Game 5 WCSF AfterThoughts: "A Little Bit of Hate Out There"

This series will end up looking like a series after all

Bullet points for this one seem the way to go, as it was a 4-0 loss. Those stink, if you are the team on the wrong side of them! Dallas has been on the wrong side of them three times recently. Let’s talk about Some Things.

• Dallas got shut-out just once in the entire regular season. When they were “flipping the switch” after game 82, did they accidentally flip the “don’t get shut out” switch to “sometimes get shut out”? Why would you even have a “sometimes get shut out” switch in the first place? Why are these things not controlled through more comprehensive programming rather than using analog switches?

• Jamie Benn’s mixing it up the way he did with Mark Scheifele is not a bad thing, in my view. I don’t love the punch to a player somewhat restrained by a linesman, to be clear. But if he’s in Winnipeg’s heads, it can do some good things for Dallas, who can’t afford to keep asking their penalty kill to do more work than their power play.

• Also, scoring any goals would be a good way to get in Winnipeg’s heads, too. But hey, Dallas responded with wins after their last two playoff shutout losses, so maybe this was all a setup for another home ice celebration.

• Of course, if they don’t win in Game 6….well, that’s going to be a very somber flight back up to Winnipeg for Game 7. So, best not to let that happen.

• In fact, “Win and you don’t have to go to Winnipeg” might be enough to conjure up all the desperation you could ask for. What could possibly be stronger motivation than that, unless you replace “Winnipeg” with “Oklahoma.”

• That Tyler Seguin shot off the post, oh man. That changes the whole game if it’s an inch to the left, but alas, the bounces were decidedly not on Dallas’s side tonight. But when you’re hanging in there during a hockey game, you’re kind of asking for trouble, right? I mean, the Stars had some pushes, but not enough to really grab the game back. They needed to put more “won” shifts together, and they couldn’t do that often enough.

• The 5-on-3 was a rotten bit of luck for Dallas, absolutely. But both tripping penalties were “reachy” plays, and those will get you into trouble. You can’t say Dallas didn’t make their own bed a fair bit in this one.

• Back to the Scheifele/Benn thing for a moment: I think Lowry got the extra penalty as the third man into the tussle, so whatever, that’s fine. But the Benn punch to Scheifele was bad enough to where I don’t think you can settle the bill there with Dallas getting a power play. At the very least, things should be even. Surprising that such wasn’t the call.

• In fact, both that and the Lian Bichsel penalty after the whistle seemed like needless instances of giving man-advantages after scrums rather than “letting ‘em play” as playoff refereeing usually seems to go. You generally expect to see officials sending either both guys or none, unless there’s something egregious (like a punch to the face of an unsuspecting player, say). I’m sure the officials had a logic to their thinking in both cases, but from 30,000 feet, it looked curious, if not outright bizarre.

• Come to that, the Duchene interference penalty to cancel out the high-sticking call was pretty embarassing, in my view, for Namestnikov.

  It looks like Duchene tries to reach out and get his stick in front of Namestnikov, only for him to grab Duchene’s stick and spin to try to buy a hooking call, only to end up accidentally chopping Seguin up high with his own stick. That really shouldn’t result in 4-on-4 in any universe. But as Dave Jackson said in Mark Lazerus’s great piece, officials sometimes miss things in the extra craziness of the playoffs.

• That said, the Stars also took plenty of legitimate penalties in this game and got a power play out of Benn’s punch to Scheifele, so nobody is going to be pitying them after this game. They didn’t do enough to force the issue in their favor.

• Well, you might pity Jake Oettinger, actually, who was outstanding time and time again despite getting nowhere near enough help. If recent history holds true, Oettinger is likely to repeat his excellence in Game 6, while the offense wakes back up as well.

• Mikko Rantanen led all players on both teams with 24:58 of ice time. That’s probably too much in a game like this, even for him. And nearly ten of those minutes came in the third period, meaning Rantanen was playing every other shift down the stretch.
  
  He is a remarkable player who has turned an elimination game around singlehandedly before, but this game just didn’t have that magic to it, especially after Dallas went down 3-0 with eight minutes to go. He looked tired late in the third, and one absolutely cannot blame him.

• That Miro Heiskanen shot earlier in the game that glanced off Hellebuyck’s shoulder felt destined to do something better, didn’t it? Still, it’s a good thing that Heiskanen is feeling confident enough to take that shot, given his propensity for passing on the power play. The Stars are better when Heiskanen is a scoring threat as well as a defensive stalwart.

• Heiskanen played 18:33 in this one, so it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Dallas goes back to 12F/6D on Saturday. I think they could use a more regular fourth line in this series, especially at home where they can deploy it in the most ideal situations. With Heiskanen looking ready for 20 minutes of duty, I don’t see why you wouldn’t put him in for Petrovic and sort out the pairings from there.

  • Personally, I’d go Harley-Heiskanen, Lindell-Ceci, and Bichsel-Lyubushkin.

• Wyatt Johnston deserved a goal in this game, given the physical abuse he took and the hard work he put in. His rebound chance late in the third that went over the net was a surprise miss (with some good backchecking by Winnipeg factoring in, too), but the later this series goes, the more I think we’ll see this lineup start to look as deep as it is. And Johnston is nails in big playoff games.

• The Duchene line generated multiple chances with Benn back up in place of Marchment, and man, they feel close. Duchene was adamant after the game that he’s not worried about not having a goal so far, but I do wonder if his half-second to collect that early power play pass before shooting it (which allowed Hellebuyck to get over) was a result of his goal-scoring dry spell. When you’re confident, you don’t need that extra beat. But one-timing pucks is a very hard thing to do, in fairness.

• Winnipeg clearly focused on spreading out in the offensive zone and just generating simple shots with players at the net in this one, unless they found openings for quick shots near the slot.

  

  At even-strength, they fired from both points looking for tips and rebounds, then tried to just get any puck on net that they could from the tops of the circles on down. (The diamond shapes are deflections and tips.)
  
  And at 5-on-5, as you can see above, when they actually shot it at the goal, Oettinger saved everything bound for the net but the Scheifele double doink goal and the Ehlers empty-netter. Winnipeg didn’t solve him in this game; they got a 5-on-3 goal, a 5-on-4 goal late in the game against tired penalty-killers, and a 4-on-4 goal that bounced off a skate. That’s hardly a meltdown by Oettinger, whose mental fortitude will have already assured him as much.

• As for Dallas, they were, as they’ve been pretty much all series, the better team at 5-on-5 (when they weren’t taking penalties), but not decisively so (obviously).

  

  That Thomas Harley backhand chance (that he didn’t lift as high as he wanted, putting it right into Hellebuyck’s glove just over the pad) was a glorious one, as was the Johnston deflection from Dadonov that slid wide. Toss in the Robertson and Seguin posts, and you can see a clear path for this game to get to overtime at the very least.

• But to do that, Dallas absolutely can’t keep taking penalties. They’ve been loading up Winnipeg’s very-dangerous power play 4+ times a game all series, and that’s just a foolish opportunity to allow all their hard work at 5-on-5 to get undone in frustrating fashion. And the best way to avoid taking penalties is to push play a bit more.

• Winnipeg came out well to start the game, and Dallas had a rough go of it before they settled in for the second period, which was going fine until the 4-on-4 ensured.

  

  This is a case where the xG chart tells you the story of the game pretty darn well: Winnipeg jumped out early and racked up some chances on the power play, but Oettinger held Dallas in the game. Then Dallas got some chances on a power play right after that, and the game evened out for a bit. But the second Dallas power play might as well not have happened, and Winnipeg really pushed after that late in the period.
  
  Dallas settled things down right up until the late Winnipeg power play at the end of the second, when Oettinger was downright heroic and the Jets were gloving pucks into the net.

• Really, that penalty kill at the end of the second period was such a shame to waste the way they did, because Oettinger was incredible, and Ceci had to play with Hintz’s stick for half of it.
  
  Dallas had a far-too-frequent recipe for winning this sort of game, where they get past late penalty trouble and hang around in a game before punching a team in the mouth in the third period. Instead, they tripped over a gopher hole.

• You can look at this two ways, I think: Yes, the Jets have shut out Dallas twice in five games. But also, Dallas is unstoppable unless you shut them out. And does anyone really think this offense (aka “Mikko Rantanen”) is going to be kept quiet on home ice on Saturday? One would tend to doubt it.

• Thankfully, Saturday’s game is at 7:00pm CDT rather than 8:45, like tonight’s. Some of us have bedtimes.

• Pete DeBoer after the game on Benn and Scheifele’s ruckus: “I think it’s an emotional series. You play this time of year against one team, there gets to be a little bit of hate out there. That’s okay,” said DeBoer.
  
  That got me thinking about hatred in general. More on that in the final point.

• The whistle after Hellebuyck's mask got loose came after the Stars had the puck in their zone. There was some talk about why the faceoff wasn't brought back into the Winnipeg zone, but my assumption there was that the officials simply didn't notice it until that long after the shot that caused the loose mask, so they didn't want to move the puck all the way back down the ice, given that the play had naturally moved the puck out of the zone. I had no problem with it, even if a quicker spot might have meant another OZ faceoff. Maybe Hellebuyck saw the play heading out of the zone and waited to shake the mask off for that reason, but referees aren't usually going to move a puck back into the zone to punish a team for a safety issue. At least, not in this game they weren't. Again, I didn't have a problem with it.

• I’ll end this with a video, because one of my favorite traditions from Lonestarball back in the day was their Friday Afternoon Video, so what better way to honor a tradition than by stealing it?
  
  So, I just finished watching Andor this week, and it was absolutely brilliant. I don’t think there will ever be a better Star Wars show, and probably they shouldn’t even try.
  
  Anyway, it made me think a lot about what it really takes to fight injustice, and how hard it is to fight it when we let anger and hatred dictate our decisions in the moment rather than subordinating those feelings to more lofty aspirations. So, in that vein, I think this video is a good reminder for all of us. Have a great Friday.