Game 20 AfterThoughts: The Craziest Ending That Wasn't

Jamie Benn played another game, which is good

Benn’s back - Screencap from Victory+

Let’s just start with the end, because that game was 40 minutes of one thing, and a final 20 minutes of something entirely different, including the very last tenth of a second, in which Wyatt Johnston appeared to have scored an incredibly unlikely shorthanded goal to tie the game.

But watch how the Stars get the puck down the ice (remember, no icing when shorthanded) and bust down the ice to follow it as Oettinger goes off for another skater. This is a planned play, as Gulutzan noted after the game, and it actually results in a goal for Dallas. For a moment, at least.

This team is so, so dangerous when they’re pressing like this. I know we’re only 25% of the way through the season, but the high end of this roster really is starting to look even more fearsome than they did last year. And that’s an impressive thing to say about a team that consistently finished near the top of the league in scoring for much of the last three years.

Anyway, about the goal: the officials reviewed the play, and they decided to use the Goalie Interference Stamp and get the heck outta Dodge. And I can’t really blame them if that was in the back of their minds, given how incensed Patrick Roy was even before the apparent tying goal. I mean, do you want to face that guy in a narrow hallway? I sure wouldn’t. Goalies, man.

Oh right, the final goal. Or, no-goal.

First, the behind-the-net cam, in which it kinda seems like Robertson is trying to skate across the top of the crease before he’s knocked into the goaltender.

Then, the overhead, in which Robertson’ skate appears to get to the crease almost exactly as he gets checked:

As a reminder, here’s the salient excerpt from Sean McIndoe’s invaluable piece on Goaltender Interference from a few years ago:

Don’t want a goal called back for interference? Stay out of the crease. When there’s a review and you see those first replays, tune out all the noise and look to see if the attacking player is in the crease. If any part of him (not just his skates) is in there, and he’s impacting the goalie’s ability to make the save, the goal is probably coming back.

Sean McIndoe, The Athletic

So the real question that I believe the officials were debating on this goal is: Did Robertson enter the crease of his own volition? And by the eventual no-goal call, I believe they must have concluded that he did.

Now, the other piece of all this is that the officials, I have to think, wouldn’t exactly mind finding a reason to wipe out this goal and put an absolutely banana sandwich third period to bed. So while you can certainly argue (as the Stars players and Gulutzan did after the game) that Pulock pushes Robertson into the crease here, it appears the officials didn’t find that argument convincing.

These cross-conference games can be really weird.

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Now, for the thing that incited everyone: the major penalty on Mikko Rantanen. But first, the good news:

Alexander Romanov did not need to be hospitalized after the game, which is as positive of news as one could hope for after a collision with Rantanen late in the game brought a terrifying moment that somehow ended with Romanov making it off the ice fairly upright (albeit in pain and with help).

Here’s the hit.

Patrick Roy had one view of the play, which is to say he was screaming at Rantanen and the Stars’ bench, apoplectic with rage at what looked like a serious injury to one of his players.

After the game, Roy had this to say. Words like “disrespectful” and “you have to lay off” are all deployed, as you would expect from a coach who just saw a player go hard into the end boards and wind up in terrible pain.

Glen Gulutzan admitted that he had a different view of the play, but that he knows everyone is going to see the play through their own lens.

“Everybody’s gonna have their own take,” Gulutzan said, “But if you watch the play, I think it’s Mayfield, the defenseman, who actually holds up ‘Rants, and they actually clip skates. So ‘Rants is off-balance going in there, too. And if you played the game, and you’re off-balance heading in, you usually put your hands out. I’ve seen ‘Rants play enough over the last ten years that it’s just one of those hockey plays that happen. I hope Romanov is okay. Looks like he went in flat, but just hoping he’s okay. ‘Rants clips skates being held up there. It’s a dangerous play for everybody.”

Rantanen was assessed a five-minute major and a game misconduct for boarding, which was reviewed and upheld. If I had to guess, I would say that Rantanen’s being tripped on the play will likely mean he avoids significant supplementary discipline, given that he isn’t in much control here until the end, when his arms extend as he’s falling, exacerbating Romanov’s impending collision with the boards.

Still, Rantanen probably does need to do a little better there in the moment, hence the penalty. But there are mitigating factors present, and I honestly can understand both reactions. Rantanen is barreling into the end boards there, and the contact starts a chain reaction of force that results in an injury. The league should always, in theory, see if it is possible to discourage plays that result in these sorts of things.

But, I mean, that play was only one of multiple bonkers moments in the third period. So let’s go through the other ones as quickly as we can:

• The Stars scored a 6-on-5 goal after failing to score on multiple power play chances in the third period, including one in which they surrendered a shorthanded goal.

• The Stars scored a second extra-attacker goal (that was called back) in the final tenth of a second of the game, and they did it after taking a shorthanded faceoff in their defensive zone with under 30 seconds to play. We talked about it already, I know, but I just think it’s worth reckoning with how unimaginably wild it would have been if that goal would have counted.

  • Gulutzan said the same thing, in fact: “We were never out of it. Just wish the last one would’ve counted. Would have made for a great movie.”

  • Bo Horvat got a misconduct penalty after a double-minor high-sticking penalty. I couldn’t tell from up high if it was for complaining, but given Palmieri’s subsequent complaining after Matt Schaefer’s high-sticking penalty, one suspects the Islanders don’t hold back on rendering their objections. I wonder where the players learned this from.

• Jason Robertson could have had his second hat trick in four games, avoiding all the Rantanen/Romanov incident, if not for a Nabokovian stop by (sigh) Big Save Dave Rittich. I mean, look at the two replays of this pass by Seguin, and the shot by Robertson, which looked like the surest hat-trick goal you’ve ever seen, until it wasn’t.

  • How this puck doesn’t go in initially is one thing (magic, specifically). But how the rebound off the cuff of the glove manages to fall perfectly into Rittich’s lap, where it can’t be pounded home? That’s another thing entirely. This whole game, in fact, was another thing entirely.

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Getting Jamie Benn back was the big storyline of this game, but obviously the third period altered any prior narratives for good. Benn played about 10 minutes, and Gulutzan said afterward that this was more or less the plan. The hands usually do need some time to get back after long absences.

But the first period was a fitting tribute to Daryl Reaugh, as the goalies had some nice saves to make, and they did. Dallas probably generated better scoring chances overall, but the Islanders’ persistently probed the goal crease, and Jake Oettinger had to come up with a couple of nice saves, especially later in the period.

Still, the Stars got to the net, and the Islanders (mostly) didn’t, outside of a couple of chances. That’s how Dallas has been wanting to defend, and you have to give them credit when they execute.

The second period started even more sleepily, with neither team putting a puck on net until nearly the halfway mark. Then things got exciting.

First, Mikko Rantanen laid a big hit on Mathew “Mat with one ‘H’” Barzal.

Next, Alex Petrovic set up Jason Robertson with a gorgeous pass that I suspect Robertson still is trying to figure out how he didn’t score. (He could have had four goals, if you believe in the opposite of the Butterfly Effect.)

But after that chance, you just knew the next one was gonna go in, and Calum Ritchie made sure it did, after an extended bit of pressure in the Stars’ zone against the Hryckowian line saw Mavrik Bourque not quite clearing the puck a couple of times. Ritchie then got a pass across the royal road against a spent group of Dallas skaters, and he didn’t miss.

But you know what they say about Jason Robertson: Don’t give him another chance to burn you. And the Isles did just that, when Tony DeAngelo pinched hard down the wall, only to have Robertson deftly poke the puck past him to create a 3-on-1 that Seguin and Robertson didn’t overcomplicate against the Not-Number-One Goaltender of the Isles. Alley-oop, 1-1.

However, the Stars struggled to keep that momentum going, and the second period ended with the Isles once again hemming in the Hryckowian line. But this time, the Stars were able to smother the puck along the boards until the buzzer sounded to save them.

Smothering the puck was what Jake Oettinger was trying to do on a fairly innocent foray by the Isles, but the puck somehow got through his blocker before he could freeze the puck, and suddenly it was 2-1 out of nothing in the third period.

Overall, not a puck that Oettinger probably wants to see get past him, but he rebounded immediately with a big save on Maxim Tsyplakov off a one-on-one chance, so at least you know it was a one-time sort of thing. And that save looked huge a moment later, when Bo Horvat high-sticked Bäck (while tripping), opening up Bäck’s face, which had only recently healed from the hit in Ottawa.

But what looked like a godsend for the Stars turned into disaster immediately after, when a Johnston zone entry turned into confusion and a turnover, with Kyle Palmieri rushing up the ice past a fallen Roope Hintz on an odd-man chance, with Heiskanen back alone to defend. But rather than pass, Palmieri called his own number, firing a puck off the rush past Oettinger from a bit further out than you might have expected.

From there, the third period deteriorated, even after the Stars got another power play due to a Matt Schaefer high-sticking penalty. That power play also ended early, however, as Robertson was tagged for hooking, and the cavalcade of penalties looked like it was shaping up for a suitably listless final few minutes—until the Stars pulled Oettinger with under three minutes to go, and the game inhaled an entire canister of Fast & the Furious-grade NOS.

Anyway, Jason Robertson is scoring goals right now in every possible way you can score them. He now has eight goals in his last four games.

You may have heard that goal-scorers can be streaky, and Robertson and Seguin’s chemistry continued to Do Its Thing, resulting in a game far closer than it seemed like it ought to have been, even in the dying moments of the whole thing—again, I cannot believe that final one-timer got saved.

How fitting then, that Robertson’s being pushed and contacting the goaltender would result in a goal being taken away, right? Or maybe “fitting” is the wrong word. Poetic? Well, if it’s poetry, I don’t care for the meter or the rhyme scheme all that much. Next time, perhaps the Stars will just score on the four-minute power play like normal teams do, and we won’t have to go through all this absurdity. Just a suggestion.

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All up, this game wasn’t Dallas’s best, though they really didn’t allow much defensively for most of the game. The shorthanded goal was the dagger, but of course the weird goal off the end boards for a tap-in was something out of nothing, whereas the Stars managed to turn a whole lot of Somethings into Not Enoughs. That’s a great way to lose a weird game, it turns out.

That’s how these cross-conference games go so many times—well, aside from the final 28 seconds. Teams hang around, then the big push finally comes, and sometimes (often) it’s enough to get to overtime, where the Isles have been in three of their last four wins.

Dallas is extremely shorthanded, which is why Bichsel and Petrovic played over 20 minutes apiece (and why Heiskanen played nearly 28). As far as patching things together goes, the Stars are making do right now, even if they still have a lot of polishing still to be done.

Now the Stars head back on the road for four games, all of which are against the Western Conference. And something tells me those games are going to end up telling us a lot more about this team than the crazy 59:59 we watched in Dallas on Tuesday night.

Esoteric Song of the Game

Lineups

Dallas did this:

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

Lindell-Heiskanen
Capobianco-Kolyachonok
Bichsel-Petrovic

Oettinger in goal

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The Isles did thus:

Drouin-Barzal-Shabanov
Heineman-Horvat-Palmieri
Lee-Pageau-Duclair
Cizikas-Ritchie-Tsyplakov

Schaefer-Pulock
Pelech-DeAngelo
Romanov-Mayfield

Rittich in goal

AfterThoughts

• If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss Josh Clark’s piece on Daryl “Razor” Reaugh. It is very good, despite being written by Josh, who is far too tall to be entirely trustworthy, in my opinion.

• With Jamie Benn back wearing the captain’s “C” on his sweater, Tyler Seguin and Miro Heiskanen wore the alternate captain “A” letters. In the first 19 games of the season, Esa Lindell wore a third “A.”

• The night began with the Stars honoring Daryl Reaugh and his family, following Razor’s receipt of the Foster Hewitt Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame last week.

  

• I thought it was a nice touch to have the two goalies join Jamie Benn in handing gifts to Razor and his family.

• In case you missed the memo, Matthew Schaefer is very good at hockey. And now, Lian Bichsel is aware of this as well.

• Wyatt Johnston got fed in front of the net for the Stars’ first scoring chance, courtesy of a wonderful setup from Mikko Rantanen.

• Jamie Benn then got a shift with Rantanen, and a world-class backhand feed hit Benn in the tape, which he caught right before trying to tuck it past Rittich for his 400th goal. Almost, but not quite.

• Mikko Rantanen doesn’t often lose the puck in bad spots, but he had one slip off his stick high in the zone, and it was up to Alex Petrovic to perform some heroics—for which Rantanen gave him a solid fist-bump afterwards.

• Jamie Benn was moved up with Rantanen and Johnston in place of Sam Steel for the last few shifts of the second period, and it makes you wonder if that’s a look Gulutzan might want to go to more regularly. Given that Benn was probably slated to play second-line left wing before his injury to start the season, it’s not outlandish to think that he might continue to get chances up the lineup, given the Stars’ paucity of left wingers right now.

• No penalties were called for the first 40 minutes of the game. One suspects that the book on Dallas is “AVOID POWER PLAY AT ALL COSTS” by this point, right?

  • Then again, a slew of penalties were called in the third period, as though the officials were making up for lost time. Unfortunately for Dallas, they didn’t result in anything good. The opposite, actually.

• Ryan Pulock stripped Sam Steel of the puck for a breakaway, but Kyle Capobianco was able to do his best Alex Petrovic impression to once again prevent the shot off what looked like a breakaway.

• Bo Horvat scored a goal in the third period, then three minutes later, he took a double-minor and ten-minute misconduct, ending his night. Nothing like doing your job and going home early, I suppose. It must have been wild to watch the rest of this one from the locker room.