Game 57 AfterThoughts: They Can Indeed Keep Getting Away With It
Stars/Blues, third period, you know the drill
SotG
Love is a gamble, and I’m so glad that I am winning
We’ve come a long way and yet this is only the beginning
I’m sure the Stars don’t plan to play rope-a-dope in these third periods. But showing a flair for the dramatic only works if you create drama to begin with, and the Stars have certainly managed to keep snatching drama from the jaws of less entertaining victories in recent days.
Six wins in a row mean nobody really has to care. And overall dominance outside of some stretches in those third periods mean the Stars’ game, as a whole, is in better shape than it’s been for much of the season—even when they had other winning streaks going.
No, you don’t have to like the near-disaster. There are things to fix, as both players and coach keep acknowledging. But remember: you can only blow a lead if you’re good enough to get that lead to begin with.
Likewise, you can only reclaim that lead in the final seconds if you have a team with enough heroes to step up when the pressure is at its zenith. And one thing everyone would agree with about these Stars is that they are not short on heroic figures.
Thomas Harley. Jason Robertson. Mikko Rantanen. And tonight, Miro Heiskanen and Jamie Benn.
The top-end talent is there. The depth players, like Benn, are also finding more juice in their game. For Benn to even be out there in a tie game would have been unthinkable for much of last season, when he slid down to the fourth line, even joking about being “a checker” to Wayne Gretzky himself.
But when these Stars get going, the heroes start showing up. And anyone who has watched the Dallas Stars over the past 16 years knows that Jamie Benn is just as capable of heroics as anyone else.
I don’t know what you do if you’re Jim Montgomery, after this game.
Three times in a row, they’ve had the game even with a minute to go against the Dallas Stars. And in each of those times, a Stars player has calmly reached out with a pin to burst the Blues’ bubble in excruciating fashion.
For Glen Gulutzan’s part, he’s doing his best to recognize the issues without dismissing the good.
“I thought we didn’t manage the puck well in the third, and it cost us,” Gulutzan said. “There’s always lessons in these games.”
Of course, the Stars got away with some mismanagement in the third period on Wednesday for the same reasons they got away with it in the last two third periods against St. Louis: They played really well for large portions of the rest of those games, as they did for much of this one.
But finishing the job shouldn’t have to be quite this dramatic, admittedly.
“I thought we were a little too loose in the third,” Gulutzan said. “We weren’t pushing. We were a little complacent. I felt a couple turnovers early just kind of fed their attack. They made us take a penalty, and then we started to press a bit after it was 4-3.”
You can dissect another third period stumble by the Stars in more detail if you want. Certainly the numbers will tell you St. Louis mounted a push, and Dallas couldn’t sustain a counter-push. But If you have a knockout blow to deal before the final buzzer, that does a lot of the countering for you. The last one standing is the winner, whether by judges’ decision or an unbelievable KO.
“I give them credit,” Gulutzan said of St. Louis. “They came out and played hard and probably, in this series of three games, they deserved better fates than losing in the last minute.”
Deserving better fates is one thing, but actually dictating fate is reserved for the best of the best players. Players like Mikko Rantanen, with his incredible goal against the Jets the other night. Or, in this case, players like Miro Heiskanen, who grabbed a puck at his own red line and simply decided to beat everyone up the ice, letting the rest of reality simply catch up with what he’d already decided as he went coast-to-coast and fed a wide-open Benn for the game-winner.
“When he grabbed the puck,” Gulutzan said, “The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw him keep going is, ‘He is determined to make something happen here.’”
And make something happen Heiskanen did, nearly duplicating a shift from his first NHL game back in 2018.
I’m not exaggerating, either. Here’s a shift from that first game. Just try to tell me that very first rush isn’t cut from the very same cloth as Benn’s winner tonight.
Heiskanen has become more known for his defensive acumen in the years after that shift, but there’s no denying all the tools are still there. He’s tantalizingly close to just going nuclear on offense, at times. And tonight, for once, he actually mashed the button, and 18,000 people celebrated as a result.
We asked Gulutzan after the game if that sort of aggressive offensive playmaking is something he’d like to see more of from Heiskanen.
“The answer to that question is yes,” Gulutzan said. “He has more of that in him. He hedges sometimes his bets to the defensive side all the time. But that other side of him, you can see it’s there when it needs to be. There’s more of that there, and we certainly want to get it out of him, too.”
When it comes to getting more out of players, Gulutzan’s recent track record is pretty impressive. Because the Stars have gone from a team that felt like it had four top-six forwards and two checking lines to one with three pretty fantastic scoring lines, and an identity-rich fourth line.
That’s all happened, in part, due to young players like Justin Hryckowian and Mavrik Bourque fitting in so well in the top six. But that has only been possible because of what’s happened on the third line, where Duchene, Benn, and Sam Steel have begun to solidly themselves as a deadly weapon for Gulutzan to deploy—even in the final minute of a tie game.
Duchene has looked more invigorated and dangerous with each game. Genuinely, he and his non-Olympic teammates are probably a bit bummed to have to hit the pause button on the season right now, given how much momentum and chemistry has been built in the last two weeks.
But hey, if you have to step away from the league for a couple of weeks, a six-game winning streak isn’t a bad consolation prize to take with you on that vacation.
So, how does Jamie Benn describe what he and Matt Duchene have done over the past six games?
“We’re just trying to do our part,” Benn said. “I think we both had more to give for this group. Speak for myself, but I wasn’t playing very good hockey for a little bit there. Then I got put with Sammy, and we found some chemistry there.”
Duchene was, as you’d expect, a bit more effusive:
“He’s been great,” Duchene said of his captain. “I’ve been telling him nonstop how well he’s playing. He’s got some swagger in his game. He’s a heck of a player, and he’s shown it throughout his career, and he’s still got a lot of game in him. He’s been awesome to play with. It’s been really fun.”
Since January 23rd, Duchene leads the Stars in scoring. But Jamie Benn is just one point behind him:
So, yeah. Jamie Benn has absolutely got some game left in him.
“He’s been huge,” Duchene said. “Even when he hasn’t been on the board, he’s been huge, helping our line score. We had really good chemistry last year when we played together, and we’ve kind of found it again here.”
Jake Oettinger and Jordan Binnington were both tested early in the game. Binnington had to face a flurry of Roope Hintz rebounds as shots mounted to 6-0 in Dallas’s favor, and the period would start (and end) with Binnington having the heavier workload, but the better numbers.
It would be the Blues who got on the board first. After Miro Heiskanen showed the downsides of a lefty playing on the right side by backhanding a puck over the glass to put Dallas on the penalty kill, Pavel Buchnevich got a one-timer from way too close to the net after a flurry, and the puck was pounded into the net to give St. Louis the 1-0 lead.
After Oettinger had to stop a 2-on-1 shortly after that, the Stars would equalize when Mikko Rantanen carved his way into the slot and found a late-in-his-shift Jason Robertson (who is pretty much dynamite when he’s playing with Rantanen) just above the goal line for a one-timer into an open net, as Binnington had sold out for a Rantanen shot that never came.
The game opened up a bit more than either coach probably liked after that, and another goal looked all but certain. Jason Robertson apparently felt the same way, as he jumped onto the ice, grabbed a loose puck, and cut across the blue line with a vengeance, forcing Jake Neighbours to bring him down with a tripping penalty to put Dallas on the job.
As usual, the top unit created some great chances, and Binnington lost his stick amid the early chaos. But the Stars couldn’t put one home, and they paid for it a minute later when the Blues scored on their own delayed penalty, after Jordan Kyrou had time and space to come in on Oettinger’s glove side and pick the far corner. 2-1, Blues.
Heiskanen drew a penalty with five seconds remaining on an overzealous Robby Fabbri, but the Stars had to settle for the 1:55 of carryover as the period expired.
1:54 of that residual time was uninspiring. But Matt Duchene uses every part of the buffalo, and in this case, a pretty generous rebound by Binnington off a Thomas Harley shot was more than enough for the Stars to make a meal. 2-2.
Jason Robertson clearly observed the same rebound issues, as he cut into the netfront and managed a turnaround shot on Binnington that generated another promising rebound, which Mavrik Bourque immediately finished on account of being in the right spot at the right time. But then, is there ever a wrong time to be in front of the net?
That prompted Jim Montgomery to use his timeout just to settle the troops. It worked for a moment, but a good bit of forechecking from Oskar Bäck and Adam Erne led to a trip by Binnington, who had to haul Bäck down to prevent him from grabbing and depositing a loose puck.
Rantanen and Robertson nearly combined for another goal right off the bat, with a play eerily similar to the Duchene tap-in from a couple of games back. Instead, the Stars decided to let the entire power play elapse before Benn and Duchene combined again, and what a combination it was to make it 4-2, as Duchene immediately one-touched a pass to Benn in the slot, and the Stars captain took aim and fired, beating Binnington high on the blocker side:
You could feel the game approaching a boil, and a bit of Netfront Nonsense led to a Blues power play, after Rantanen came down with something resembling a wrestling move to draw the extra roughing penalty in a pile with Nils Lundkvist putting his man in a headlock somewhere at the bottom of it.
The Stars would kill that penalty, however, and the tide resumed in Dallas’s favor. Matt Duchene got a half-breakaway a few minutes later where he fired a shot off the outside of the post, which felt like yet another warning shot to the Blues. There are nights where players just look on, and this was certainly one of them, for Duchene.
The second period would end with the Stars on another kill after a Hintz tripping minor, but three big blocks and a very nice Oettinger save on a Kyrou slapper sent the Blues to the room with 14 seconds remaining in the thus-far unsuccessful set.
St. Louis would nick the outside of a post themselves just after those 14 seconds ran out to begin the third, but no further danger was to be found in the aftermath. Thus, Dallas got to work defending a 4-2 lead in the third period, which I hear is very easy to do and very rarely goes awry.
The Stars chose to go about doing so taking another penalty, however, as Johnston got called for a hook after an Oettinger save bounced back toward the goal, requiring emergency maneuvers to keep the puck at bay. But the Stars came up with another kill, and the two-goal lead was holding as the final period hit the halfway mark.
But Jimmy Snuggerud knows firsthand how tenuous third-period leads have been for Dallas, lately, so he went for a skate after the Stars tried to rush a line change after a long shift in their own end, and they paid for it. Snuggerud eluded a lot of stick-checks and not much else in the way of defense before getting to the slot, and he beat Oettinger back against the grain, blocker side, to make it 4-3 with eight minutes to go.
Yes, you might have been saying at the time, but surely that was all the Stars would allow, right?
Well, three minutes after that, the Stars’ third-period speed bumps against the Blues would rear their head to full height when Hryckowian and Rantanen full-on collided in the neutral zone. The Blues rushed in with numbers, and a nice drop pass by Philip Broberg set up Toropchenko for the game-tying goal (which also set up all the home fans for a whole lot of anxiety).
Thomas Harley was poised to be the latest last-minute hero for Dallas against the blues after a click Rantanen feed with 55 seconds to go sent him low in the slot, but his backhand effort didn’t quite get through Binnington, and it looked like the narrative wasn’t going to be so poetic. Best not to get greedy, right?
But Miro Heiskanen had other plans.
With 30 seconds to go, Heiskanen took a puck from his own end, and he skated. He put his head down, and you could see immediately that he wasn’t planning on stopping. After holding off any would-be defenders for the entire length of the ice, Heiskanen saw the seam, and he hit it with a gorgeous pass that Jamie Benn knew exactly what to do with, one-timing it past Binnington for yet another impossibly poetic last-minute goal.
For the third time in three matchups against the Blues over the past couple weeks, the Stars saw St. Louis tie the game up, only to break Jim Montgomery’s boys’ hearts in the final 70 seconds. And for Jamie Benn to score it on Jordan Binnington? Well, sometimes these things rhyme, eventually.
Lineups
Dallas deployed this group:
Robertson-Hintz-Bourque
Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Erne
Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Capobianco-Lyubushkin
Oettinger
St. Louis unleashed these folks in an 11/7 format, which I am pasting from their website with full names attached:
Brayden Schenn - Dalibor Dvorsky - Jimmy Snuggerud
Jake Neighbours - Pavel Buchnevich - Jordan Kyrou
Robby Fabbri - Pius Suter - Nathan Walker
Alexey Toropchenko - Oskar Sundqvist
Philip Broberg - Colton Parayko
Tyler Tucker - Justin Faulk
Cam Fowler - Logan Mailloux
Matthew Kessel
Jordan Binnington
After-AfterThoughts
There was a nice pregame ceremony for the seven Dallas Stars going to the Olympics, with four kids carrying flags for the players’ respective countries.
Two of the kids fell on the way out to center ice: The ones carrying the Canadian and U.S. flags. The kids carrying the Finnish and Czech flags made it out safely. Omen? You decide.
Also worth a watch: This video, in which you get to hear a slightly perturbed Radek Faksa explaining that everyone was calling him The Grinch when he was wearing his red Czechia pants at practice with his normal green socks and jersey.
Matt Duchene has looked like a completely different player lately, especially in the last two or three games. It’s hard to believe that’s the same guy from three weeks ago. Confidence is important in this game, but it’s like straight-up NOS for a skilled player like Duchene.
With about 13:20 remaining in the second period, Nils Lundkvist took a shot from the point that got blocked. But a sign of his confidence might be how he responded: rather than backing off for what looked like a likely 2-on-1 the other way, Lundkvist stepped up and played the puck, preventing any counterattack with a calculated risk that panned out.
Lundkvist made another aggressive play to generate a scoring chance in the third, coming down low before feeding a puck to the doorstep for a great shot. Confidence, confidence, confidence.
Lundkvist and Thomas Harley dominated as a pairing tonight at 5-on-5. Per Natural Stat Trick:
83% expected goals share
1-0 goals advantage
10-4 scoring chance advantage
7-0 high-danger shot attempts share
Radek Faksa came up with two big (and painful) blocks on the penalty kill to end the second period, drawing a lot of stick-taps from grateful teammates after the second intermission arrived. Is there a more viscerally satisfying an experience than watching a big shot block subvert an opposing power play?
Yes, there was another Benn wraparound on Binnington in this game that was just barely saved. No, I don’t expect anyone wants to talk about it. But yes, we all saw it. Be cool, people.
With Darren Pang in town today, I finally had a chance to prove I wasn’t crazy.
I have a vague memory of watching a Stars/Coyotes game from what has to be around 20 years ago. During that game, I could’ve sworn Pang and Daryl Reaugh switched booths for a period, with Pang doing color commentary with Ralph Strangis for the Stars’ channel, and Razor moving over to call the game with Curt Keilback, the old Coyotes pxp man. Until tonight, I hadn’t met anyone else with any memory of this, however, and I’ve wondered more than once if I was mixing up my memories.
But Darren Pang is the best, and he absolutely did remember it when I asked him about it today, though he said he can’t recall whose idea it was or why they would have done so. But with both teams’ broadcast rights being owned by FOX affiliates at the time, it really wasn’t much more complicated than just switching spots for a period, so that’s what they did. Take that, people who think I’m crazy.
Finally, I keep coming back to this mesmerizing pose by Jamie Benn, who slides on one knee all the way to the boards well after scoring the game-winner. That goal had to feel pretty good, even for someone as stoic as Benn. Or maybe especially so, come to think of it:
And again:
I do remember Pang + Razor trading places too, 2nd period sometime after the Ladislav Nagy trade and Razor said he wanted to yell out "NAGY" when he had the puck, but he never did.
I also remember the game where Razor and Panger switched, you are therefore not any more crazy than I am. I actually happened to be visiting family in Tucson when that game aired, and was happy to catch the Stars game through the Coyotes broadcast. Was pleasantly surprised when they did the switch for a period!