Vegas finishes off Winnipeg with a 2-1 victory in Game 5.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Ryan Reaves scored the winning goal, Marc-Andre Fleury made 31 saves and the Vegas Golden Knights pushed their remarkable expansion season into the Stanley Cup finals, beating the Winnipeg Jets 2-1 on Sunday in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals.
Alex Tuch also scored for the Knights. They lost Game 1 in Winnipeg before winning four straight to become the first expansion team since the 1968 St. Louis Blues – when the six initial expansion teams were put alone in the West – to get to the Stanley Cup finals.
Vegas will meet the Tampa Bay Lightning or the Washington Capitals. Tampa Bay leads the Eastern Conference finals 3-2, with Game 6 set for Monday night in Washington.
Josh Morrissey scored for the Jets, and Connor Hellebuyck made 30 saves.
Reaves, a bruising Winnipeg native acquired from the Pittsburgh Penguins before the trade deadline in February, snapped a 1-1 tie with 6:39 left in the second period when he tipped Luca Sbisa’s point shot past Hellebuyck for his first goal of the playoffs.
Winnipeg got a power play early in the third but couldn’t muster much of anything. The Knights smothered much of the Jets’ attack for the next 10 minutes, with Hellebuyck having to come up with big stops on William Karlsson and Eric Haula to keep his team within one.
The Jets pressed with under 4 minutes to go, with Fleury stopping Blake Wheeler on the doorstep, but the Knights closed out their third straight series on the road.
The Jets beat the Knights 4-2 in Game 1, but Vegas snatched home ice with a 3-1 victory in Game 2 before picking up 4-2 and 3-2 wins at T-Mobile Arena.
The Knights, whose jaw-dropping, inaugural 109-point campaign included a Pacific Division crown, swept the Los Angeles Kings in the first round and knocked out the San Jose Sharks in six games.
The Jets had the NHL’s second-best record with 114 points in the regular season. They advanced to the conference finals for the first time by topping the Nashville Predators in Game 7 on the road after a five-game victory over the Minnesota Wild in the opening round.
The usual raucous, white-clad crowd at Bell MTS Place – not to mention the thousands of fans outside the arena attending a street party on a sun-drenched spring afternoon – were silenced just 5:11 into Game 5 when Tuch jumped on Morrissey’s turnover and fired his sixth goal of the playoffs past Hellebuyck.
The Jets were tentative to start, and it got worse after the opening goal as Vegas dominated the next couple shifts, forcing some good saves from Hellebuyck before Winnipeg got its feet moving.
After being outshot 7-1 in the first 7 minutes, the Jets finally pushed back and turned the tide with the next nine shots, culminating with Morrissey making amends for his early gaffe with 2:46 left in the period. Bryan Little won a faceoff in the offensive zone straight back to the second-year defenseman, who blasted his first career playoff goal past Fleury’s glove.
Both teams had chances in the second period before Reaves made it 2-1, with Jets center Mathieu Perrault just missing on a pass from Little that had too much speed.
Right after Reaves scored the second playoff goal of his career – and first since 2015 with St. Louis – Winnipeg’s Nikolaj Ehlers rang a shot off the post.
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