Game 14 AfterThoughts: No 2-0 Lead is Safe from/for the Dallas Stars

Second periods. Who needs 'em?

Before we talk about this game, I wanted to talk about the game it reminded me of.

Back in October 2014, I was living in a condo in Buena Park, California, with a buddy from college. I had just begun to blog for DBD, and one of my duties was to round up some germane links every day.

One morning in the aforementioned month, I included a little preamble about the game the night before. That featured this paragraph:

It was entertaining and terrible hockey at the same time…It was a night a lot of players (and perhaps coaches) want back, but it was also the wacky sort of game that makes outsiders sit up and pay attention, or at least appreciate the offensive fireworks on both sides.

No, that wasn’t a psychic vision. It was written in reference to this game, 11 years ago:

Now, Anders Lindback’s goaltending was the giant asterisk in the middle of that game, so the comparison is very limited in certain senses. But my point is, a 7-5 loss to a team that finished third in their division has happened to the Dallas Stars before. And we can probably learn a thing or two from what happened 11 years ago.

A shorthanded goal against? Yep. Too many rush chances against? Check. A Tyler Seguin goal? Yessir. A Stars power play that scored, but wound up feeling like it still probably left some meat on the table after giving up a shortie? You betcha.

Those 2014 Stars, like this year’s, also battled back in that game despite falling behind by two goals in the second period. And despite eventually giving up 7 goals, the game never felt totally out of reach until the very end. But they just couldn’t quite outscore their mistakes.

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Back here in 2025, things are better in many, many respects. And one major one is that goaltending isn’t the problem this year. Even though I know some of you don’t want to hear it after this game, Oettinger has gotten off to a very strong start, and Casey DeSmith has gotten the Stars five out of six points in his last three games. The problem is not in net, right now.

The final score was 7-5, but a couple of those (including the shorthanded goal) were dead-to-rights pass plays that no goalie on earth (or off it) ever stops. And did we mention the Ducks out-shot Dallas 31-5 in shot attempts in the second period? This game was basically a defensive collapse in the middle period, when the Ducks struck for four goals. Even a big push by Dallas later in the third didn’t end up being quite enough to climb out of the hole the Stars dug for themselves in the middle frame.

Still, I’d say the Ducks are more likely to wind up re-living the Stars’ 2014-15 season right now than the 2025-26 Stars will be. That’s a very good team, but their defensive numbers are right there in the bottom chunk of the league alongside Nashville, Chicago, Vancouver, and Boston. When the scoring slows even for a bit, they are probably going to find themselves in trouble.

Of course, that assumes the Ducks have to slow down in scoring at all. Maybe seven goals is their new average forever, and we just haven’t adjusted yet. Maybe the Stars should start giving other teams a two-goal lead at the very beginning of the game, since they’re clearly more comfortable in that sitaution than they are holding such a lead themselves. These are theories and assumptions, is what I am saying—not facts.

(Though it’s worth saying that Oettinger wasn’t quite on his best angle on Kreider’s opening goal.)

A first Anaheim goal shouldn’t have been a problem though, with Dallas still leading 2-1. After all, the whole reason you want to get a multi-goal lead, as I am given to understand, is because it allows for just such a mistake as that without shanking the whole Jenge ship.

But things really went south just over a minute later, on a goal which Gulutzan pointed to after the game.

“We made some mistakes,” Gulutzan said. “Our game plan against a very good rush team was to limit the amount of rushes. And then we started extending our shifts and turning pucks over after one goal.”

Gulutzan would later say that the puck has to go deep in that spot late in a shift, rather that a low-percentage lateral play being made. He’s right. The Stars were late into their shift (over 40 seconds in), and Robertson here tries an aerial pass to Hryckowian on the far side that gets swatted down, collected, and turned north against a tired team. That’s not ideal.

And while Gulutzan didn’t say it, I think he’d also like to have seen Robertson back off there after the turnover and force the Ducks to get through three guys in the neutral zone, instead of the fly-by Robertson makes after the turnover. There aren’t many great options there, but that wasn’t the best of what was left, either.

But it was that kind of game, which featured a similarly catastrophic turnover by Sam Steel, also in the neutral zone for the Ducks’ fourth goal, after Seguin had tied things back up with his first-ever goal against Anaheim. These sorts of mistakes just felt inevitable as the period wore on, with Dallas looking nothing like their first-period selves.

Seguin sounded pretty disappointed after the game, and I believe there’s a fair amount of offensive frustration in that room in general when it comes to the relative lack of 5-on-5 offense. It’s a hard thing to go from being the third-highest scoring team in the league two years in a row to being 20th, as they are right now. Oh, and they’re tied for last in 5-on-5 scoring, too. That grates of a team accustomed to using their offense as a weapon.

The power play is carrying a ton of the load right now, but eventually, it’s going to have a dry spell. This game was a microcosm of that eventuality, as the team went a fantastic 3-for-3 to cut things to 5-4 early in the third, only to then get two more third-period power plays that got killed in a way that made you think the Ducks had taken the prior three goals extremely personally. Probably they did, as the shorthanded goal by Leo Carlsson would seem to indicate.

Now, look: I’m never going to tell Mikko Rantanen what to do, in any situation. But I think he’s just a wee bit optimistic here with this attempt to bank the puck in off the goaltender’s helmet. That shot wound up missing the net and starting a break for the Ducks the other way against a Dallas power play that had spent over a minute on the job, and even Roope Hintz wasn’t quite able to catch Troy Terry before he sauced it across to Leo Carlsson for the dagger goal. That’s when you know things aren’t great.

Jake Oettinger got a bit unlucky on the goal too, as he gloved a piece of this shot, only for the puck to bounce off his glove, off his mask, and then back into the net. But it was that kind of night for Dallas: One where the Ducks were executing tip plays just that little bit better than Dallas—even though Dallas had themselves a couple successes of their own.

Anyway, I’d say that’s as good a point as any to stop talking about the goals against Dallas, because who wants to re-live those, among our dear readers here? Probably not very many of you, I am guessing.

However, it’s worth pointing out something very positive right now: Neil Graham’s power play is cooking.

They sit comfortably at 3rd in the NHL right now, despite missing Roope Hintz for a few games, and they’re doing it in new and exciting ways.

• I mean, look at this play.

  Rantanen has previously taken the puck low, and now they’re resetting at the point, with the Ducks’ PK trying to get back to the guts of the ice. But there’s just enough elasticity here to where Rantanen knows Johnston will be open if he slides him a touch pass after the Ducks’ forward edges toward him after Heiskanen makes the first pass. It’s so, so simple. But when simple things are effective, you know they’re well-conceived. From the Johnston deflection goal to the Johnston drag-tip over to Rantanen early in the third period, this power play is loaded, and locked-in.

  

Esoteric Song of the Game

Lineups

Stars

Steel-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Bäck-Hryckowian-Bourque
Erne-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell - Heiskanen
Harley - Lyubushkin
Bichsel - Petrovic

Oettinger

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Ducks

Kreider-Carlsson-Terry
Gauthier-McTavish-Sennecke
Nesterenko-Poehling-Killorn
Johnston-Harkins-Vatrano

LaCombe-Helleson
Zellweger-Trouba
Mintyukov-Moore

Dostál

AfterThoughts

• Tyler Seguin finally scored a regular-season goal against the Anaheim Ducks for the first time in his career. However, he did score one against them in the playoffs. Do you remember it? Of course you do, because it also came back in 2014.

• I watched tonight’s game in the seats with the proletariat, so I am now qualified to make the following recommendations at American Airlines Center: The Gold Rush at Balcones and the brisket tacos at Zavala barbecue, both near section 121. Here endeth the lesson.

• Getting Radek Faksa and Roope Hintz back in one game was a boost for the Stars. Nils Lundkvist, Matt Duchene, and Jamie Benn are still a little ways away, but just having more than one of their starting centers in the lineup has to feel like relative luxury for Gulutzan, right now.

• Roope Hintz has scored two goals this year: One of them into an empty net, and one with his own net empty. Maybe he will be the key to the Stars’ 5-on-5 scoring, whenever (or if?) it finally starts to kick in.

• The Stars gave up a lot of goals in this one, but Radek Faksa’s line remains, as ever, a black hole for goals in both directions.

  

• Following this game, the Stars have just three players on the team with a positive plus/minus: Esa Lindell (+4), Ilya Lyubushkin (+2), and Kyle Capobianco (+1). Mavrik Bourque and Thomas Harley are sitting on -7, each, right now—though remember, empty-net goals against count for those purposes, so it can sometimes skew the picture even further than plus/minus already is.

• The Stars’ penalty kill is at 27th in the league. That just can’t continue if the team’s 5-on-5 scoring doesn’t pick up. Power play and goaltending need a little help every once in a while, or maybe most whiles.

• Mikko Rantanen has 20 points in 14 games, which means he is currently on pace for 117 points this year. That would be a lot of points.

• Finally, there are two things to appreciate about Tyler Seguin’s goal in this one.

  • First, how about Miro Heiskanen’s play to turn the puck over, and Sam Steel’s feed to send Seguin in? Those are two things, which I have combined into one for the purposes of Brevity.

  • Second, how about Seguin’s fending off two aggressive backcheckers, and contorting his body to still place his shot over the pad and past the glove?

    I think his hip is feeling better this year, folks.