Game 55 AfterThoughts: Break(down) Time

Defending optional, Vacationing mandatory

When Miro Heiskanen went down with an injury on January 28, the Stars still had five games to play until the break. They also lost Nils Lundkvist for the year right after that, and then they ended up losing Ilya Lyubushkin for about 2.5 of those remaining five games.

Their three primary right-side defensemen for much of the year were all gone in a flash, with ten important points sitting on the table before the league hit the pause button. And over those five games, the Stars proceeded to go 3-1-1, and that despite a dud in Anaheim on Tuesday and a promo for pond hockey on Friday in Los Angeles.

So the Stars find themselves sitting in third place in the NHL with two weeks of rest that have mercifully arrived. That’s impressive stuff for any team, and it’s particularly important for a Stars team that has the final third of the season still to be faced without Tyler Seguin, with Heiskanen’s return also likely a ways off.

No, the Stars haven’t always played the way their coaches would like them to during this west coast trip, but DeBoer has mentioned repeatedly that the team is tired, that they’ve played late into the summer, and that they’re missing players like Seguin and Joe Pavelski from last year. Those aren’t excuses on any given night, but those things do put the overall picture in stark relief: this is a very good team, even when the team isn’t very good. And against less-good teams, that’s plenty good enough.

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Yes, we probably shouldn’t read too much into an 8-3 win against *this* San Jose Sharks team, though. Given that the Stars were playing the worst team in the league after poaching two of that team’s top veterans, this was always likely to be a bit of a one-sided affair.

It didn’t start that way, though. In fact, this game started like half the players had already gone on the vacations most of them have planned. And after a rotten start that echoed the 11-seconds-in goal the night before, Peter DeBoer made some changes.

Before we get to those changes, let’s look at what happened beforehand to possibly prompt them.

First, the Sharks kicked off the scoring a minute into the game. The Harley-Ceci pairing neither killed the play along the boards (where Macklin Celebrini threaded a pass through Harley) nor covered the one player who can hurt them (as Ceci fails to get William Eklund’s stick on the forward’s net drive, while Johnston is leaning toward the F3 coming into the face-off circle just out of frame). The result? A far too easy goal.

On the second goal, you don’t need screenshots to understand that Matt Dumba went for a hit on Andrew Poturalski at the blue line and missed spectacularly, while the rest of his teammates got caught puck-watching as Will Smith fired a shot from a vacant slot that Casey DeSmith saved, only for Fabian Zetterlund to find time to do his taxes, throw a load of laundry in, and finally tuck home the rebound.

The Stars found some life after Matt Duchene (who scored six points in the two-game set over the weekend, no big deal) got a favorable bounce to cut the Sharks’ lead in half on the very next shift. But it was the sort of goal that prompted this face during the celebration, if that tells you anything:

Duchene’s goal aside, that sort of sleepwalking start in the last game before a two-week layoff is akin to college students opting not to wear pants for the final class before winter break. And while I don’t know what a professor would do if faced with the latter scenario, I know what Peter DeBoer did with the former: he put his two best defensemen together (Harley and Lindell), and played Lian Bichsel and Matt Dumba as his second pairing—a pair that would combine for three points on the night. (Don’t look now, but Dumba is on a two-game points streak.)

Anyway, that made Cody Ceci and Brendan Smith the de facto third pair, and I think it’s worth keeping an eye on how Ceci is used after the break, when Ilya Lyubushkin will presumably return.

Since Mikael Granlund and Ceci arrived from San Jose, they’ve been deployed like fresh troops sent in to relieve an exhausted infantry unit. Ceci has led the team in 5-on-5 ice time per game, and Granlund has led all forwards in the same category:

One would presume that Ceci would play with Lindell again when Lyubushkin reunites with Thomas Harley, as the Bichsel-Dumba pairing has been pretty much constant since Bichsel’s second recall (aside from Friday, when Lindell played on the right side with Bichsel in that wacky Kings game).

For tonight, Bichsel wound up +4, while Brendan Smith somehow managed to earn a -1 in this contest, though when you consider that Matt Duchene also walked away with an even plus/minus rating despite scoring two goals and an assist, maybe plus/minus is a fool’s errand in this game (and most games).

I’m not sure Ceci has found his ideal defense partner in Dallas yet, but the quick mix-and-match to Alain Nasreddine’s group in San Jose suggests the Stars aren’t going to be shy about looking for one, if he’s there to be found.

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As for the forwards, well, here’s how they started:

A couple of interesting notes here:

• The centers were pretty unique in this one. Wyatt Johnston moved back up to the top line as a right wing, while Colin Blackwell played what was I think his first game at center all year for Dallas, with Mavrik Bourque doing his best #53 impression while centering the third line with Jamie Benn and Evgenii Dadonov. Three of the four Stars’ centers had a goal tonight.

• Sam Steel hasn’t been scratched since the first half of last season, if memory serves. My top theories on why the scratch happened now: 1) As always, there could be an injury that the team didn’t want to disclose, or 2) They may want to spread around the healthy scratches to avoid sitting players like Blackwell for extended stretches. But who knows, really.

• Colin Blackwell played center over Oskar Bäck, and I find that fascinating in a very minor sort of way. Bäck has been a center for practically his entire professional career until moving to wing early this season, but he’s reprised that role as a center multiple times this year. I wonder if the Stars simply wanted a left-shot forward on the left side of that line rather than playing Blackwell on his off-wing (where he played a lot in Chicago prior to coming to Dallas).
  
  I know these line combinations aren’t the most important thing, but man, I would love to hear the thought process behind processes like these. Maybe I am in too deep.

• It’s a little lineup-adjacent, but we’ll fit it in here: Wyatt Johnston has been wearing an “A” as an alternate captain during the last three road games after Miro Heiskanen (who usually wears it on the road) got injured. Since Heiskanen went down, the alternate letters have gone to Duchene and Lindell at home, and Hintz and Johnston on the road, though Johnston also wore a letter last month in that rough Colorado game on January 18.
  
  It might seem more interesting to think about why other players haven’t been wearing a letter while the youngest forward on the team has, but it really might be as simple as this: Johnston is one of the best players on this team, and DeBoer has been clear that he’s a leader on it, too. The 21-year-old really is a remarkable player.

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Okay, it’s late (early), and you all want to eat a bunch of cheese while complaining about the Super Bowl, so let’s hit a few of the main beats about a game that didn’t end up being much of one.

• Oskar Bäck somehow didn’t put a sitter into an empty net, as the puck rolled over his stick blade in such a way that he saved his own shot by doing something by accident that I could never even do on purpose. Just watch it, and marvel.
  
  At least Bäck got an assist later on, with a beautiful feed to Wyatt Johnston in front of the net for a gorgeous tip. Sometimes the net is just too open.

• Who needs open nets when you have tiny gaps, though? Mason Marchment found this hole on Vítek Vaněček to give the Stars a 3-2 lead, and probably this was the moment when the Sharks’ goalie knew he might be in for a rough ride.

  

  That’s a tough one. You can see Vaněček trying to stay big, but you do have to plug those leaks, and Jason Robertson taught everyone last playoffs.
  
  Here’s how you’re supposed to look, with the glove (or blocker) covering that hole. Of course it’s all about which part of the net you want to give: the top of the spot over the pad. This is probably why the Reverse VH position prefers to give the top spot.

• Matt Duchene’s deflection for a power play goal is a great example of why he’s on that top unit, and perhaps a similarly great example of why Thomas Harley is well-suited to join him there. I don’t think people always realize just how deep Dallas’s forward depth is until you start drawing up their second power play unit personnel. They have a ton of great options, with the $3 million center as good as they get right now.

• Jason Robertson’s rebound goal reminded me of a lot of the things I’ve seen Dallas do during practice: working for shot lanes and tips, then trying to grab rebounds and stash them home. A whole heap of goals are scored that way in the league these days, and it’s good to see Robertson piling them up in ways he wasn’t earlier this season.

• Jamie Benn had two excellent plays to create goals in this one: first, his textbook tie-up on Timothy Liljegren to clear Mavrik Bourque’s shot lane.

  

  And second, Benn’s shot on his breakaway, where he kept things simple and just fired a snap shot under Vaněček’s glove rather than trying the five-hole deke on his breakaway in Anaheim Tuesday night. Yes, the goaltending had clearly waved the white flag after Thomas Harley’s goal (which was still a beautiful shot, to be clear), but you still have to do something special to beat an NHL goaltender, and Benn did that.
  
  Oh, and Benn also skated straight to the bench and plopped himself down after scoring. No high-fives, no glove-bump line, just “okay, I’m done.” I don’t hate that, when celebrating an eighth goal against a team that has clearly given up (on a lot of things).

• In the third period, Johnston was moved off the top line in favor of Logan Stankoven (who was the only forward without a point in this one). Johnston moved next to Blackwell and Bäck, who set up his goal. You know that Johnston’s deflection was a beautiful one, because it looked easy, but don’t discount the work it took to make it happen.

• I would love to know why Ceci was standing up at the blue line on the Sharks’ third goal, allowing himself to be left behind for an immediate 2-on-1. I would also like to know why Mikael Granlund didn’t play another shift after being on the ice for that goal. Hopefully it was just rest, as the game was well into garbage time by then (if such a thing exists, given the history between these two teams). But it’s 2:30am and the NHL just stopped uploading highlights for the night, and I don’t want to crawl back through the game broadcast to get one screencap just to parse the decisions as best I can in order to tell you that “2-on-1s are bad to allow.”
  
  (They are, though.)

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Many Stars players have vacation plans during the 4 Nations break; I know Cody Ceci won’t be the only Stars player to be heading for Hawaii after this game, but one player who won’t be going on vacation is Lian Bichsel, who was loaned to Cedar Park tonight after the game.

This loan was one most folks probably expected, as it allows Bichsel to fine-tune his game in the AHL after a second decent stretch in the NHL. Hopefully Bichsel enjoys the next two weeks down there, because there’s a chance he won’t see the AHL again after the Stars resume their season on February 22.

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As for us here at the ol’ ST, we’ll still be here, chugging away. There are two pieces in particular I’m really excited to share soon, so don’t think your e-mail inbox will be off the hook any time soon.

I also want to say thank you to the many, many folks supporting my work. (Shout out to the subscriber I ran into in Los Angeles, by the way!) I've had occasion to reflect over the last week on how lucky I am to have anyone reading a single word I write, and I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with gratitude each time I get an e-mail telling me someone else has subscribed. That’s been very cool. Also, money helps me eat food, and I have grown quite accustomed to that habit. Thank you for enabling me.