WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg Jets saw Mikko Rantanen coming, but he lit them up anyway. Now his name is etched into the NHL history books twice over, and the Dallas Stars have a 1-0 series lead.
Rantanen’s second-period hat trick gave him points on 12 straight Stars goals, surpassing Mario Lemieux’s streak of points on nine consecutive goals for the 1992 Pittsburgh Penguins. He’s also the first player in Stanley Cup playoff history to score multiple hat tricks in a single period.
It’s not as though the Jets didn’t know what kind of problem he could be. Rantanen was all over Winnipeg’s pregame scouting report after his Game 7 third-period hat trick against Colorado. He was also burned into Winnipeg’s memories after what he did to the Jets for Colorado last year: nine points in five games, including the series-winning goal. Rantanen was a big part of Jets head coach Scott Arniel’s game plan, which included extensive head-to-head minutes with Adam Lowry’s shutdown line and the Jets’ top defence pair of Dylan Samberg and Neal Pionk.
The shocking thing is how little of the puck Rantanen needed to do his damage.
That Rantanen still found time, space and the offensive spark to win Game 1 for Dallas is partly a testament to his incredible ability, and partly a testament to his coach, Pete DeBoer. Rantanen scored three goals in a 7:55 span and possessed the puck for less than two seconds on each. The Jets played Rantanen hard throughout those six shifts, predominantly using Lowry’s line against the Stars’ top line of Rantanen, Roope Hintz and Mikael Granlund. He barely had the puck, making only one play with it aside from the three goals he scored, but Rantanen didn’t need to hold the puck to do his damage.
“Let’s see how long he can run this for,” DeBoer said. “He’s rolling and he’s feeling it. It’s pretty impressive, what he’s doing.”
Another one for Mikko Rantanen! 🚨 pic.twitter.com/E1d8Jo6AIq
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 8, 2025
Rantanen scored his first goal by reacting to a rebound faster than Samberg in the Jets’ slot. He scored his second goal on a deflection from the circle to Connor Hellebuyck’s right. His third goal took puck luck — a Stars-friendly bounce off of Samberg on a Dallas power play — but that’s two of three goals with better execution than that of the Jets who tried to mark him.
DeBoer gave Rantanen extra shifts in the offensive zone by double-shifting him on the Stars’ fourth line. He scored both five-on-five goals while playing with Sam Steel and Evgenii Dadonov.
“He’s used to playing big minutes in Colorado with (Nathan) MacKinnon,” DeBoer explained. “We’ve traditionally been a four-line team, so he’s taken a little bit of a haircut ice-time-wise with us. But I’ve been trying to supplement that a little bit because he is used to getting more ice, and it’s a lot easier when he’s going like he is now.”
Remember MacKinnon? The superstar without whom Rantanen isn’t meant to be able to succeed? That Avalanche misstep looks costlier by the game. Rantanen’s hat trick puts him atop playoff point scoring, with eight goals and seven assists for 15 points, and makes him a way-too-early Conn Smythe Trophy favorite.
‘We gave up home ice,’ and keys to a Jets win in Game 2
The keys to winning Game 2 go well beyond containing Rantanen.
There’s a lens through which Winnipeg’s 3-2 loss to Dallas was the least miserable, most correctable loss of the Jets’ playoffs, but Arniel sounded uniquely frustrated after its Game 1 loss.
“We know we just gave up home-ice advantage, and that wasn’t a game where they rolled over top of us for three periods,” Arniel said. “That was a game where we weren’t at our best, and we should have been.”
Whether it was a case of Winnipeg needing more time to get over its dramatic, double-overtime win in Game 7 or a one-off case of awful execution, the Jets took a long time to assert themselves in Game 1. Mark Scheifele was Winnipeg’s most dangerous player by the end of the night, but opened the game with a series of giveaways. Nikolaj Ehlers put an impressive backhand deke wide — and won several races to keep power-play shifts going in the offensive zone — but got his signals crossed with his linemates multiple times over.
“There was a lot of sloppiness to that game,” Arniel said. “That did not feel like a playoff game, Game 1 in Round 2. That felt like Game 45 in the middle of December. Obviously we know the high that we’re on coming off that St. Louis game, but man, this is the playoffs. That’s a game that no matter how you start the game or however you get into the game, it’s one of those ones that there’s a way we have to play as a group, and that’s not how we played tonight.”
Key No. 1: The Dallas Stars are not the St. Louis Blues
The Stars took one key page out of the Blues’ playbook, but making Winnipeg’s night miserable via thunderous bodychecks was not one of them. Whereas St. Louis ranked fourth in the playoffs in hits per minute of play, the Stars are last in the NHL.
It sounds absurd, but that may have thrown Winnipeg off in Game 1.
“I’m not harping back onto St. Louis, but we didn’t have a lot of room to make plays, to hold onto pucks. Tonight we had time and we didn’t make the plays,” Arniel said. “We rushed ourselves. I think we were thinking that people were going to come pouring over top of us. We had more time to make plays and to execute.”
Nikolaj Ehlers looks like he has his wheels back but he’s gotten his signals crossed with linemates on two entry attempts.
You can see something building for him, though, like an engine coughing before a little bit of gas brings it to life.
— Murat Ates (@WPGMurat) May 8, 2025
Winnipeg made some poor decisions with the puck against St. Louis in the moments leading up to heavy hits. Knowing they were about to get run, Jets players rushed their decisions or lobbed the puck straight back to Blues players while protecting themselves physically. (Nathan Walker’s goal in Game 6 may be a good example; Josh Morrissey lobs the puck to Justin Faulk in the neutral zone while appearing to duck out of a check from Alexey Toropchenko.)
The Stars gave Winnipeg more time to work with, changing the rhythm of the game — and it somehow became a problem for the Jets instead of an advantage. In a postseason marked by poor Jets starts, the first period of Game 1 was particularly rough. Dallas jumped out to an 8-0 lead in shots, including two each by Rantanen and Hintz. On Friday, the Jets will need to do a much better job of using the time and space given to them, on the power play and at even strength.
“Our start was once again not very good,” Nino Niederreiter said. “It’s something we know we’ve got to do better and it was a completely different series than the St. Louis one. They are obviously a very experienced team. They know how to be in a tight game; they are extremely patient. That is something we’ve got to learn from.”
Key No. 2: The Dallas Stars can play like the St. Louis Blues
The Jets have given up more goals on deflections and screens than any other team in the playoffs. Rantanen’s second goal brings that total up to 12, which is nearly 40 percent of all goals Winnipeg has allowed and roughly twice the amount allowed by Toronto and Dallas, who are No. 2 and 3.
So yes, there’s a playbook to beat Winnipeg. Rantanen’s Avalanche perfected it last year, the Blues nearly knocked Winnipeg out in Round 1, and the Stars are creating plenty of double-layered screens of their own. Remember Dallas’ 8-0 run of shots at the start of the game? Only two of them came without a Stars player in the slot. Most of them occurred with two or even three Stars players crashing the net. The good news from Winnipeg’s perspective is that Hellebuyck was dialed in from the opening whistle and appeared to have elevated his play from Round 1. The bad news is that there were a lot of quality scoring chances tucked into that scoreless flurry to start the game.
Key No. 3: The Winnipeg Jets need to play like the Winnipeg Jets
This brings us back to the Jets’ struggles to generate offence in Game 1.
Scheifele returned to the top line with Kyle Connor and Gabriel Vilardi. It took them a long time to get going, but Scheifele’s line ended up controlling play, with Arniel matching it up predominantly against the Stars’ second and third lines. Scheifele scored Winnipeg’s second goal on a wrist shot from the slot and led all skaters with seven shots on goal.
“I probably didn’t find my stride until the second, probably later in the second, the third period. Then I started feeling better,” Scheifele said.
The positive storylines should have continued, given that Winnipeg was playing with a full complement of forwards for the first time since March 23, but that was not the case. The Vladislav Namestnikov line with Ehlers and Cole Perfetti was outshot 7-2. The fourth line was outshot 3-0. Even Lowry’s line with Niederreiter and Mason Appleton spent more time in the Jets zone than the other end of the rink, although Niederreiter did open the scoring with a backhand goal.
The Jets’ lack of generation was their biggest problem, and they got in their own way more than the Stars made it difficult for them. Arniel seemed to agree, saying he shuffled his lines in the third period because “there was nothing going on. … I was just trying to get a little bit of a shakeup there.”
An optimistic take on the Jets’ play in Game 1 would suggest they kept things close and their goaltender played well. They were in it until the end, despite not bringing a game that resembled their best. A pessimistic take would suggest Dallas was, like the Jets, processing the comedown from a dramatic Game 7. If Winnipeg has a higher level to get to, so, too, must Dallas.
Part of Arniel’s frustration was the opportunities the Jets didn’t capitalize on.
“There’s areas we need to exploit,” Arniel said. “I saw a lot of stuff tonight that we’ll look at on video tomorrow.”
(Photo of Mikko Rantanen skating against Neal Pionk: Cameron Bartlett / Getty Images)