Nine games down, seven games to go.

The Winnipeg Jets took care of business in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final, jumping out to an early three-goal lead and carrying it to a 4-2 victory. The final score was probably a bit more kind to Vegas than the actual game showed – Vegas was chasing nearly the entire game and Winnipeg, especially down the stretch, was willing to throttle down and bottle things up in the defensive zone.

There were two key takeaways from Game 1. The first is that the Jets accomplished in one period what the San Jose Sharks and Los Angeles Kings couldn’t deliver once in 10 games, creating extreme discomfort for Knights goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury. Fleury was bound to have a bad stretch at some point – he was stopping over 95 per cent of shots coming into the third round, which is obviously unsustainable. But the Jets didn’t make it easy for him, either.

There was incredible traffic in front of Fleury on three of the four Jets goals. Paul Stastny was camped out in the crease right before Patrik Laine’s one-timer for Winnipeg’s second goal. Joel Armia scored on a redirect in the paint – a play that was initially ruled goaltender interference but overturned by Toronto. Mark Scheifele was amidst a sea of traffic – he was the fifth and final body in front of Dustin Byfuglien’s point shot on Winnipeg’s fourth goal. The Jets talked about screening Fleury and forcing him into uncomfortable save positions, and they delivered in a big way.

The other interesting storyline was how Winnipeg matched up against Vegas with last change. Coming into the series I wrote that Vegas had two ways to pull off a series upset – they needed the aforementioned Fleury to be great, of course, and they needed their top line to dominate. Vegas have been a handful to deal with all season long because their top line has been so good and their depth usually can outskate the opposition. I’m not sure that’s the case against Winnipeg, a team that seems just as deep and just as talented throughout the lineup.

Still, it’s not an easy question to answer if you are Paul Maurice. You want to ensure that Jonathan Marchessault, William Karlsson and Reilly Smith don’t run wild on you the way they have everyone else this season, but you also can’t be paralyzed by that matchup. At the end of the day, that line only plays 30 per cent of the game – there is still plenty of time at 5-on-5 and in special teams to score goals, and you can score an awful lot of goals in those minutes.

In that light, I was curious to see if Winnipeg would do anything quirky with the matchups and ice time. Looking at the data, I’m not sure Maurice was concerned about chasing any particular matchup. Either he has confidence in his better lines to outskate Vegas, or he just wants to get his better players more ice time, or a combination of factors.

The below data tables shows the percentage of minutes Vegas skaters played against Winnipeg forwards and defencemen. To me, it’s a clear indication that Winnipeg was fine playing best against best:

The Karlsson, Marchessault, and Smith line were heavily matched up against Winnipeg’s Scheifele line – about two-thirds of their shifts saw direct head-to-head action. You can see the trickle-down effect from there. The Erik Haula line matched up heavily against Stastny’s line, the Cody Eakin line matched up heavily against the Bryan Little line and the Pierre-Edouard Bellemare line saw significant time against Adam Lowry and company. The defensive matchups followed in a similar pattern.

The Vegas top line was in on both of their goals, but the first came on a delayed penalty and the second came on the power play, courtesy a Ben Chiarot trip. At pure 5-on-5, the line more or less broke even against Winnipeg’s best.

This is precisely the problem for Vegas. Los Angeles made it a point to get Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty against Vegas’ top line. It didn’t work, and their depth got hammered on top of that. San Jose made it a point to get Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Justin Braun out against Vegas’ top line, but deployed their more talented forwards against Vegas’ depth to try and balance the scoring. That failed too, mostly because San Jose didn’t have enough firepower in their bottom six.

Winnipeg is a different animal. Scheifele is good enough to be a matchup problem on his own against Vegas’ best unit. Even if that ends up being a wash, it’s hard to see where Vegas has remaining advantages further down the lineup. It’s hard to make a ‘Vegas has depth’ argument when you still have talents like Nikolaj Ehlers, Stastny, Laine, Little, and Mathieu Perreault to play a bunch of minutes against your weaker forward and defensive groups.

Attention now will turn to Vegas coach Gerard Gallant. Do you roll with what got you to the Conference Final, or do you make lineup adjustments because of the challenges the Winnipeg lineup poses? We will find out Monday night.