Game 32 AfterThoughts: Building Nomentum

The Stars more or less bookeneded their season-long six-game homestand with lifeless losses against the worst team in the NHL (Nashvile) and a team that just traded its captain and a former second-overall forward in a frantic effort to put some life into the team (New York). Those games aren’t easy, because this is the NHL, but they also shouldn’t have been insurmountable climbs.

Not for this team, certainly. The Stars came into the year looking like one of the deepest teams in the NHL, and they still should be. But the moment adversity hit this team last month, they started to look about as deep as the plot of Land Before Time 12 (in which Littlefoot learns to be brave at the dentist).

Look, it’s easy to bury a team after a going 0-for-7 on the job while the flu ravages the team’s health, and I don’t want to do that. Because you could see how frustrated the Stars were in this game. You could see how each Igor Shesterkin glove save just demoralized them a little more, and you could see how the power play was, as DeBoer said, sapping momentum from the group. It’s all obvious enough to any moderately empathetic human being: it hurts them way more than it hurts you.

But the thing is, that’s not good enough. It’s not enough to try, when you’re paid to score, and when you’re playing a team that has looked about as checked out as any club in the league over the last month.

It’s not enough to point to past power play success when you continue to look mediocre. You can’t ask fans to just keep the faith when the issues everyone wants to complain about continue to be the issues. You have to fix it, by hook or by crook. They have the players to do it, but the players aren’t doing it often enough. So far, at least.

The Stars have allowed the second-fewest goals in the NHL, by the way. That’s fantastic! They’ve been elite in terms of goal-prevention, but all they have to show for it is a sub-.600 points percentage and a mere one-point lead over Utah, who are out of the playoffs right now. They’ve asked Jake Oettinger to play eight straight games, and some of that was out of necessity, as Casey DeSmith had the nasty virus for a couple of games. But the fact of the matter is the team has gone 3-5-0 in those contests while averaging less than 2.5 goals per game.

You can’t ask Jake Oettinger to keep your season afloat indefinitely just because the power play has to do a vision quest until some later point in time. It’s not fair to him, and it goes against the exact philosophy the team preached from years past about keeping Oettinger fresh for the most important games later in the year. The message is clear: right now, they view these games as the most important games they have, because Oettinger has been the only weapon that has consistently shown the ability to win games for them. But even he can’t score power play goals.

In December, you can’t ask Miro Heiskanen to absorb 30 minutes the game after Esa Lindell plays over 30 minutes, and then have your power play lay an egg after a goon called up from the AHL takes a run at Heiskanen’s numbers and leaves him bleeding on the ice. You just can’t ask fans to be okay with the lack of a meaningful response (despite Roope Hintz’s standing up for his teammate in the moment, of course). No matter how solid your 5-on-5 scoring is, or how many chances your power play is creating, you have to do something to instill confidence in your fanbase when you’re underperforming. Because how the fans feel right now, watching this team fail to capitalize on chance after chance while more imbalanced teams have cruised to a better start while keeping players fresher, is frustrated.

It’s not fair to let one playoff series color your view of an entire season, but that’s kind of the name of the game in the NHL, folks. The power play disappeared against Edmonton, with the Stars giving up shorthanded goals, too. This game was a microcosm of that series, where the Stars probably deserved more, but they didn’t get it. I think folks are getting a little tired of seeing microcosms this year.

It would be one thing if Dallas were just biding their time, knowing Jim Nill had a huge deal coming in two months. They don’t need to blow the doors off the league in November. It’s fine to just keep pace and save your kick for the final bell. But they’re suddenly on the edge of the playoff bubble after a rough two or three weeks. That’s the harsh reality of this league, these days.

And even if you are desperate to stay ahead of the pack, running your best players into the ground in December, both in terms of minutes and usage, is not what a patient, confident team does. So, if nothing else, you can rest assured that the coaching staff is not any more apathetic than you are: DeSmith played really well in the third period on Wednesday, but they went back to Oettinger for this game, yet again. And Oettinger, to be fair, was really good, having to make a couple of outstanding saves just to keep this one in theoretical reach. They wanted this game, and they decided to once again lean on their top guys to get it. And their top guys ended up letting them down. So, if you want to blame Oettinger for giving up two goals, I would invite you to look at essentially the entire period the Stars got to play with one more skater than New York, and ask you why it’s Oettinger’s fault he gave up two goals while his team scored just one.

Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston had more power play time than Lian Bichsel or Evgenii Dadonov had total ice time. You cannot ask for a better opportunity to show you can help your team win than that, and neither of two of the Stars’ best young forwards over the last 2+ years could find a way to make the play they needed. They’ve done it so many times in the past, but when the Stars needed that one extra goal tonight, they couldn’t get it. Nobody in that room feels good about that, I promise you.

Matt Duchene and Jamie Benn likewise couldn’t find a way to learn on their veteran know-how in order to muster something more from their group. Leadership doesn’t just mean answering for a loss or sticking up for a teammate. It means finding ways to get results in important times. Tonight was such a time, until it wasn’t.

Watching that five-minute power play felt like doomscrolling your Twitter feed the night before you have to take a final exam you haven’t studied for. You know you won’t feel better afterwards, but you’re just looking for something, anything, to make you forget about your anxiety. But each tick of the clock just brings the despair closer to home because yes, it is this bad, and no, it does not look like anyone will be able to stop it. But you’ll keep watching, because what else are you going to do, go to sleep? That sounds like something a healthy person would do, ppsh.

What you can say, at least, is that the last ten games have been an enormous compliment to Tyler Seguin. Far from being the sort of player Peter Chiarelli thought Boston couldn’t handle, Seguin has apparently become the cornerstone of this entire team, causing them to stumble in perfect unison the moment he had to leave. I’m not sure he takes any solace in this. (I am sure that he doesn’t.)

Now, let’s calm down for a moment, because it’s only been nine games since Seguin left, and the Stars have gone 4-5-0 in those games. That’s far, far from season-ending, and now would be a great time for all of us to remember where Edmonton was at this time last year, or where St. Louis was at this time six years ago, and so on. There are plenty of examples to draw from if you’re looking for consolation, so I’ll not take those from you. There is ample hope, plenty of reasons not to be drawn offside by a tepid offensive stretch that defies the underlying numbers. The Stars are capable of creating scoring chances, and they have players who have historically been able to capitalize on those. Either they all spent Thanksgiving staring at a solar eclipse, or else there will be some positive regression. It would be foolish not to believe that, as Hintz’s scoring exemplifies. The players you know are still in there.

But I also don’t think it’s fair to tell the fans to calm down, or not to worry. Clearly DeBoer was worried after Thomas Harley let that puck miss his stick for the shorthanded goal by Reilly Smith, as Heiskanen began staying out for both power play sets for most of the 3rd-6th power play opportunities. Maybe Harley isn’t quite 100% yet (and who knows who else is ailing), and that was a mercy as much as anything. But the concern isn’t localized within one person, is the point. And Harley had a chance to redeem himself on the five-minute major, but it just wasn’t his night.

And sure, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the power play was then asked to go from relying on Heiskanen to quarterback all two minutes to having to do five minutes without him at all. It’s perfectly understandable that the power play might not look its best when asked to do things without Heiskanen. Again, there were challenges and excuses aplenty, as there always are. No one is saying the Stars have it easy. Indeed, it’s been very, very tough in a lot of ways big and small this year.

But you know what? Fans don’t care. Fans simply know that going 0-for-7 on the power play is embarrassing. They know that losing in regulation to Chicago (is that still the low point of the season, do we think?), losing a stinker at home to Nashville, meekly submitting to what’s left of the Rangers, and having “one of those games” against Anaheim are concerning things, when grouped together. They know that when a goon hits your guy, you have to make the other team pay, somehow. You just have to. But they didn’t, or they couldn’t, and I don’t know which one of those options is worse.

Again, for the folks in the back: There are very real reasons why the Stars are not able to play their best hockey right now, but there are far more reasons why they can’t afford to play their worst hockey, either. Especially when they have one more player than the other team.

So, what do you do?

You can bench players from the power play, which sort of happened with Bourque getting in the mix in favor of Dadonov tonight, if that moves the needle for you. But I don’t see how giving slumping players like Logan Stankoven or Jason Robertson fewer opportunities is likely to help them gain more confidence. And by the way, Bourque could’ve had a hat trick tonight with the chances he was getting and making, but he didn’t. And the way the team is right now, it’s a shame. But he simply has to score if he really wants to keep getting those opportunities this season, given how badly the Stars need goals. And he, like almost everyone else, couldn’t manage it.

I do wonder if you at least consider swapping Logan Stankoven and Colin Blackwell on the job once in a while (but certainly only for a couple of games–not permanently), if only to get Stankoven out of whatever scoring funk he’s found himself in. And goodness knows Blackwell would attack that opportunity with all of the percents. But this is just moving the names around, not something coaches really want to do. Stankoven has to be that sort of guy for you, given what you know about him. He’s just too good not to be good.

I don’t like even appearing to blame one or two players for games like this, anymore than I like blaming a goalie when the entire team gives up too many chances. Coaches talk all the time about needing to see emotion and drive from their players, and the Stars’ inability to mount big pushes and to score big goals when trailing is now both a collective problem and an undeniable trend, with 50 games left to go. So whether it’s just a statistical anomaly, a tactical error, or a functional hiccup, Stars fans can’t keep watching their team end things with a whimper after being asked to GET LOUD for seven power plays without result.

Fans want to see something happen in games like this, or to hear about something happening after games like this. Catharsis is an insatiable beast when the team is struggling, and it demands stories of coaches screaming, throwing things, or bag-skating the team (which is both outmoded in general and the last thing this particular group needs, given the health situation). Fans are tired of breaking their remote controls, of walking through surly crowds back to their cars in order to get home at midnight when they have work the next day. They want to feel hope, and the Stars have invariably turned third-period deficits into defeat this year. Fans deserve better than that, eventually. Maybe the Stars are just setting us all up for an amazing next 50 games.

The good news is, this team isn’t Buffalo. Things are not that bad, because Jake Oettinger and the top-three defensemen have been that good, this year. But the standard in Dallas has been set admirably high, and that means a points percentage in the .500s is not, and should not, be okay. The Stars have set a high standard for themselves, and now is the time for them to show fans that they care about failing to live up to it. Their track record suggests that won’t be a problem, but no one wants to hear about the past. The future needs to be now.

(Wow, that would look great on a t-shirt, right?)