Anything Can Happen in Game Six, and It Looks Like It Probably Will

Hold onto thy derrière, for thine eyes shall see new lines tonight

A lot to get to today, but let’s start with the nuts and bolts. Per the inimitable Lia Assimakopoulos, here are the lines from morning skate in St. Paul today:

Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Steel-Duchene-Rantanen
Bunting-Hryckowian-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Harley-Heiskanen
Lindell-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-Petrovic

Oettinger

As we discussed yesterday, the Harley-Heiskanen load-up felt pretty inevitable, as did the inclusion of Michael Bunting and the scratch of Tyler Myers. What we didn’t expect was the breaking up of the Duchene line, though I suppose it does create some interesting matchup questions for Minnesota—not that they’re going to be too worried, given how their top guys have been rolling.

As usual, we’ll probably wind up seeing a few different mix-em-ups during the game regardless. There is no reason to leave anything in the tank during this one.

For the Wild, Jonas Brodin and Bobby Brink appear to be out, so Jeff Petry will come into the lineup, making Minnesota’s bottom-four suddenly look even more vulnerable than they’ve already been (which would be more noteworthy if not for the utter dominance of the top pairing).

In other words, it looks like it’s going to be a pretty fascinating Game 6. But then, they usually are.

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Jake Oettinger burst onto the Stanley Cup Playoffs scene in 2022 with an all-time performance against Calgary, dragging Dallas to the cusp of an upset with a heroic double-overtime effort in Game 7, where the wild card Stars ultimately fell to the Flames. You know this.

It wasn’t just that Game 7 that deserves plaudits, though. After doing some math, I have determined that you actually and technically cannot get to Game 7 without also going through Game 6. And what a Game 6 that was, in 2022. Do you remember that?

The journey was similar to one you know well. Like 2026, those ‘22 Stars lost Game 1, then went up 2-1 in the series, and then dropped the next two before arriving in Game 6 trailing 3-2 against a Flames team that looked eager to dispatch the hard-to-squash bug that was those Dallas Stars under Rick Bowness.

Then the Stars got some big performances from up and down the lineup, ultimately playing one of their best third periods of the season.

Jake Oettinger had to be lights-out early, as he did throughout this series. Even now, some of those saves in the highlights above take your breath away. But do you remember how the Stars actually started to be in command of the game starting around the midway point, only for Calgary to tie it up with two quick goals in the second period?

And yet, the Stars were able to absorb those punches and take the game anyway. Resilience and resistance are playoff requirements for fans and players alike.

So, how did those Stars win that Game 6? Well, “Jake Oettinger,” a proper noun that is also a complete sentence in the context of those playoffs, but also Roope Hintz, who played one of the best games I have ever seen him play in that Game 6. Miro Heiskanen was similarly dominant, eventually scoring the game-winning goal by absolutely losing Matthew Tkachuk (in his final season as a Flame) and wiring a sneaky wrister through a screened Jacob Markström. And of course, Joel Kiviranta came up huge in clutch time when he jammed a puck to the net that Michael Raffl eventually magicked over the line after a mad scramble that benefited from some help from Chris Tanev’s glove.

Improbably, the Stars had punched back in Game 6 and brought Calgary to the brink of elimination with them, and you know what happened next. Hintz wouldn’t be available for Game 7 after suffering a reaction to treatment for an ongoing oblique injury, and neither would Alex Radulov, though he was given lineup scratches both healthy and not in his final playoff series in the NHL and was a shell of his former self at that point.

And even still, the Stars very nearly won that Game 7. Ultimately, Dallas would fall to the Flames because they didn’t get that third goal in Game 7 they got in Game 6. The offense just wasn’t there, but if Roope Hintz had been able to go, I really do think they scratch out a series win in 2022 with Calgary’s nerves getting the best of them. We can talk about the butterfly effects of such a scenario during the summer, but it’s crazy how close that team got to a storybook first-round win.

Looking back at numbers from that series, it continues to hold up as perhaps the most ridiculous playoff ride in the post-lockout era for Dallas. No, that Dallas team probably wasn’t deep enough to have made a deep run. Heck, even the Flames, who finished atop the Pacific Division, would fall meekly to Edmonton in five games in the next round.

Anecdotally speaking, Game 6 is usually a great playoff game, even when one of the teams has no business still being in the series. And in 2026, both teams entirely deserve to be here.

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I don’t begrudge anyone their playoff dread. Before the 2025 playoff run, I wrote a less-edited version of this:

That’s why Stars fans don’t really have a choice. If you want to reap the rewards of any magical playoff run (and they are all that), then you have to watch the games. You have to be willing to experience the agony or ecstasy with all the dread and uncertainty they bring. That’s life, man. That’s every game. The possibility of losing is why we watch. If you wanted to see someone get it right every time, you’d go sit at the bank and watch tellers count coins.

This Stars team can bring you those moments, in case you forgot. Even if you’re only focused on results, the Stars brought good ones far more often than not this year, even after Heiskanen went down. We don’t watch sports just for results, but for the story arc. We want to ride the ride. And you will miss out on a whole lot of the highs if you refuse to risk the lows.

Some of y’all reading this have watched playoff series in the early or mid-nineties that even I wasn’t watching at the time, so you know this lesson better than most. Ask the 1991 North Stars about expectations vs. reality. Or ask the 2006 Stars, who finished atop the Pacific Division like those 2022 Flames, only to get bounced in just five games in the first round by the Colorado Avalanche (for the second season in a row), albeit by losing three games in overtime. It was a painful series, that one.

In the playoffs, there is absolutely momentum, but of a capricious sort. If you’ve been watching Utah/Vegas, you know this well. It really isn’t about building a case for why you’re the better team, but about which team can manage not to trip over their own shoelaces when given the chance to win the game. The team that deserves to win a playoff game is pretty much always the team to actually do so, full stop.

Often the team leading a series feels more pressure in Game 6. Players in 1999 will tell you (whether truthfully or otherwise) that they had little hope of going back to Dallas and winning Game 7, had Brett Hull not scored. I likewise remain of the belief that those 2008 Stars would not have won a Game 7 in San Jose, had Marty Turco and Brenden Morrow not given American Airlines Center its best Stars moment since its opening. Kari Lehtonen doesn’t have the chance to stomp all over your heart in that Game 7 in 2016 if not for his lights-out robbery in Game 6 on the road.

There are many ways to win a critical playoff game, but they all start the same way: someone (and usually someones) has to have a big game. This can happen in any series at any point. Hockey fans know this. Colorado was down 3-1 in the 202 bubble, but they came within a Joel Kiviranta stupefy spell of roaring back with three straight wins. I’m not sure whether that series proves you should be hopeful or despairing for tonight. You can probably torque into evidence either way, and I suspect you will.

If I had told you nine months ago that you would be worried about the Stars’ first-round chances because of an Arttu Hyry injury, you would probably have had Some Questions about the team and my own wellbeing, but here we are. Hintz is unavailable because of a Nathan MacKinnon-related injury, Miro Heiskanen is recently returned from a Ryan Hartman-related injury, and Mikko Rantanen missed significant time down the stretch because Tom Wilson and because Olympics.

Sam Steel and Radek Faksa also took their knocks late in the year, while both Michael Bunting and Tyler Myers endured injuries and underperformance alike. Nils Lundkvist didn’t even travel after having his face pick-axed by the skate of a falling Michael McCarron.

NHL players will tell you in the moment that none of these are excuses, and that they have to simply Get the Job Done. That’s the mentality they have to have, too. The moment you start feeling sorry for yourself during a game is the moment you start to lose it.

After the season, I suspect we’ll learn about a litany of injuries, to some of the above players and more. You have to get lucky to win a Stanley Cup, and in the Central Division, you have to get a bit lucky just to get out of the first round. In hockey and in life, your health is something to be grateful for every day you have it.

Dallas was the better team over 82 games this year, and they’ve been the better team over the past decade, too. But they’re also facing a Minnesota Wild team that is unironically experiencing this game as the biggest match of the decade. Repeated playoff failure breeds a voracious appetite, and you can bet that these players and everyone in hockey ops is banging the drum of What This Means to Minnesota each and every day.

Sports don’t operate according to narratives except in retrospect, though. Think of all the teams that seemed destined to do something wonderful, only to abruptly find their season ended or their series derailed. You can bet the farm that Joe Pavelski and the 2014 Sharks felt themselves destined for far greater things than the ignominy of a 3-0 reverse series sweep.

The Stars have a chance to equalize the pressure in this series with a stubborn win tonight, and even the depleted roster they have available is entirely capable of doing that. Just because a team is facing additional challenges doesn’t mean failure isn’t still a disappointment. And just because a franchise seems “due” for a series win doesn’t mean they will actually get it.

Tonight’s battle will be decided, if we’re lucky, solely by the players on the ice. They say the last win of a series is the hardest win to get, and the Wild know this better than almost any other team in the league. Despite grabbing a disgruntled Quinn Hughes from Vancouver, and despite forking over $17 million to keep Kirill Kaprizov happy, absolutely nothing is guaranteed for this Minnesota team just yet. We’ll see if the Stars can remind them of that fact at 6:30 tonight.