The Dallas Stars tagged the Winnipeg Jets 5-1 on Saturday in what ended up being a largely dominant effort by the guys in green. The goal scoring effort was led by the big trio of Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, and Alexander Radulov. They scored all five goals plus, for good measure, tallied a total of five assists. They deserve all the praise in the world, but without the second line going yeoman work this game isn't a blowout.

When you get past the Stars top two lines figuring out which line slots where is a bit of a coin flip at first glance. The kid line with Brett Ritchie is clearly the bottom unit. A line centered by Jason Spezza feels like it should be the second line, but when you look a bit closer there is little doubt that the trio of Radek Faksa, Tyler Pitlick, and Devin Shore is operating as the second line.

Against Winnipeg Faksa led all Stars forwards in even strength ice time with a hair under 14 minutes. His group was matched pretty tightly against the Jets top line of Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Blake Wheeler. Jim Montgomery didn't play a terribly defined matchup game against the Arizona Coyotes in the opener. Some more definition came through on Saturday.

Check out the hockeyviz matchup chart to see what I'm talking about.

Reading the hockeyviz matchup chart is pretty straightforward. The bigger the box means the matchup was more prevalent. The box is divided between blue and red to show which side of the matchup attempted more shots. Blue is for the home team and red for the visitors. The boxes go from light to dark to signify how chaotic play was with the matchup on the ice (combined rate of shot attempts).

Tyler Seguin and friends saw a heavy dose of Patrick Laine at even strength in relatively low event hockey, though they also saw some of the other Jets forwards. The Faksa line was almost exclusively against Scheifele. Most importantly they won the battle against the Scheifele line by playing them straight up in shot attempts.

It looks even more impressive when you dive into where the shots came from with this matchup taking place. The shot chart to the right is with Faksa on the ice at even strength as a proxy for the entire matchup.

At the top you can see shots taken by the Faksa group. They crashed the Jets net pretty hard all things considered with a few shots on the edge of being scoring chances.

At the bottom you can see that this group managed to allow only one really severe scoring chance against one of the top lines in the league. There were a few other marginal scoring chances, absolutely. You'll take this effort 999 times out of 1000 if you're the Stars.

Corsica's Expected Goals paint and even rosier picture. Faksa had .96 xGF at even strength last night, triple the total of any other player in the game.

TRIPLE.

The i in these stats is for individual, so this is what each player was credited with on the scoresheet in the Corsi, Shots, and Expected Goals columns.

Not all of that is from just this matchup, but enough of it is to drive the point home. Praise the Stars top line all day. They're an other-worldly group that rivals any top line in the game. That second line put in some work against the Jets though. They aren't going to score much in all likelihood despite Faksa trying his damnedest to score all of the goals.

On a nightly basis they appear to be ready to be a group capable of completely neutralizing even the top lines in the league while causing chaos of their own. That development, should it be maintained into the future, is going to make the Stars a tough out against every team in the league.

@JoshL1220 on Twitter