Game 4 WCF AfterThoughts: Making Meaning and Sense of a Lean Offense

Where have all the scorers gone?

Where have all the [scorers] gone
Long time passing

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The Dallas Stars played their 100th meaningful hockey game of the 2024-25 NHL campaign last night. They lost the game. But you probably didn’t get hurt watching it, and your life is probably going to go on much the same unless you are extremely close to the team and/or employed by them.

In the first 82 games of an NHL season, you can rationalize most any loss. It’s a long season, these things happen, get ‘em next time. These platitudes are necessary to surviving the grind, I think, and the Stars themselves have repeatedly pointed to their ability not to get too high after wins or too low after losses as a reason for their success.

But last night, the frustration was clear. For the third game in a row, players who spent those 82 games doing some of the most successful goal-scoring in the NHL were out of answers. These same players had spent the first two rounds of the playoffs finding answers and bouncing back, but they have wilted under the bright lights of Edmonton.

A shutout on the road in the first two rounds? No problem, we’ll get the next one. And they did, every time, as they took out two genuinely great teams by out-goalie-ng, out special-teamsing, and out-scoring the other 20 guys competing against them each night.

The Stars’ offense

Mikko Rantanen is tied for 1st in the NHL in playoff goals this year, and he’s 3rd in overall points. He is the last person anyone should be blaming for the Stars’ currently dire straits, but even if he’s at the very bottom of the Blame List, the point is that there is a list, and it’s a long one.

Or, it could be a short one if you just write “everyone except Jason Robertson” as the scoring winger with one good knee has been the only spark of offense for Dallas lately, which has meant three straight losses.

Now, the Stars could absolutely win three straight games. Hockey is weird like that—just ask the Oilers, who eliminated Dallas last year with three straight wins, only to lose three in a row to Florida, only to then win three more in a row before dropping a dramatic Game 7.

But something about this Oilers team feels different than last year’s, and that Something has been more noticeable with each passing game in the series. The momentum swings don’t rattle them, the breakdowns aren’t happening quite as wildly, and the Stars just aren’t getting that pass when they need it most.

So instead, you see what you saw last night: hopeful plays, pucks trapped along the boards, one-and-done shots, and an increasingly impenetrable Edmonton blue line. Dallas had 16 shots on goal in the first period, then nine in the second, and only four in the last and most critical period of their season to date.

These Oilers seem to feed off the other team’s desperation, which is why it was so crucial for Dallas to get the first goal, as we talked about yesterday. Every time Dallas has gotten a lead in this series, they’ve gotten a win. But the number of leads and wins they’ve gotten is not a difficult one to remember, on account of the number requires singular nouns. The Oilers have led for most of this series, and when they lead, they tend to win. It really is that simple.

Pete DeBoer was very calm in his postgame presser last night. He didn’t want to give any of his players grief for the penalties they took, and he clearly has reconciled himself to the fact that it just might not be the Stars’ year. This was not the time or place to blow up, when his team was hurting the most. Veteran coaches understand when you have leverage, and when you need to lick your wounds and play out the string for pride. This is feeling awfully close to the latter scenario, but of course, the Stars have proven us wrong before.

In fact, the Stars overcame a 3-1 deficit in Game 1 of this series, so why would a 3-1 series deficit itself be any most daunting?

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When a goal-scorer is slumping, you can see it all over their game. Picture Jason Robertson early in the season, when his surgery was still fresh in his and everyone’s mind, and when he was looking for answers in far too many games. Goal-scorers do not have that fourth-line hustle to make you feel better about missed shots, because you expect more from them, and they from themselves.

But when Robertson finally got going in December, everything clicked into place almost instantly, and he roared back to life with such ferocity that he ended the season leading the Stars in goals, and nearly in points, too. And again, that was a team with the third-best offense in the league; leading that team was an accomplishment both in and out of context.

That Robertson goal last night was a tiny bit of that same phenomenon. Robertson got credited with the goal in Game 3 from Lian Bichsel’s shot (Robertson later said he thinks it ticked off the bottom of his stick blade), and he built on that bit of good fortune to step into space vacated by Connor McDavid and rip a game-tying goal on the power play in Game 4. Sometimes all you need is one, and more will follow.

The problem for Dallas has been that Robertson is the only one who’s been able to find his confidence in three games. Despite a hopeful outburst in Game 1, the Stars couldn’t build on that whatsoever. Matt Duchene got his goal in that game, and his line has created chances for three games now. But they’re not solving the riddle of how a puck actually gets into the net when the Stars needed their line the most, and that might be the season because of it. Everyone bears responsibility, but you tend to focus on the ones who have shown the most ability.

I’ve read a lot of explanations over the past 12 hours for why Dallas isn’t getting or converting their chances, and those explanations tend to be one of the following:

• Dallas is out of gas

• Stuart Skinner is a warlock

• Dallas is trying to be too perfect

• Stuart Skinner is best friends with a warlock

• Edmonton's defense is sturdier than Winnipeg’s or Colorado’s

• Edmonton is blocking all the shots

• Stuart Skinner is a happiness vampire

• Edmonton is more physical than Dallas

• Dallas didn’t respond sufficiently to the slash on Hintz (both of them, now)

All good theories, in their own ways. But as for the response/physicality thing, I am gonna be blunt: I don’t agree at all. Yeah, Dallas probably would have benefited from turning one of the last three games into an angry, dirty, misconduct-y affair, but then again, who knows what it would have cost them in the process?

Besides, remember this for a second: Dallas appears to have knocked both Connor Brown and Zach Hyman out of the series. Which, to be honest, stinks. Injured players are a rotten, rotten side effect of the playoffs, and nobody in Edmonton is going to summon much forgiveness for Marchment after finding out Hyman is probably done for the playoffs.

That’s a big deal, whatever you think of those hits by Petrovic and Marchment. If this group needed someone to go full gorilla mode on an Oiler just to defend Hintz’s honor, they would have done so, but it’s not like they’ve been whispering “excuse me” every time they pass an Oilers player. I think it’s a cheap narrative to try to say they win some of these games if they punch more people, but Maybe Hintz or someone else in that room feels differently. If so, though, I have yet to see that become evident.

However, we can do the math on the shot-blocking. Here’s what each series has looked like for Dallas’s offense.

Colorado blocked 14 shots per night, on average. Dallas averaged 26 shots on goal per game, and then they won Game 7 by a score of 4-2 just 19 shots on goal—their lowest total of shots in any playoff game so far. They couldn’t get interior on the Avalanche with consistency, but the power play and Mikko Rantanen won them that series.

Against Colorado

Winnipeg allowed fewer shots overall, about 23 per game. That meant fewer pucks to block in the first place, and they averaged only 13 blocks per night. But Dallas got a 3-1 lead in that series, and that meant even Connor Hellebuyck’s improvement wasn’t enough to withstand Dallas’s dynamite Game 6, when they overwhelmed Winnipeg with 74 shot attempts, their most of the playoffs so far.

Against Winnipeg

Against the Oilers, Dallas has averaged 29 shots on goal per game. Edmonton has blocked 16 shots per night, on average, but that’s because Dallas is shooting more pucks overall, too. The Oilers only blocked 12 shots last night, after blocking 23 in Game 3. But a perfectly fine 1-for-4 night on the power play wasn’t sufficiently heroic on Tuesday.

Against Edmonton

Dallas’s 5-on-5 offense has still been much more effective at getting shots from good areas in this round than against Colorado or Winnipeg, and they also have four power play goals in four games.

Some of the Edmonton shots are from score effects, however, as Dallas has been trailing for most of the series, and Edmonton has ceded them some initial looks while waiting to rush back down the ice the minute Dallas turns it over or fails to retrieve a shot in the Edmonton zone.

Still, it really has been a matter of just not putting pucks in the net despite getting some looks. And while Stuart Skinner hasn’t been the problem for Edmonton, he also hasn’t had to make lights-out sorts of saves, either. This isn’t a matter of Mackenzie Blackwood withstanding an onslaught while crushing hopes and dreams with incredible saves. Dallas simply hasn’t forced top-tier saves from him, and that looks like it’s going to be the story.

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You know how in martial arts, when you learn to break a board, you’re taught not to punch or kick the board? Instead, you’re taught to punch or kick through the board, taking for granted that the board will break on the way. I think goal-scoring is like that. When you believe a puck will go in the net, you’re barely even thinking about the goalie. Instead, you’re thinking about the space around the goalie, and you’re hitting those spots in the net.

But when the goals aren’t coming, suddenly you’re trying not to hit the goalie, rather than hitting the net. And when you’re trying to hit the board hard rather than punch through the board, you feel a whole lot weaker.

Right now, nobody seems to believe they’ll score except one or two players on a given night. Part of that is Edmonton’s tenacious counterattack, which has made Dallas slightly more risk-averse after getting burned so badly early in the series. This has shown up the most in the third period, I think, when Dallas has usually managed their biggest heroics.

The Stars have looked tired. They were dumping in more pucks last night than usual in the second half of the game (it seemed like, I haven’t tracked it yet), and that meant more work along the boards to dig pucks out, with Edmonton players lurking up high to pounce of those pucks and go the other way. The Stars just can’t win that way at this point in the postseason. The wear and tear may be starting to show.

Dallas had their looks even in this game, sure. But when your confidence is at en ebb, you put pucks off posts like Mikko Rantanen has done lately, whereas Leon Draisaitl puts them just inside said posts. It’s not a crisis of confidence, mind you—this team is too good and too experienced for a full-blown crisis—but in the short runway of a playoff series, it might as well be. Even a two-game cold snap can doom your season.

Think of that Draisaitl goal last night. Rantanen put almost that exact same shot off the post in Game 3, and maybe that goal in Game 3 gets the Stars to overtime, and maybe this series is level now like the Colorado series was after a lost four, giving Dallas a chance to come back home and regroup. Genuinely, I think that could be the post that ends up costing them the season. And it wasn’t even a bad shot at all! It’s just that Draisaitl’s goal was an incredible shot, because he is an incredible player.

When you’re drafting as high as Edmonton had been for years and years, you ought to get a lot of incredible players, and they did. Missing the playoffs for 12 of 13 seasons from 2006-2019 would be murder on most fanbases, but the Oilers have enough banners in the bank to weather even an abysmal dozen years like that, and they have the rich rewards of the draft lottery to show for it.¹ And most of those rewards are fully operational, right now.

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Everyone wants to blame someone or something right now, and I just don’t have the energy to refute or support any of those claims. Yes, Cody Ceci allowed a pass to get through for that Corey Perry goal, but he was also stuck defending two guys in tight all by himself. That’s not all his fault, any more than the goal was Oettinger’s.

Here the puck has been cycled around and is being fed to McDavid, coming off some rotation on the wall. Wyatt Johnston will come up to defend McDavid, and he gaps up pretty well. Except McDavid isn’t shooting this puck, as he immediately feeds it down to Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, also rotating with momentum.

Oskar Bäck and Esa Lindell are on the far side, as the Stars’ PK has been clearly under orders to defend Leon Draisaitl, who scored from that spot on the first power play. And if Lindell leaves him all alone, he knows a quick bit of passing could set up another such goal, so he doesn’t exactly sprint to recover to the net front. You can see that Bäck does sense some danger, perhaps expecting Perry to pop out to the low slot here, except Perry doesn’t do that. Nugent-Hopkins takes the space he’s given below Johnston, and he attacks the crease.

And here, you can see a little PTSD from the Draisaitl goal, as both Bäck and Lindell are more concerned with that pass to the far circle that the guy eight feet away from them on the back door, Perry.

Ceci goes down to block the pass initially, and Oettinger dares Nugent-Hopkins to beat him over the shoulder (which is a good bet, given RNH’s left-hand shot making the angle less favorable for the shooter). But Nugent-Hopking makes a more patient play, backing up from Ceci and forcing him into a quandary.

As Nugent-Hopkins tries to curl out and make the angle better for a shot to the far side, Ceci panics a bit. Nugent-Hopkins creeps closer, and Ceci lifts his stick up at the exact wrong time to try to poke the puck off the shooter’s stick, and that leaves a gap under his stick that happens to allow an easy pass to Perry for an easy goal on the back door, as both Bäck and Lindell realize the danger too late to do anything, and it’s a goal.

Now, maybe Perry is Bäck’s guy here, or maybe Ceci should have backed off entirely and let Johnston or Bäck attack Nugent-Hopkins, giving up a prime shot to a prime scorer. But the point of the power play is to force these sorts of impossible decisions upon an outnumbered group, and the Oilers’ power play now has five PPGs in four games. That looks like it’s gonna be the series.

So, that was the game-winner, a dagger of a goal just a couple minutes after the Robertson shot tied it up. It’s a lot of little things, but the foundation of it all is that Draisaitl missile that lives in the Stars’ penalty kill’s head, I think. They didn’t want to get beaten by it twice, and so Lindell, of all people, probably gets caught a bit too far away from the net, which is an uncharacteristic thing, for him. This series has been uncharacteristic for most of the Stars’ team, if you discount the fact that we saw this same offensive disappearance last year.

Last year, it was the power play disappearing. This year, the power play has shown up, but the Stars have just three 5-on-5 goals in four games, which is another way of saying that the real problem has been the lack of any real hero in this series, after two series full of Dallas heroics.

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Mikko Rantanen and Jake Oettinger were magnificent against Colorado and Winnipeg. Mikael Granlund had his game-winning hat trick as well, and even Colin Blackwell came up huge in the biggest moment imaginable, way back when. Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn scored the only goals of Game 3 against Colorado, and Seguin’s work in Game 1 of this series is one of the only reasons Dallas even has a Game 5 at all. Wyatt Johnston scored yet another Game 7 goal in what looks likely to be the only Game 7 Dallas plays this year.

Jake Oettinger was unbeatable in the biggest games of the first two rounds, and hey, he only allowed two power play goals last night, neither of which I put on him at all. Usually, that’s been enough for Dallas to get a look at the game; but usually, their offense is a weapon, not a piano tied around their waist.

DeBoer has tinkered with the lines to try to get something going, both between and within games. But he can’t score the goals himself², and neither can Oettinger. The Stars have spent a month finding ways to do just enough to win, but the Oilers are a team you need to beat, not just hit with you best shot. And the Stars are hitting the board rather than hitting through it, these days.

I don’t want to do a post-mortem before the end of the series, because who knows what the future holds? But it sure does feel like the Stars are on life support right now. Maybe they’ve got one more shock to the system left, and maybe a home crowd can help them find it. The great thing about hockey is you really don’t ever know what’s going to happen, and the worst thing about hockey is when start to know exactly what will happen, like you did after that Corey Perry goal last night.

Let’s see if the Stars have one more surprise in store. And then another, and another. It doesn’t feel terribly likely, but that’s the point of surprises. Like the Stars’ offense, a surprise doesn’t always have to make sense. You’re just glad to see it whenever it appears.

1. Wait, are the Oilers just the hockey version of the Houston Astros? This comparison is flawed, but also, definitely.

2. Rhetorical question: is there anything in the rules that says a coach can’t score a goal?