Game 52 AfterThoughts: A Finishing Blow of Hot and Cold

Only 30 games to go

SotG

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A 2-for-5 night on the power play is a good one, most of the time. Two power play goals is as much as any time has a right to ask for from the top guys, especially when a team is facing the 31st-ranked club in the league.

But as the third period wore on, the Stars continued to be one bounce away from feeling like they’d squandered another opportunity to get more out of a game than they looked likely to do. After starting 2-for-2, the Stars’ momentum sputtered in a herky-jerky second half of the hockey game, and Jake Oettinger had to make approximately five dozen saves (rough estimate) on Brayden Schenn to keep Dallas level.

But when you have a weapon like the Stars’ top line, you always have the ability to find that one goal at that one time. And on a cold and dreary night, Roope Hintz and Jason Robertson drew five power plays and got the game-winning goal in what was quite literally the last minute.

It wasn’t pretty, and there’s no getting around that fact. Hintz and Robertson were the only pair really pushing things positively at 5-on-5 for much of the game, and that was made even more remarkable by the fact that Gulutzan acknowledged after the game that he put Rantanen with those two in order to allow Hintz’s speed to create space for Rantanen, a player who had lost weight after battling the flu over the past week, and thus wasn’t likely to have his entire toolkit available.

“You know, Rants has been sick for four days, so I give him a lot of credit,” Gulutzan said. “He’s down weight, and he didn’t feel great this morning. I didn’t think he was playing, and he just came and said, ‘I’m gonna play.’ So it was a true game-time decision. We knew with about six minutes left in warmup, he said, ‘I’m gonna give it a go.’”

Rantanen looked like he was a bit wan this morning when he skated with a few other Stars players, and tonight proved that looks aren’t always deceiving. But Mikko Rantanen at less than full operational capacity is still Mikko Rantanen, and Hintz and Robertson have carried a lot less special players than that one in their NHL careers.

Rantanen’s gutting it out in this game was a pretty good microcosm of the Stars as a whole, too. After putting pucks on net for much of the first period, Dallas slowed down in the second half of the game considerably, and Gulutzan said playing their third game in four nights was probably a part of that. I’m not going to disagree with him, either.

And when you add in the fact that Rantanen was still sick and the Stars lost Ilya Lyubushkin in the second period to a lower-body injury after he blocked a shot, it meant that a few players were being asked to do a bit more of the heavy lifting than they might otherwise have to do, with 18 healthy skaters available.

To that end, this was a good win for a team that badly needed it. As Bob Sturm often likes to say about football, you don’t apologize for wins. And frankly, the Stars can’t afford to apologize to anyone right now, given how January has treated them. Scraping out ugly wins in a packed schedule before the Olympic break is the name of the game right now, and it doesn’t matter how good or bad the opponent is, so long as you do that.

And when you have Jason Robertson—who scored his 30th goal during the middle of the month of January, by the way—you can always do that. And Gulutzan didn’t mince words when asked about how Robertson has gone about being that guy this season.

“I can only speak to this year,” Gulutzan said of Robertson, “From the start of the year ‘til now, I just think his two-way game, for me, has really improved from the start ‘til now. And I’ll double down: I still don’t know why he’s not on the team [USA]. But he’s been, you know, he can play any which way he wants. He that cerebral of a player. And I think his defensive game has gotten better every game that he’s played here. It’s a credit to him. He’s big for us.”

Robertson was the best player on the ice for Dallas tonight, intercepting multiple passes and generally just tilting the ice every time he was out there. Natural Stat Trick had scoring chances at 10-3 in the Stars’ favor during Robertson’s 5-on-5 time, and that was no small feat considering how many Stars players were tiring as the contest wore on.

That’s not to say that there weren’t other heroes, though. Matt Duchene’s power play goal was as big as goals can be at this time of year for an individual player. Duchene has been struggling to produce offense as of late, and he acknowledged tonight that sometimes you earn better things than you get, and then it gets reversed the next game.

“You know, last night it was insane that we didn’t find one, but I’ve been through this literally a 100 times in my career,” Duchene said, “Where it’s just, you do some good things and it doesn’t go, and then eventually you get one game that can turn it around. So you just keep pushing for that moment, and that was a great play by Johnny there. You know, that was one you can’t really miss.”

Duchene has scored two other goals in January, but one was an empty-netter, and the other came with the extra attacker on the ice with 18 seconds left against Chicago, down two goals. As far as beating a goaltender while the game was still in reach, this is Duchene’s first such tally since December 15.

“I feel like I’ve been doing some good stuff, and just haven’t been able to get it to go,” Duchene said after the game. “You know, that injury, I don’t think I appreciated how much it puts you behind the eight ball. And you kind of go through ebbs and flows, and I feel like my game’s coming now, and my poise. You feel more comfortable with the puck. Scoring helps. It always helps. Hopefully there’s more to come.”

Duchene played as the top center for the third game in a row with Wyatt Johnston on his right wing, and the two certainly had some looks, especially early. But Johnston’s power play goal to open the scoring meant the world, coming when he tipped a puck on Binnington and buried the ensuing rebound.

Johnston also set up Duchene off the rush during an entry with Robertson on the Stars’ next power play, and that chemistry can certainly flow into 5-on-5 play, as it has with Rantanen and Johnston for a lot of this season. You need to build chemistry and connection and cohesion and all the other things that mean “you’re on the same page,” and perhaps we saw the fruits of the last couple of games after a dry spell in Columbus.

The process was better in Columbus, but the result came against St. Louis. It’s not ideal to drop half of the points of those two games, but “ideal” is a pretty long ways away from Dallas right now. Jake Oettinger had to clean up a whole bunch of “not ideal” moments in this game, and he did enough to get his team a victory, holding St. Louis to just two goals, and perhaps sending Brayden Schenn into conniptions on the flight back to Missouri.

But Jason Robertson’s goal erases all of the icky from this game, because in back-to-backs, you just care about the points. And Robertson got them through dogged work, steady defensive play, and moving his legs as much as any player on the ice. He got rewarded for a ton of hard work with his final goal, but even that one was far from a given.

“It was a great shot,” Duchene said of Robertson’s goal. “I think he was far enough out to get it up, and it is one of those ones you just try to get on net because the goalie is not really ready. You just try to hit a corner, and the guy just finds ways to score from everywhere. You watch him. He has a knack. It was a classic goal for him.”

Victory+

Robertson has continud to look like a better, stronger, faster player with each game that goes on. He was always a goal-scorer who was also better at other things than he got credit for, but it’s no secret that he didn’t always display enough of the peripheral aspects of his game to win over people looking for flaws, and he could disappear from games when the goals weren’t coming.

This year, Robertson’s play has embodied a whole bunch of those things to a greater degree than I’ve ever seen. Tonight, he was heavy on the puck, creative in his passing, and dogged in his work ethic in all three zones. If he keeps looking like this version of himself, then it’s hard not to think the Stars would feel like they wound up with a bargain no matter how much money he ends up signing for. He was dominant, full stop.

The Stars will face the Blues again in a few days, with St. Louis playing a home game between then and now. Until then, Dallas will have a precious three days of rest. Certainly they need it, and after tonight’s result, they have well and truly earned it, too.

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After a bit of lineup intrigue during warmups, things got going. And Dallas was the better team for the first couple of minutes, testing Binnington with a couple of great chances from the Steel-Duchene-Johnston line.

St. Louis nearly got their own great chance on a 2-on-1, but an all-or-nothing attack of the puck carrier by Ilya Lyubushkin was enough to force the play offside before it germinated. And when Pavel Buchnevich took a holding penalty on a gesticulating Roope Hintz, it looked like Dallas would continue to run up the shot counter in their favor.

The top power play unit took their time threatening anything, but the league’s best power play goal-scorer continued his work this year, proving that Columbus was a complete aberration. 1-0, Dallas.

Heiskanen shot for Johnston’s stick and hit it in the slot, and the deflection was too tricky for Binnington to control. That led to a rebound for Johnston, and he finished the job.

Shots on goal climbed to 7-0 for Dallas, but after a couple of icings, Wyatt Johnston would take a slashing penalty that was probably about as much of a penalty as Buchnevich’s was. Turnabout is fair play, and Dalibor Dvorsky one-timed a puck just hard enough to push past the tip of Oettinger’s glove and trickle in.

Later on, Jordan Kyrou was credited with the goal, so he must have gotten a piece of it with his deflection attempt. Perhaps that accounted for the puck’s getting by Oettinger, but either way, the score was now 1-1 with a power play goal apiece.

After 20 minutes, shots on goal were 10-3 for Dallas, and the score remained tied. But the second period started off with ignominy, when Jamie Benn took a holding penalty along the boards in the offensive zone that was consistent with the standard of the prior two penalties called in the game (Read: fairly mild).

So the Blues went on their second power play of the game, and Dallas’s PK had to come up with a big kill to prevent them from falling behind in a game they had otherwise played well in. But Oettinger made a big save on Otto Stenberg from a dangerous area, and Dallas survived.

Or at least, they did for a bit. But after a great shift by the Hintz line, the Stars got collapsed a bit, and Jake Neighbours found Pavel Buchnevich in the slot for a one-timer with traffic in front that was a goal before the shot even happened. 2-1, St. Louis.

Oettinger would rob Brayden Schenn with the glove right afterwards on what looked like the 3-1 goal, and when Jason Robertson drew a power play a minute later, that save immediately looked like it could end up being a big one.

Matt Duchene confirmed that assessment after a pretty lackluster first 80 seconds of the 5-on-4, when he got open on an entry play with Robertson and Johnston, and fired a pass over Binnington to knot things up at two.

Duchene had just come on as part of the second power play unit, but he was right at home on a rush with two top forwards, and he didn’t hesitate before ripping the puck home. It was a goal he needed, and so did his team.

Jake Oettinger had to keep things knotted up on a dangerous tip from Schenn (again) at the crease, but he did just that, preventing the Blues captain from capitalizing (captainalizing?). A subsequent scramble at the net saw a puck get cleared after squirting free from Oettinger, during which Colin Blackwell’s head collided with the end boards in the chaos. Thankfully, he was able to get up and skate off under his own power.

Once again, the Hintz line got going with 9 minutes left in the 2nd, and the Rantanen-Robertson-Hintz trio drew another penalty off some great cycling, during which St. Louis probably could’ve been called for any one of a few infractions. There was desperate tackling and grabbing going on, but nothing came during the delayed penalty call, so Dallas had to settle for trying to go 3-for-3 on the power play.

They looked to have done so off a great tic-tac-toe pass to set up Johnston in his office, but Binnington managed to make a highlight-reel save of his own this time, and the Stars finally tasted disappointment for the first time in three power plays.

Justin Faulk would give them a fourth kick at the can shortly after that, when he kept after Roope Hintz in the corner of the Blues’ zone, finally earning a call through cumulative work as much as any single act. Dallas once again got shut down, but the Hintz line drew its fifth power play of the game right afterward when Robertson was brought down defending in his own zone.

To that point in the game, Robertson had drawn three power plays, and Hintz two. But with a minute to go in the period, Dallas wasn’t able to pull back in front before the second intermission arrived, and they had to take their vestigial power play to the final frame tied 2-2.

All up, Dallas had a +3 advantage in power plays over the 31st team in the league, but the game was very much in danger of slipping away, you felt, if they couldn’t get the lead soon.

The third period began with the remaining power play time ebbing away, and a cold night in Dallas looked in danger of turning sour. Even a 2-on-1 where Mikko Rantanen shot didn’t result in a goal, as the puck glanced off the shaft of Binnington’s stick for another heartbreakingly near miss.

On a night in which Dallas had every reason to make a statement, they remained stuck on zero 5-on-5 goals for the second straight game in what was quickly turning into an ominous third period.

That adjective was even more applicable when the Stars finally took a penalty of their own again on a D-zone shift that went on far too long. I couldn’t actually see the hold Lundkvist purportedly committed, but with power plays at 5-2, you knew one was coming eventually.

Dallas killed it thanks to some especially good work from Steel, Blackwell, and Faksa, but not without Brayden Schenn forcing Oettinger to come up with yet another Grade-A stop on the Blues captain in what was turning out to be the most intriguing battle of the game.

The other such battle was Hintz and Robertson vs. Jordan Binnington, as yet another great play by Robertson to grab an outlet pass turned into a scoring chance for Hintz, who ripped a puck into what I think was the arm of Binnington, at first glance.

I know it was the left toe of Binnington that stopped Jamie Benn on an attempt to tuck the puck around the far side with 4 minutes to go, however. Hey, did I mention that Brayden Schenn brought up that Benn wraparound chance from 2019 when I was talking to him this morning? I was going to spare you all from that detail, but this game kind of forced anyone watching it to remember every single part of that series.

With 1:10 to play, St. Louis iced a puck, and Dallas had a chance to pull a smash-and-grab job in a tie game.

They lost the faceoff, but St. Louis iced it again.

And this time, with a minute to go, Dallas finally scored at even-strength for the first time since their win over Boston. And it felt almost like an extra-attacker goal, as Robertson grabbed a puck Hintz protected off the draw and put it past Binnington for the go-ahead goal.

It was a huge goal, as you don’t need me to tell you.

Dallas tempted fate a bit when Rantanen tried to hit the empty net with under ten seconds to go, only to ice the puck instead and force Dallas to defend one more faceoff. But defend it they would, and the game was safely brought back from the cliff-edge of disaster for a much-needed win.

Lineups

Dallas rolled these groups:

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

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Capobianco-Lyubushkin

Oettinger

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St. Louis tried these on for size:

Berggren-Schenn-Snuggerud
Neighbours-Buchnevich-Kyrou
Stenberg-Dvorsky-Joseph
Toropchenko-Bjugstad-Fabbri

Broberg-Parayko
Tucker-Faulk
Fowler-Mailloux

Binnington

After-AfterThoughts

• We got a bit of news on Lian Bichsel before the game tonight. Per Glen Gulutzan, Bichsel is going to travel with the team on their upcoming three-game road trip, but he isn’t going to play until at least the final two home games before the Olympic break, if he plays at all.

  • Gulutzan said it’s a matter of whether they would want to have him play if he’s only at 90%, or if they’d rather give him a bunch of extra healing time. Personally, I still think Bichsel is likely to play the moment he feels up to it, but as we saw with Nils Lundkvist’s broken foot, these things can take time.

• I got caught in a conversation down in the bowels of AAC before the game tonight, but I’m told that Mikko Rantanen essentially stood around and watched line rushes during warmups, only to draw in at the final moment when the rosters were finalized before puck drop.

• A pretty cool moment during the anthem tonight: Matt Duchene’s son joined him on the ice.

  

• Adam Erne skated in line rushes, but he ended up being the healthy scratch. Presumably, he would have been in ahead of Nate Bastian, had Rantanen not been able to go, but at this point, it’s unclear exactly what gets Erne into the lineup vs. Bastian.

• Dallas had a promising rush in the final minute of the first period, and it appeared that St. Louis had poked it back into their own zone, which would normally negate an offside. But the play was blown offside nonetheless, and Duchene’s immediate and vehement protests fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the fact that Duchene had been carrying it towards the line to begin with meant that the Blues simply deflected it, rather than playing it back in themselves? It’s an interesting call to debate, either way.

• Jake Oettinger had a couple of huge saves on Brayden Schenn to keep the game from getting out of hand in the first half of things. Binnington’s save on Johnston in the second was similarly in the “remember that one” category, but through 40 minutes, you couldn’t tell which one(s) would be remembered, or for which reasons.

• Ilya Lyubushkin left the bench midway through the second period, and he wasn’t on the bench to begin the third, when the team confirmed he would miss the rest of the game. Lyubushkin blocked a shot earlier in the second period, so that seems to be the likely culprit.

• Despite a slightly less full crowd than normal due to the inclement weather, Dallas still announced the game as a sellout, keeping that streak alive, which is somewhere around 130-140 games in a row now, if I’m not mistaken.

• Gulutzan initial quip when asked about why he put Rantanen with Hintz and Robertson tonight: “Because Heiks said it.”

  • (For context, Gulutzan was asked by Mike Heika earlier today about whether he’d considered playing Rantanen with Hintz lately. Gulutzan confirmed that Mike Heika didn’t know that was actually a possibility today, but it seems like he couldn’t resist the opportunity for the joke. We’re fans of having a sense of humor around here.)

• As far as the weather, the roads were wet but otherwise safe after the game tonight, so I hope everyone made it home all right—or at least, that everyone didn’t drive any more recklessly than Dallas drivers always seem to do in the rain.

• Partly because of the Lyubushkin injury and partly because of the situation at large, Heiskanen and Harley both played upwards of 26 minutes tonight.

  • Also, the ailing Rantanen gutted out 22:28 tonight. Even when he’s likely dehydrated and seeing treble, the superstar player can still look like a pretty good hockey player. Really impressive effort by Rantanen to do what he did tonight.

• My favorite response of the night was Jason Robertson, when Mike Heika asked him if he scored that game-winning goal for his cat. (For context, Robertson has a pet cat that he and Heika discussed before the game in Utah yesterday.)

  • Robertson’s response: “Every one is for my cat.”

• Finally, I thought this post was chuckle-worthy: