sure, they didn’t find a goal on Kyle Connor’s high-sticking infraction. And yes, they conceded a brilliant, Crosby-esque play by Scheifele.

But they seemed undeterred.

Winnipeg heads to Colorado on the back foot. They know they didn’t engineer enough zone time. They know they allowed Colorado to sustain far too much of that.

They also know they made some errors with the puck, most notably Connor Hellebuyck failing to pick up on the forecheck that led to him getting stripped of the puck and Zach Parise scoring the eventual game-winner, and Nikolaj Ehlers coughing up a puck from his posterior that led to Josh Manson getting a breakaway out of the penalty box.

Those are fatal errors in the playoffs, and they killed Winnipeg on Tuesday.

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Puck management issues have been a thread woven into Winnipeg’s season’s fabric. More than ever, they will have to find a seam ripper to get rid of it starting Friday, going up against a team that won more games at home than any other in the NHL this season.

• Manson had a tremendous game, a bounce back that was only overshadowed by the one Georgiev had. The breakaway goal with seconds left in the second was just a cherry on top. Well earned. “You don’t get those often,” Manson said.  “And just to be able to put it away, that was nice. It was obviously not my best effort in Game 1, so I wanted to focus on that.”

• Georgiev composed himself not long after Gustafsson’s goal to make a save in tight on a cross-ice pass into the slot. That was the start of what ended up being a terrific, and potentially series-saving game from the netminder. “I tried to imagine that feeling of winning the first game of the series for us,” Georgiev said. “Trust the game, enjoy the atmosphere and try to approach it as a new game after the last one.”

• Dylan Samberg’s dash-two on the night won’t show it, but he was tremendous on the penalty kill. On the four-minute kill in the second, he blocked three shots, sacrificing the body to keep Colorado at bay. Samberg was in the crosshairs after Game 1, with a couple of tough plays that ended in goals against. He had a better effort in Game 2, including four blocks total.

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X: @scottbilleck

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