Terrence Lee - USA TODAY Sports
NHL

Round 1 Takeaways: How the Jets and Islanders won their series

As the opening round series results start to roll in, we're going to highlight some key trends that helped push the winning teams over the top. Since styles do tend to make fights this time of year, it's useful to identify what teams have specifically been doing well to generate positive outcomes. 

Rather than just doing traditional recaps of what happened though, we'll hopefully be able to spin it forward by pulling some actionable bits of information out that will be relevant for the following round(s) to come as well. 

We've already taken a look at how the Avalanche used their defensemen to throttle the Blues, and how the Bruins top-six continued its dominance against the Capitals. This time, let's talk about the importance of goaltending in the postseason, and the role it played in the Jets beating the Oilers, and the Islanders beating the Penguins.

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This article is about:
NHL Edmonton Oilers New York Islanders Pittsburgh Penguins Winnipeg Jets NHL Sidney Crosby Casey DeSmith Connor Hellebuyck Tristan Jarry Yevgeni Malkin Kyle Palmieri Adam Pelech Ryan Pulock Mike Smith Ilya Sorokin Semyon Varlamov
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