Game 33 AfterThoughts: Forced Perspective
The number 1,000 is a big one. Two is not.
After a game like this, I tend to skim over most of my mentions or replies on social media. What is there to glean from the bitterness and anger of people who feel let down by a team whose players feel like they let each other down?
It was clear from postgame media availability tonight that the players didn’t feel like they were able to follow their captain’s example and come up with a performance that pulled points out of a bad game. So often this year they’ve spoiled us by doing just that, but as Minnesota showed just two nights ago, sometimes you just don’t play as well as the other guys, and the points follow suit.
The first period of this game was shocking in a lot of ways, but that Matt Duchene chance sticks with you, right? Glen Gulutzan said as much, too: maybe things are different if Dallas draws first blood one of their chances early, forcing Florida to start pushing a bit more. It sounded a bit like Pete DeBoer talking about constantly trailing Edmonton, but that’s where the similarities ended.
Whether it was Colin Blackwell, Esa Lindell, Radek Faksa, or Gulutzan tonight, there was exactly the sort of disappointment you’d expect to hear from a team with lofty aspirations dealing with being brought low for the second time in two games.
You can listen to Gulutzan’s (fairly brief) postgame availability tonight, and there’s a pretty measured-but-realistic look at things in this one. It wasn’t the same problem as the Minnesota loss, even if the end results matched.
“I thought it was a highly contested game,” Gulutzan said. “That’s the way they play. Everything’s contested, every line’s contested […] You’re always in some kind of race, and you gotta be good on the walls.”
Gulutzan pointed to Florida’s bringing their A-game on the power play, penalty kill, 5-on-5, and in terms of Bobrovsky’s goaltending. It’s tough to beat a team when they win all four of those areas.
“That’s their game,” Gulutzan said. “I’ve seen that movie before.”
And indeed, anyone who coached the Oilers in the last two years certainly has seen that Florida movie more than enough times to know how tough it can be to deal with, when it’s clicking.
Florida was also coming off a 6-2 drubbing by Colorado (albeit on the second night of a back-to-back for Florida), so you knew Paul Maurice was going to have them coming out with a point to prove. But in a sense, the Stars’ ability to saw off the first period with the least eventful first period in the league all year was a testament to how well the Stars were able to match that effort, initially. The score was ugly, but the game could’ve been a much better one, if not for the second period.
It’s a real shame that the Stars gave up a Grade-A chance and a goal right off the bat in the second, because that immediately changed the tone of a period (and a game) that otherwise might have shaped up as a similar battle of wills as we saw in the opening 20 minutes. Add in a bit of a fortunate bounce on the second goal (though one admittedly earned after a great shift by Florida), and the Stars perhaps got at least a tad worse than they deserved.
When you don’t score, you don’t deserve to win. That’s why the Stars’ 5-on-5 offense is still a point of focus, even if this game was more about losing too many man-on-man battles against a team known for winning them than a systemic failure. You can disagree with that, as a few folks are likely to do whenever coaches and players manifest outward calm instead of matching the fury felt by the ostensibly jilted paying customers, but it’s probably the more reasonable look at this game, as opposed to their getting thoroughly outworked by Minnesota the other night.
The good news is that the Stars, right now, have built too much of a cushion, have overcome too much adversity, to start tearing things apart and screaming for blood. They are a very good team trying to do something that 31 teams fail to do every single year, and that means they are going to have a different perspective than most of us when it comes to the results of one game—even one as disappointing as a 4-0 loss to an opponent that has won six times in a row against your team. But one thing they do share, absolutely, is your disappointment.
The terrible thing about the compressed schedule this year is how little time there is to recover, breathe, and steady yourself. The flip side of that breakneck pace is how quick the opportunities come to wash the taste of your first shutout defeat of the year out of your collective mouth.
Dallas have zero 5v5 goals in their last two games. That’s a good recipe for a slump, but it’s also an area they’ve shown they can address in the past. No time like the present (or I mean, two days from now) to prove they can do so again.
The game started more interestingly than it became, as an early 2-on-1 with Duchene and Robertson ended in a blocked Robertson shot into the netting. Faksa then nearly put a Petrovic rebound past Sergei Bobrovsky, but he didn’t have time to steer it around the erstwhile goaltender, and it thunked into the goaltender harmlessly. These early chances with nothing to show for them would come back to haunt Dallas, as you know now.
Florida’s forecheck then started causing their usual problems, but Dallas maintained the threat of a counterattack sufficiently enough to rebuff it often enough to be getting along with. That didn’t mean there weren’t moments with exclamation points, such as a Gustav Forsling shot from the point that glanced off the outside of the post, or a big Petrovic hit on Anton Lundell in the corner. But with five minutes remaining in the first period, it was a pretty humdrum event thus far.
But a Florida icing led to Some Real Action, including a Duchene shot from the front porch that Bobrovsky’s glove and shoulder kept under control. It all ended in a hooking penalty on Mackie Samoskevich, but the Stars’ power play couldn’t generate a single shot on goal against an aggressive Florida penalty kill, and that was that. The first period ended with a 0-0 score, and shots on goal at 3-2 for Florida.
As Brien Rea pointed out, it was not the most exciting period of hockey this year. The opposite, actually:
The second period started much more eventfully, unfortunately. They say you don’t want to allow a goal in the first or last minute of a period, but the Stars allowed a goal in the first and last minute of the second period, with another one tossed in the middle just for good measure. I think that is probably suboptimal.
Anton Lundell walked through Sam Steel and Alex Petrovic and around Jake Oettinger to tuck in what was a pretty goal from one perspective, and a very ugly one from the other before everyone was back to their seats at the start of the second period. It was a rough night for Petrovic, who has had better games than this one.
Petrovic is not situated to defend the chance there, and Lundell exploits his skate and hip positioning here expertly. And the deft touch to tuck it in behind an aggressive Oettinger was the brilliant icing on a very unfortunate Dallas cake. Lundell was really good all night, as was his goaltender.
Speaking of unfortunate, a decent push by the top line was stopped by Bobrovsky, and then Florida got a push of their own that started with a broken Capobianco stick and ended 90 seconds later with a puck bouncing off Oettinger, off Capobianco’s glove, and getting knocked into the net off Sam Bennett’s…leg?
I’m marginally interested in getting an unbiased poll going on this goal’s validity, but I suppose it’s more about precedent than whether, you know, Bennett’s leg moves forward and kicks the puck in (which it does). I get that the league has leaned on officials to allow more of these goals, but man, anyone who remembers Brenden Morrow’s no-goal calls of yore for similar reasons has to shake their head at goals like this just a little bit, right?
Anyway, the thing about goals is that you need to score them as well as not allow them, and the Stars got to the halfway point of the game with just 7 shots on goal and 0 goals from said shots, which is not nearly enough to get anything going. Gulutzan pointed out postgame that the Stars’ not creating chaos with more pucks on the net (and old adage for a reason) was part of their problem tonight, but when you’re frustrated and without a goal, it’s hard to decide to take a marginal goal-scoring opportunity by putting a puck on net over the possibility of creating a better look for yourself by hanging onto it. But this was just the sort of game where the latter approach played right into the Panthers’, uh, paws.
Frustration, right? That’s probably why Jamie Benn was more than happy to drop the gloves with Noah Gregor midway through the period, and he won the fight pretty handily:
Unfortunately for the Stars (that adverb is cropping up a lot tonight), any momentum they might have gotten from that fight was quickly negated by a TV timeout, and then wiped out altogether by a Too Many Men on the Ice penalty shortly after that. But would you believe the Stars killed another penalty? Because the Stars killed another penalty, and then Mikko Rantanen got them on the power play for their second time of the night after Ekblad stepped too far to his right to take the body after a dump-in by Rantanen.
But the Stars’ second power play looked just as lackluster as its first, and Evan Rodrigues’s shorthanded backhand chance 1v1 (which Oettinger saved with aplomb) was the most dangerous chance for either side. Frustration was palpable for Dallas, and Rantanen began to attempt entries singlehandedly, only to have his efforts end just as fruitlessly as the group’s.
The Stars got a third chance late in the second period, but despite some better looks, they struggled to generate their customary Grade A chances. And that led to the frustration spreading, as you can see here when Eetu Loustarinen got interfered with in the dying seconds of the power play while also picking Thomas Harley’s pocket for a shorthanded breakaway that Oettinger somehow prevented from rebounding off the crossbar, his leg, and going in:
Sadly, it wouldn’t be enough to keep Dallas in the game, as the Panthers quickly collapsed the Stars’ penalty kill and scored the first goal any power play had scored against Dallas in the last 36 tries. I don’t imagine you want to watch it all that much, but you can do so here, if that’s your thing.
What do you do as a coach with a third period left to play in a 3-0 game against the reigning two-time champions when your team has looked slow and out of answers after 40 minutes?
Well, you start Hintz and Robertson with Mikko Rantanen, it turns out. And then you put Duchene up with Benn and Johnston and try to grab a goal early to generate some momentum. But if that doesn’t work, then you kind of just plod along, trying to generate traffic in front of Bobrovsky and trying to get possession in the offensive zone while Florida sits back and waits, happily clearing and defusing most forays you bring their way.
It’s frustrating, in other words.
And that’s how the game wound down, as Dallas got some looks here and there, and Oettinger also made a couple of crucial saves that would have mattered a lot in a different game. But when Brad Marchand scored an empty-net goal after a three-minute shift from Rantanen and company with the net empty, it was as much a mercy as anything, putting the game thoroughly to bed at 4-0.
When this team isn’t getting help from special teams lately, the 5-on-5 offensive issues become that much starker. At least they know what the issue is, though. Accepting a flaw is the first step on the path to healing it. Also, scoring a single goal is a good step.
ESotG
Lineups
Dallas did this:
Steel-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Benn
Hryckowian-Duchene-Bourque
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell
Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Petrovic
Capobianco-Lyubushkin
Oettinger in goal
Florida ran these folks out there:
Luostarinen - Lundell - Reinhart
Verhaeghe - Bennett - Marchand
Samoskevich - Rodrigues - Greer
Gregor - Studnicka - Boqvist
Forsling - Ekblad
Mikkola - Jones
Balinskis – Petry
Bobrovsky in goal
AfterThoughts
If you haven’t seen the Victory+ piece on Sam Steel yet, it is well-worth your time. You can watch it here.
The Stars began the night with a ceremony commemorating Tyler Seguin’s 1000th NHL game. He received a customized golf cart from Jamie Benn and his teammates, as well as the classic crystal plaque and the silver stick. It was something of a bittersweet ceremony, given Seguin’s ACL injury, but it was a special moment that transcended all of that.
Throughout the game, the Stars had video greetings playing on the hanging video board from some of Seguin’s old teammates and fellow players, including Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane, Connor McDavid, Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Joe Pavelski, John Klingberg, Alexander Radulov, Ben Bishop, Jason Spezza, Dak Prescott, and Dirk Nowitzki.
A telling quote from Gulutzan about the power play’s struggle to do much tonight against the aggression of the Florida PK: “It’s something you have to deal with.” The Stars’ power play did not deal with that aggression well at all, either in the neutral zone or in the offensive zone.
Florida is missing players, too. Almost every team is (except Colorado). Injuries simply can’t be an excuse for Dallas to play as poorly as they have in the last couple of games (and really, a bit before that, too). The solution has to come from this group of players. The good news is, it’s a pretty darn good group.
Thomas Harley is probably feeling some pressure now, which is a tough place to be coming off an injury. His start to the season wasn’t ideal even before he got hurt, but it’s also not fair to point fingers at him without also talking about the 5v5 play of the majority of the roster in recent games. They just need a bit of a reset.
With that said, Harley looked a bit like his old, dangerous self in the 4-on-4 set late in the third period. When he’s shooting, he’s at his best, and he wired a good one off a nice place that Bobrosky just did get a piece of.
Matt Duchene pushed hard at times, and he even led the team in shots on goal, which is mildly surprising for someone who is often more of a passer than a shooter.
To be clear, Duchene had 3 shots on goal, while nobody else had more than one. Mikko Rantanen, Roope Hintz, and Jason Robertson each had zero shots on goal. That’s a stat as shocking as it is telling, if those can go together.
This is only really applicable to me, but: At least I didn’t have to fly to Finland in order to watch the Panthers do this to Dallas, this time.
Finally, if you need something a little bit on the non-hockey side, here’s a video of Dick Van Dyke, who just turned 100 years old today. That is also not a small number.