Dallas Stars Media Day: New Lineup, Old Faces, and the Same Challenges As Before

Third time's the charm, perhaps?

The Dallas Stars are back in the Western Conference Final for the third straight year.

It’s funny how teams talk about success before the season compared to how they view it during the thick of the postseason. For most teams, the talk before the year (or even during it) is all about just getting into the playoffs, just getting a ticket to the tournament and seeing what happens. “Just get in and see what happens” is the mantra of every single bubble team when early spring rolls around.

But for the Stars, the expectations have gotten too high for that to be the case. As they know all too well, even a great record in the regular season doesn’t mean anything close to an easy path when the playoffs begin, but you also can’t take anything for granted.

Dallas had to knock off two of the best teams in the league just to get halfway to their goal, and they might well have the other two best teams still to face on the way to the top of the mountain. But that’s no great surprise to anyone in that dressing room.

“When we do our meetings and talk with each other, it’s not like we’re talking to a new group,” Jamie Benn said. “We’ve been here before.”

They have. They’ve gotten ten wins deep twice in a row now, and they’re sitting on eight victories ahead of Wednesday’s opener against Edmonton. Through two rounds, they’ve already faced players who have won the Norris, Hart, and Vezina Trophies. And now they’ll face Edmonton, a team with four Hart Trophies between Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl.

But as Jamie Benn said on Tuesday, the group in Dallas has seen a thing or two as well.

“It’s fun when you go through battles with the same guys so many times,” Benn said.
”You see what guys do and what guys sacrifice for each other. We know we can count on one another to make that next step.”

That’s the key, really: the trust the players have in one another. And in a year with as much adversity as this one, you can imagine how that trust has been tested time and time again, most particularly at the end of the season, when the Stars dropped game after game in a row, stumbling their way into a playoff series against Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar.

That trust can take many forms, too. In talking with Tyler Seguin today, he pointed out that there’s a fine line between the players’ friendship with each other and the high level of accountability that you also have to hold each other to. You simply can’t do anything great if you’re more concerned with sparing feelings than with giving whatever it takes to win the game. Sometimes, you might have to be critical of each other in pursuit of something more important, and trust that your teammate won’t resent you for that in the long run. But with this group, the trust runs particularly deep in that regard.

You saw that, I think, in how Seguin stepped up without Miro Heiskanen or Jason Robertson, as the Stars clawed their way to a 2-2 series through four games, thanks to overtime goals from Seguin and Colin Blackwell (and another crucial power play goal from Seguin in regulation).

And once Game 5 arrived, it became apparent that the Stars had something that Colorado no longer did: Mikko Rantanen, who lit up the scoreboard to an historic degree en route to eliminating his old team in the most wonderfully heartbreaking fashionable imaginable. Talk about a quick way to earn trust.

But the thing about Rantanen you might not realize is that he isn’t just an elite Finnish winger, although he is certainly that. He is incredibly competitive, as any elite player has to be when playing with someone like Nathan MacKinnon, who is just as fiery at the IIHF World Championships as he is in an NHL playoff game.

Rantanen is a workout fiend who leaves everything on the ice during his shifts. And despite his extremely patient, professional, and good-natured demeanor with the media, he comes by his preternatural playoff scoring ability the old-fashioned way: through hard work and intense focus, never giving an inch to the other side.

In a sense, Rantanen is the epitome of Finnish hockey—with a massive dollop of size, skill, and speed to boot. He’s hardworking, focused, and always able to summon a little bit more in the tank, whether he’s playing 19 minutes or 25. And when you take a player like that and plop him on a team with four other high-performaning and highly motivated Finnish players, it’s no surprise that the Stars have weathered their early playoff storm to get this far.

“This is the golden age of Finnish hockey, if you look at the last decade,” Pete DeBoer said on Tuesday. “They have those winning habits, and that’s what makes them easy to coach, easy to play.”

That trust in his players is something a veteran coach like Pete DeBoer loves to praise. He has talked at length about how Wyatt Johnston or Thomas Harley are such easy players to deploy, because they bring such a consistent level of excellence and responsibility. And Rantanen prides himself on that consistency in not just the team’s play, but also their mental approach to games as well, as the Stars have followed three 4-0 losses in the playoffs with impressive victories in route to the final four.

“There’s an experience, there’s that even-keeled mindset, like I’ve talked about,” Rantanen said. “After a win, it felt like we never got too high on the celebration of a win. If we lose, we reset really quickly. I think that’s the most important thing, and when you have a lot of experience, that kind of comes automatically in the playoffs.”

That sort of trust extends beyond the dressing room, too.

“I think we’ve got a hardened group, a very resilient group,” said general manager Jim Nill. “They want more of this, and they’ve learned from it each time they’ve gone [to the playoffs].”

Jim Nill also pointed out that there was never a “panic” in the group during that losing streak to the end the season, even when they obviously weren’t thrilled with the results.

“Were we concerned? Yes. We don’t wanna lose seven, eight games in a row. Yes, there was concern. But our guys stuck with it, they’ve continued to stick with it, and you bend and you don’t break.”

Indeed, the Stars haven’t broken, despite every excuse to do so. Without their top defenseman and top goal-scorer, anyone would have given them a pass if they’d been outdone by Colorado, let alone the Presidents’ Trophy winners in Winnipeg.

But they didn’t. And given how big of a switch-flip Dallas has executed since their ignominious finish to the regular season, I have wondered if that rough stretch—their first such losing streak since DeBoer arrived in 2022—might well have been a result of a team that knew the real battles were still ahead.

Perhaps they started to subconsciously save a tiny bit, even as they professed the need to right the ship, to go into the playoffs feeling good. Because while it’s nice if you can find a way to hold a lead against Detroit or Pittsburgh or Nashville down the stretch, it’s also not quite as life-or-death as holding such leads becomes in the postseason.

If that was what happened, well, it would be hard to fault them too terribly much for treating those final games of the season like the last couple of hours on a Friday at the office before a long weekend. Hockey teams contain human beings, after all.

But now, all that pressure of fixing the problems has faded well into the background, overshadowed by Jake Oettinger and Mikko Rantanen’s world-class performance to get them back to the cusp of the Stanley Cup Final once again.

This group has proven they can overcome a lot of adversity and beat a couple of very, very good teams when it matters most. That galvanizes a group even as veteran as this one. Notably, even Jamie Benn seemed a bit less stressed on Tuesday, cracking a couple of jokes during his press conference alongside Jake Oettinger.

“Nothing seems to phase him, really,” Benn said of his goaltender. “I try to get under his skin even in practice, and he’s calm as a cucumber.”

And of facing former teammate John Klingberg, Benn followed up some nice words by ending with that fact that he “can’t wait to try and run him.”

Jamie Benn came with the jokes on Tuesday afternoon

This is the same Benn who was also shown on camera joking with Wayne Gretzky about how he’s “just a checker now.” And it’s the same Benn who answered a question about that interaction today by saying, “It’s doing whatever it takes for your team to win, whatever role that might be.”

Despite being a playoff beast for many years—including last year, when Benn scored 15 points in 19 games while taking only six penalty minutes—Benn makes sense to deploy on that fourth line these days. But his ability to take that role with equanimity and even humor says a lot about his desire to finally earn a Stanley Cup with this group.

There are some former Stars players not named in this article who would have taken issue if a coach moved them down the lineup like DeBoer has done. But Benn has done the exact opposite for years now, leading by example up and down the lineup, whatever line he is or isn’t on.

Benn took the ice for practice on Tuesday wearing a blue, fourth-line sweater for the first time this year, at least that I can recall (though his usage has sometimes tended toward such a role).

He has also been taken off the power play completely in recent games, but he is, absolutely, still this team’s captain in every sense that matters to the players.

“It’s that time of year to make sacrifices,” Benn said, placidly. “And as long as you’re winning games, that’s the most important thing.”

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Speaking of forward lines, these are the lines Pete DeBoer ran in practice on Tuesday:

Granlund-Hintz-Rantanen
Robertson-Duchene-Johnston
Marchment-Steel-Seguin
Benn-Bäck-Dadonov

(Brendan Smith skated as a forward with Colin Blackwell and Mavrik Bourque, so those three look likely to be scratched, should these lines hold.)

It was noteworthy to see two usual centers in Duchene and Johnston together, with Sam Steel being moved up to center Seguin and Marchment. And it also makes sense to move Oskar Bäck into a line with two dangerous scoring wingers to give them a little bit of defensive support.

As always, I’m hesitant to write too much about lines until we see how long they last in the game. But I do think there’s merit to putting Robertson and Duchene with Johnston in an effort to load up the top six, especially if the Hintz line goes against McDavid, with Johnston facing Draisaitl.

Hintz has the ability (as much as any center can) to not get overwhelmed by McDavid’s speed, while Johnston showed he can face down a player like Nathan MacKinnon and bear up quite well. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see Johnston seeing a lot of Draistail in this series.

That means the forward depth will be key, and you’d better get ready to hear that repeated ad nauseaum: Edmonton is deeper than last year. And they are, with players like Adam Henrique and Evander Kane playing in the bottom-six.

But then, Dallas is quite a bit deeper, too.

On defense, Alex Petrovic began defensive zone coverage drills skating next to Lian Bichsel. But by the time drills ramped up to include the entire ice, Ilya Lyubushkin was skating with Bichsel, while Petrovic was skating on a pairing with Matt Dumba. So if I had to bet, I’d say these are the defense pairings for Game 1 tomorrow:

Harley-Heiskanen
Lindell-Ceci
Bichsel-Lyubushkin

As always, take these with a grain of salt until warmups Wednesday night. But I feel fairly confident that those lines and pairings are what we’ll see when the puck drops, given how DeBoer’s practice lines and game lines have corresponded in the past when he has a healthy lineup.

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The other thing about these playoffs that stuck out after today’s media cavalcade was just how many Stars players have been there and done that, when it comes to playoff hockey.

Miro Heiskanen has over 0.7 points per playoff game in his career—more than Sergei Zubov or Joe Pavelski—and he’s played just a dozen games shy of 100 postseason contests, at only 25 years old.

Jamie Benn has 115 playoff games under his belt despite joining the Stars in the midst of a five-year playoff drought. He’s also averaged 0.696 points per game in the playoffs, which is better than players like Zach Parise, Sam Bennett, Milan Hejduk, and level with one Daniel Sedin.

Jake Oettinger, who has faced more shots than any other goalie in the playoffs, has a .916 Sv% across 60 playoff games, better than his .912 regular season average. He has been nails so far this year, and he’ll have to keep it up if the Stars want to face Florida in North America for the first time this season.

And Mikko Rantanen, for whom Jim Nill traded away a king’s ransom, has a Stanley Cup. But he also has a playoff CV to warrant such a ransom regardless of the ring, with only six guys ahead of him on the all-time NHL playoff scoring leaderboard. He’s eliminated one of those six already, in MacKinnon. Starting tomorrow, Rantanen will be able to knock out two more.

But in the end, a team as experienced and playoff-tested as the Stars won’t be looking at leaderboards. That was clear time and time again on Tuesday, as everyone from the GM and head coach to the team captain and superstar winger.

“It doesn’t really matter what the score of the game is,” Rantanen said. “It’s just the one win or loss.”

Those aren’t just words, either. It’s all about the result. And speaking of results, the greatest testament to Rantanen’s unwavering pursuit of excellence¹ might have come in his most disparaging remark of the day.

When Heiskanen and Ratanen were asked whether the Finnish players have any particular dishes they cook together or restaurants they like to eat at, Rantanen mentioned that they don’t tend to do much of the cooking. But he did have one bit of culinary criticism to offer.

“One thing I gotta mention,” Rantanen volunteered, “Esa Lindell can’t cook a steak.”

As long as they keep cooking like they have been on the ice, I don’t think Lindell will mind that comment one bit.

1. This feels like it’s from a car commercial, but hopefully it’s not.