Game 40 AfterThoughts: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

And a Happy New Year!

Very Sensible Song of the Game

This game was, for all intents and purposes, the 4-1 loss to Nashville last December.

Both games featured a good Dallas squad playing like a mediocre one against a theoretically inferior opponent, only for the visitor to coast to a well-earned victory on Dallas ice.

It’s never a straight line, an NHL season. Well, unless you’re Colorado, in which case the season appears to be more of a teleportation device that makes all the games in the season feel like a montage in a film where you already know the ending. Losing just two games in regulation through the first half of the season is bonkers banana sandwich sauce, and I think we’d all do well to just pretend like the season only really begins on January 1, 2026.

Because for normal teams, there are always stretches of a season where the results aren’t falling the right way, nights where you simply don’t put enough of a quality effort onto the ice. This was one such night for Dallas, and Glen Gulutzan didn’t mince words about it.

“They’re a good team, first of all, and they’re on a good run,” Gulutzan said. “They’re very confident. And we weren’t quite ready to play, which is the concerning, disappointing part. Because the playing field for us is pretty level. Meaning, we’ve had a couple good practices here. We’ve got good energy, we’ve been home, we haven’t been traveling, our energy level should be high. That’s the disappointing, concerning part.”

The power play could have kept the Stars in it longer—so many times this season, it’s done just that. But Gulutzan said that even an 0-for-2 night on the power play wasn’t the problem for Dallas.

“You’ve got to win the 5-on-5 game, and I didn’t think we were close in the 5-on-5 game today, so that’s disappointing,” Gulutzan said.

“You’re going to go 0-for-2 lots in the year. They’ve got a good penalty kill. They did a good job. There’s a reason they’ve won 10 in a row, I mean, it’s not a fluke. They’re a good hockey team playing good hockey, and they’ve got a lot of things going. We needed to be better 5-on-5. Look at the faceoffs: we were 25% after the first period, and they’re not a historically strong face off team. Tells you a little bit.”

This game isn’t a referendum on the entire season, but it sure was a referendum on this day in the NHL. One of these teams is now on a ten-game heater. The other one is still figuring out how to turn first-half success into game-to-game dominance. Dallas got caught bringing a C- effort after the longest stretch of off-days in recent memory, and as Gulutzan says, that’s not what you like to see.

It’s a shame in one way, because the Roope Hintz line was great for Dallas tonight, scoring 15 seconds into the game, when Mavrik Bourque potted a rebound. But it was also one of those nights where the early goal ended up coloring the team’s perception of the game, and Gulutzan said he was worried that might happen even when the Stars grabbed the lead.

“When that first goal went in, I actually thought on the bench, ‘I don’t know how much I love this.’” Gulutzan said. “And it turned out that way, right? We just kind of thought it was gonna be one of those nights, and it was one of those nights—for Buffalo.”

In fairness, the Hintz line was cooking for Dallas, as all three of Hintz, Robertson, and Bourque probably could have tallied another goal here and there. But without enough support from the rest of the lineup, the Sabres were able to push back, and the Tage Thompson line tallied three of the Sabres’ four goals.

This was also a bit of a night where the Stars were missing the Quebäck line, or any secondary line to drive play, really. Matt Duchene’s line largely got outplayed through 40 minutes, prompting a Steel/Duchene swap to start the third, but Johnston’s line was similarly troubled, as #53 also ended the night with a dash-3 next to his name.

This is technically the third loss in a row for the team, though this one felt much different than the prior ones, as Gulutzan said. The power play even drew some rare boos on its second and last chance of the game, and Hintz said they’re having a bit of trouble with the first part of it right now.

“I think we have had trouble with the entry, so I think we gotta fix that, then get the power play back going, and go from there,” Hintz said.

Bourque also expressed confidence that the man-advantage would be fine.

“I think you look at our first unit, I think they know what they are doing out there,” Bourque said. “Pretty sure as a power play, we’re gonna figure it out.”

One mercy for Dallas, at least, is that they don’t have to sit on this one long. In fact, they don’t even have to do so for 24 hours, as they play in Chicago at 7:30 tomorrow night.

“That’s the only good part,” Gulutzan said. “The only good part is that we have to go play tomorrow.”

There have been happier New Year’s Eves in Dallas than this one.

Thomas Harley on Making Team Canada

Thomas Harley also spoke with the media following his selection to Team Canada for the Olympics, and he was quite candid about his less-than-ideal start to the season—adding that he was actually sleeping when he got the call from Jim Nill this morning.

“I’m not sure I was expecting to make the team, honestly, after my start to the year,” Harley said. “But it was a nice surprise, for sure. The management there has faith in me to up my game and bring it to the level that it needs to be for that tournament.”

Harley said his hope is that he can get a boost from the tournament similar to what he got from the Four Nations Face-Off, citing the faster pace of the tournament as something that can help slow the game down upon returning to the NHL.

Overall, Harley’s tone was to-the-point, honest, and clear. He knows he hasn’t been the player he can be so far this year, but with all the Olympics discussion finally settled, he’s looking forward to moving onwards and upwards.

“For me this year, there were a couple distractions, whether it was the contract or the Olympics,” Harley said. “With both of those out of the way, it’s just nice to play hockey now.”

What Happened in the Game Itself

The New Year’s Eve game is always a festive one, even if it’s a cross-conference matchup (and it feels like it often is). This time around, the festivity appeared to have trickled into both team’s defensive work ahead of time, as the opening period was a bit more harem scarem than any coach generally prefers.

Rasmus Dahlin got a great view of the game’s opening goal 15 seconds into the game, but not for the reasons that he usually does. Mavrik Bourque tipped a Miro Heiskanen shot into Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen’s pad, then put the rebound over the goaltender’s shoulder while Dahlin could only muster one swipe at the puck.

Buffalo would push back immediately, and Radek Faksa took a high-sticking penalty as a result. Casey DeSmith had to make a good pad save through traffic just to retain the lead, but the Stars escaped otherwise unscathed.

Roope Hintz nearly made it 2-0 off the rush soon afterward, but he fired a shot just wide of the far side. Then it was almost 1-1, when DeSmith had to clean up a worse mess off a Matt Duchene turnover right to the slot. But DeSmith’s arm came up with the save, and the Stars were able to clear it.

Things settled into more of a controlled back-and-forth from there. Both teams had racked up 11 shots on goal with four minutes to play, and the Hintz line continued to generate looks, with Hintz in particular causing problems on the forecheck and the rush.

DeSmith was called upon again late in the period when Tage Thompson got a stretch pass that beat all three Dallas forwards. The presumptive USA Olympian then turned the corner on the not-as-big-as-Tage-Thompson Lundkvist with a bit more ease than you’d like to see, and he forced DeSmith to come up with two huge stops in tight.

The period ended with shots on goal at 14 apiece, with Bourque’s goal the difference. Lindy Ruff hockey is never boring.

The Stars kept the excitement coming with an offensive zone penalty two minutes in, when Hryckowian turned a pass over and tripped his man in trying to recapture the puck. But the Stars had the best chance of the two minutes, as Blackwell nearly beat Luukkonen shorthanded off a neutral zone turnover.

Dallas got their own power play after a Josh Doan hook—also in the Sabres’ offensive zone. But the Stars’ power play couldn’t break through, and we crept toward the midpoint of the game.

It would be Doan who tied things up after the Stars got caught a bit tired, and Petrovic couldn’t get the puck deep late in a shift. Tage Thompson found his winger coming downhill, and Doan hammered the puck through traffic and past a goaltender.

That goal prompted a decent push by Dallas, and once again, the Hintz line was at the forefront of it. Not every bit of good work results in a celebration, though. A good life lesson to take into 2026, that is.

Mikko Rantanen nearly got an assist on a 3-on-2 rush with Steel and Johnston, but the pass to the back door didn’t get through some skates, and Johnston fluttered the loose puck on net without enough danger to result in much more.

Josh Norris drew some interest from Alex Petrovic and company after he sprayed DeSmith with a snow shower following a whistle, but no penalties resulted from the melee. That was followed by another 2-on-1 rush from Robertson and Bourque, but the pass was well-defended by a backchecking Zach Benson to foil the attempt at the last moment.

Unfortunately, the next shot would land, and it wouldn’t come from Dallas. After a pinch from Lundkvist in neutral, Bo Byram stepped up on the weak side to create a 2-on-1 that Thomas Harley (and a backchecking Duchene) weren’t able to close down before Byram fired it into the far corner to give the Sabres the lead.

Gulutzan called a timeout to, I think, review the play for offside. But the replays I saw made it clear that the play was, at best, a 50/50 call, and with the risk of a Sabres power play looming, the Stars opted not to go the Jim Hiller route, and they took their medicine.

One more push came late, when Gulutzan put Robertson up with Johnston and Rantanen and Harley out with Heiskanen. The group was cycling well in the offensive zone, and the killer pass came to Heiskanen, only for the puck to blow up on his stick blade. Thus, the Stars took a 2-1 deficit to the second intermission. And it was a pretty deserved lead from Buffalo to that point, as they’d managed to generate the better looks from the more dangerous spots:

HockeyViz.com

It just hadn’t been a night with lots of connection on most of Dallas’s lines, outside of the Hintz group. But third periods often bring changes of fortune along with them, right? No, that’s not foreboding at all, why would you even ask that.

They also brought a change of lines in this case, as Duchene (somewhat predictably) moved up to Johnston and Rantanen’s line, with Steel coming back to center the third line. The change immediately gave Dallas a good push with offensive zone time aplenty, and it was on the second shift of the Hintz line that Robertson drew a hooking call on Thompson to put Dallas to the power play.

They say power plays don’t always have to score, so long as they generate momentum. This power play, however, did neither. In fact, it might have been the first time all season I heard the Dallas crowd booing a Stars power play, as nothing got generated aside from a blocked Mavrik Bourque shot from Johnston’s office.

Then Tage Thompson happened.

First it was a fortunate bounce for Buffalo after a couple of miraculous let-offs for Dallas that probably should have been a goal anyway:

Then, it was another odd-man rush for Buffalo where Thompson beat Johnston back up the ice before beating DeSmith from the guts of the ice, ripping a wicked shot to make it 4-1, and begin a mass exodus to places that were surely more fun than the AAC was feeling by that point:

Wherever you are celebrating the New Year, I suspect it will be more fun than the remainder of this game was after that fourth Buffalo goal. Perfunctory is the word, I think.

“Losing’s tough,” Harley said after the game. “But it’s one of 82. We get to turn around and do it again tomorrow night.”

Not much else you can say than that, really.

Lineups

The Stars started like this:

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

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Lyubushkin-Petrovic

DeSmith in goal

---

Buffalo Buffalo’d like this:

Krebs-Thompson-Doan
Benson-McLeod-Quinn
Ostlund-Norris-Tuch
Greenway-Dunne-Malenstyn

Samuelsson-Dahlin
Metsa-Byram
Power-Kesselring

Luukkonen

AfterThoughts

• The folks on Victory+ may not wear ties anymore, but don’t think for a second that they don’t still know how to dress up:

  

  Victory+

• Nate Bastian continued his AHL points streak (so-called) with a pretty overtime winner against Iowa tonight for the Texas Stars. I have to think that felt pretty good.

• Steel and Blackwell have been talking about generating more shorthanded pressure for a while, and they’ve been true to their word. This pass by Steel early in the second period was excellent, only to be bettered by the save:

• I asked Miro Heiskanen the other day if he thinks he and Esa Lindell will be on a defense pairing together at the Olympics. While first saying that those decisions are up to the coaching staff, Heiskanen did say that it seems like a possibility, and then the conversation moved into how it’s funny that he and Lindell never really played together much until this year (and some spells last season). Some defense pairings have to be stumbled upon, I suppose.

• Would you have challenged the Byram goal for offside? It’s so close, but unless the broadcast showed an angle I didn’t catch, I don’t know that you have enough certainty to risk a penalty here, and the Stars in the moment decider not to do so. Though you can understand Gulutzan after the game when he said, in retrospect, that they almost might as well have challenged it, given how the game worked out. Indeed.

  

• Matt Duchene and Thomas Harley were both sporting a -4 as the game wound down. Often, plus/minus doesn’t tell the most accurate tale when it comes to a player’s night, and Gulutzan said as much about Harley afterwards, praising his skating in particular. I’m willing to agree with that as far as it goes, but the fact is, the Stars needed Harley and a few other players not just to be not negatives, but to create a lot more positive things than they were able to do. And in both Duchene and Harley’s cases, that just didn’t happen for the team tonight.

  

  HockeyViz.com

• The common theme from players tonight was that the Stars generated chances, and this was a night where they weren’t going in. The problem they’re taking to heart, however, is the chances they were giving up. Buffalo simply got too many kicks at the can—and converted more than enough of them to coast into 2026 with a playoff spot. When was the last time you heard of the Sabres doing such a thing?

• Wherever you are tonight, thank you for supporting Stars Thoughts in 2025. I remain chock-full of gratitude for the many readers who are making this place possible, whether through reading, sharing, subscribing, yelling at me, or all four. Thank you for being a part of this, in whatever capacity.
  
  Happy New Year!
  -Robert