Game 53 AfterThoughts: Lack of Execution and Lyubushkin

*duck call* *breaking glass*

Look, they won’t all be worth the time you spend watching them.

It’s a long hockey season—probably too long when it comes to the grind on the players—and even moreso, effectively, in a hyper-compressed season like this one, where you’re playing every other night just so a lot of the best players can play in an intense (the league hopes) tournament in February before rattling off the last quarter of the schedule in March and April.

This game was not pretty by any standards, really. Even a shorthanded breakaway by Jamie Benn turned into a penalty on Jamie Benn to put the Stars on a 5-on-3 penalty kill, and if that doesn’t give you a good picture of how wonky this contest was, nothing will.

That call wasn’t the entire game, but it sure could have been. Benn declined to discuss the play after the game, simply crediting John Gibson with a good save. Pete DeBoer was more forthright:

“He didn’t hear a whistle,” said DeBoer. “And Gibson was kind of feinting covering it, or moving it, so he was playing the puck. I didn’t understand that call.”

Weird calls in Anaheim seem par for the course, though I’m a little biased in that regard, as I’ll explain in a moment. But nonetheless, that sort of a weird call felt a little too familiar in this building. Even if you don’t agree with the call though, the Stars managed to lose this game without any help. A couple of turnovers in their zone did them in, with Colin Blackwell being on the ice for every goal in the game.

Blackwell made the turnover(s) that led to the first goal, though he was much less culpable for the Ducks’ second, when Stankoven couldn’t quite grab a hot puck from Cody Ceci and Trevor Zegras made a slick play to tip a puck a hair quicker than Oettinger could.

It’s a tough life, being a fourth-line forward. You can score a huge goal to make up for a mistake, and then you might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time to watch the game-winning goal put you right back in the minus column. Nobody said hockey was fair.

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Fortunately for Benn, that weird breakaway call would be easy to forget, thanks to what happened right after the penalty expired. Benn hopped out of the box and then ended up blowing a tire (he may have gotten a stick in the skate) as he went to the crease for a give-and-go with Sam Steel, but Steel checked his second receiver, and he found Blackwell on a post route to score a huge goal.

It could have been a triumphant story of the penalty kill and the captain coming back to grab a scrappy game and get something out of it. But instead, it ended the way all but one other game has ended when the Stars have entered the third period trailing this season, which is to say they lost.

It was also familiar, unfortunately, in the sense that yet another right-side defenseman wasn’t able to finish the game. Ilya Lyubushkin left the game late in the second period and did not return. The Stars did not have an update on Lyubushkin’s condition after the game, so we’ll wait until practice on Thursday to hear more.

Combined with Miro Heiskanen’s knee injury and Nils Lundkvist’s season-ending surgery, it’s becoming an extraordinarily dangerous occupation to man the right side of the Dallas blue line. Though you do have to say that this makes the acquisition of Cody Ceci that much more crucial, as the Stars would otherwise be down to just Matt Dumba, who is still wearing a full face shield after his own injury, and players like Alex Petrovic down in Cedar Park when it comes to right-shot d-men.

We’ll see if Lyubushkin comes back for Friday’s game in Los Angeles. But right now, it just feels like the 4 Nations Face-Off break can’t come soon enough for the Stars. Goodness knows every other kind of break is happening now except the good kind.

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Pete DeBoer said before the game that John Gibson is the type of goalie that tends to make games 3-2 or 2-1, and he ended up being a little more prophetic than he would have liked, I suspect.

“Gibson was good,” said DeBoer. “They were opportunistic. I thought we made a handful of mistakes, and when the mistakes were made, they put them in the net. And on the other end, when they made some mistakes, I thought Gibson made some saves or we didn’t finish. Close game, they played hard. I didn’t love our execution tonight, but we had enough looks that we should have scored a couple more goals.”

The Stars did have some looks, but pound for pound, I think Jake Oettinger probably made the bigger saves. Jamie Benn said the team didn’t quite create enough tonight, and that tracks with this game, where Dallas didn’t quite have as many Grade-A efforts as this team generally tends to manufacture against defensively porous teams like the Ducks.

Part of that may be integrating some new players into the lineup, and part of it was also surely the extra work the blue line had to do after Lyubushkin went down. But overall, it felt like that last dagger pass was more absent than the shots. when the goalie always seems to be in the right spot to make the save, it’s usually because you haven’t gotten the puck to a more difficult spot for him to deal with.

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Also, I was at the game in Anaheim tonight.

I used to attend hockey games here all the time when I lived in the area from 2005-2016. Early in those days, I was in college, and my brother would pick me up from campus to head down to the game. Usually, that was to see the Stars.

Initially it was a really good matchup. The Ducks were really good leading up to their 2007 Stanley Cup run, and getting to watch Teemu Selanne, Scott Niedermayer, and Chris Pronger was a pretty great option when you had a free night. The the Stars beat the Ducks in that 2008 playoff run, making it the Stars’ first playoff series with since before the NHL lockout. There was a lot of hatred between the teams, who were both in the Pacific Division for a good while, and you could hear a lot of that simmering resentment in the building tonight.

The matchup hasn’t been quite that good in a while, though. The 2013-14 series was better than expected, but Dallas barely got into the playoffs as an eighth seed, and Kari Lehtonen wasn’t himself after being concussed late in the regular season. The teams haven’t played each other in the postseason since.

With Anaheim still trying to emerge from their rebuild, it would be a lot of fun to see these teams renew that old rivalry. My brother had the misfortune of being at that marathon five-overtime Game 1 in 2003, and I unfortunately was at The Ryan Garbutt Game in 2014. The less said about either of those the better.

This game was different, but also the same. The crowd loves to get a good “you suck” chant going, which is far from unique to any one city, in fairness. And with the second period penalty cavalcade and extra-loud volume on the arena sound system, the oppressive environment (by Orange County standards) was every bit as sharp as I remembered it. Which is to, it’s kind of loathsome, if you’re not part of the crowd doing it.

Anyway, it is late here, and even later back in Dallas. Go get some sleep. You’ve earned it, if you stayed up to watch this one.

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Dallas began the game with this lineup:

Robertson-Hintz-Stankoven
Marchment-Duchene-Granlund
Benn-Johnston-Dadonov
Bäck-Steel-Blackwell

Harley-Lyubushkin
Lindell-Ceci
Bichsel-Dumba

Oettinger in goal

Mavrik Bourque is skating, but he was a scratch for this game along with Brendan Smith.

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John Gibson played his 500th game Tuesday night. He entered the game in style befitting such a noble occasion.

It’s good to see fashion sense in Southern California hasn’t changed since I last visited.

Jacob Trouba played his 800th game tonight, too. Given his very recent arrival to Anaheim, that milestone came with a bit less fanfare.

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Anaheim started off the game with the better of the pressure, including a potential 3-on-1 that Matt Duchene was able to get back on in time to shut down. Matt Dumba also turned a puck over the neutral zone that led to a 3-on-2, but Jake Oettinger was able to turn away the effort.

Lian Bichsel had an odd play halfway through the first when he lost a glove and his stick on an attempted dump-in. This isn’t particularly relevant to the outcome, but it was odd to see the large defenseman skating back to the bench with one glove and nothing else.

Wyatt Johnston’s defense might be underrated. He intercepted a drop pass in the first period on a dangerous Ducks attack, and he constantly wins more pucks off the walls than you’d expect, for someone his size. He also went on a rush with Esa Lindell 14 minutes into the first and tested Gibson low. You can’t fault Lindell for feeding Johnston, ever, but one of these days, Lindell might just fool everyone and keep that chance in order to fire a game-winner from the middle of the ice on a rush.

Olen Zellweger nicked a post on a shot from Oettinger’s blocker side just over ten minutes into the game. Oettinger will say he had it covered, and this is one I’d agree with him on. There are posts, and there are posts, after all. Oettinger also stopped a dangerous backhand from Isac Lundestrom late in the first period when the Anaheim fourth-liner got to the crease all alone, but Oettinger stayed big, and the puck couldn’t find its way past him.

Oskar Bäck had the Stars’ best shot of the early game when he collected a loose puck on the doorstep that Gibson just barely tracked in time to push over and cover the near post. Even when the personnel changes, the Stars’ fourth line always seems to get going when other lines are still finding their way into the game.

That’s what you want from your depth forwards, is the ability to manufacture chances when other lines aren’t quite driving the bus yet. I don’t think Colin Blackwell gets enough credit for how well he plays even after sitting out for a game or two. He’s been exactly what you’d have hoped he would be this year, but the end result of this game was that he was on the ice for every goal in both directions.

Lian Bichsel fired a dangerous shot off a rush, but it got sent up high and away. His release makes me think of the term “heavy shot.” We saw it get results in his first call-up, and I could see him scaring ten goals in a full season down the road.

Cutter Gauthier got the opening goal when he collected a a rebound after a Robby Fabbri chance, and the Stars’ fourth line and third defense pairing just got caught a little too passive. Gauthier found a rebound and took it right to the top of the crease, and fired it past traffic and behind a pretty helpless Oettinger.

Cutter Gauthier is number 61. Yes, the puck bounces right to a great spot for Gauthier, but you’d also like the Stars not to all converge on the puck to the complete exclusion of covering the third forward. But that’s not really what led to this goal.

Colin Blackwell took the blame after the game for turning the puck over in the corner, and he did sort of skate himself out of room. The really painful part is that he recovered enough to sweep the puck away, only for the puck to bounce of Steel’s skate and lay there right for Gauthier, who buried it.

Matt Dumba does fish a bit, and when you combine that with the fact that this goal meant Dumba had been on the ice for six of the Stars’s last seven goals against, it might seem easy to point the finger at him. But that puck can’t get turned over like that by the forward to begin with.

Stankoven got a beautiful chance to equalize on the very next shift, however, after Jason Robertson froze everyone with a fake and fed the puck to the far side of the crease, but Stankoven couldn’t beat Gibson from in tight, and the Ducks took their 1-0 lead to the first period.

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The second period was filled with a lot of things, so let’s just run over a couple of highlights quickly:

• A couple of fantastic saves by Jake Oettinger.

• A Stars power play that didn’t quite generate the killer chance they wanted

• Ilya Lyubushkin leaving the bench with 5:51 left in the period and not returning

• Three penalties on Dallas, including a short 5-on-3

• A shorthanded breakaway from Jamie Benn that ended in him somehow taking a slashing call against John Gibson.

  • Actually, let’s pause on this for a second. Benn’s frustration at the call was pretty justified, given the referee’s failure to blow the whistle in anything close to a timely manner. And the slashing call really felt like blaming the player for the official’s mistake, given the puck was loose, and the whistle didn’t go for a good five seconds or thereabouts. It’s one thing to take your time on a whistle when it’s a shot from distance or something, but on a breakaway chance where the puck might be trickling through the five hole, it was a baffling decision.

Oskar Bäck had a big block late in the kill at the start of the third period, and that’s when you began to think karma might be real, as the universe took matters into its own hands.

Jamie Benn would help to even things up as soon as he got out of the penalty box in the third period. Sam Steel took a great Benn feed at the blue line down the ice, and he curled back in the circle and laid off a succulent backhand pass in the guts of the slot, where Colin Blackwell found it waiting as he busted into the Danger Zone and slammed it home:

It was a cathartic goal after a big penalty kill, but the catharsis was only temporary, as always. After a Cody Ceci clear hit Logan Stankoven’s stick but couldn’t be corralled, it was kept in at the blue line by Alex Killorn, who sent a puck in to where Trevor Zegras just barely managed to tip it past the outstretched stick of Jake Oettinger, and into the net. It was a really nice play with really unfortunate timing. And against the Ducks, that so often seems to be all it takes.

As the period ticked away, the Stars got frustratingly close to evening it up, but taking some hits in the process. Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston each took a turn at a chance in close, but they didn’t have enough of an angle to beat Gibson, and the Ducks were able to send the puck back up the ice.

Roope Hintz took a bit hit on a rush early in the period, but to his credit, he kept digging away. The period deteriorated into back-and-forth, physical play, with Evgenii Dadonov skating hard to get the puck down the wing and generate a couple of almost-theres. But this was a game where execution was lacking on both sides, and a 2-1 score seemed pretty fair.

Dallas pulled Oettinger late, and to their credit, they prevented a couple of empty-net chances. But defense isn’t an end in itself when you’re trailing, and Gibson was able to hang on for a greasy win in his 500th career game. At least somebody went home happy tonight.