Game 60 AfterThoughts: They Do Ask How Many, and the Answer Is "Many"

Just another four-point night from Roope Hintz

It’s always nice to welcome back a former player in their first game back.

For longtime Star Radek Faksa, his first chance to return to Dallas was washed out by a gruesome injury earlier this season. And for a moment, it looked like his actual return to Dallas would see him causing one.

Faksa carried momentum from going to the netfront right past it, forcing Ilya Lyubushkin to do his best impression of an accordion against the end boards. It was a scary moment just 13 seconds into the game, and for a moment, it looked like Dallas would see yet another one of their defensemen leave a game with injury.

To refresh your memory: Miro Heiskanen got knocked out of a game in January when Mark Stone took out Heiskanen’s knee with a pretty foolish play. Ilya Lyubushkin then left the Stars’ game in Anaheim in early February with an injury of his own, missing the rest of the road trip before the long break. And right after the Four Nations break, Lian Bichsel got concussed by Casey Cizikas. Nils Lundkvist was lost for the season with shoulder surgery (though he seemed in relatively good spirits greeting fans after the game last night).

So when Lyubushkin went from rubbing his neck on the bench to disappearing down the tunnel, it looked like the Stars would have a nightmare scenario where their defense was down to five players, two of which have been frequent healthy scratches in Matt Dumba and Brendan Smith.

Instead, Dallas found a way to weather an onslaught of shots on goal from St. Louis and come away with a 6-3 victory.

For a moment, try to think about how this must feel from the Blues’ perspective. They’ve been on a tear recently, doing everything they can to hang onto slim playoff hopes currently dwindling below 20%, and then they get a Stars team on their heels. They even score a power play goal against the usually-stingy Dallas PK. They get to 33 shots on goal after two periods, and they end the game with a 42-21 advantage in pucks on net. And all that resulted in was a pulled goalie and a big loss.

Obviously the power play is a big story. A huge one, really. It’s funny how we want to talk about the players when a power play is scoring and the power play coach when it’s not. But Steve Spott made some big changes to the power play a couple months ago, and they’ve been paying off to an absurd degree, with the power play cooking at 37% since 2025 began.

Of course, tonight, the Stars didn’t go 37% on the power play; they went 100%, scoring on all four power play chances. That includes three 5-on-4 tallies from Wyatt Johnston, who netted his third hat trick in the past two seasons. (Note: You may have forgotten that Johnston got a hat trick in Vegas in January, because a lot happened in that game, but it’s true.)

I have to think the St. Louis penalty kill felt like crash test dummies by the end of this one. For goodness’ sake, the Stars’ second power play unit opened the scoring, as Mason Marchment fired a shot off the rush from, frankly, an angle you’d expect NHL goaltenders to be able to handle. But Joel Hofer could not handle it, and the Stars capitalized on the Faksa boarding minor to Lyubushkin. It would not get better for the Blues penalty kill as the game went on.

The Blues did punch back a minute later, when a somewhat fortunate rebound found its way to Zack Bolduc, who was able to stash the puck that crept into the crease behind Oettinger to tie things up.

Before we go on about the goals, though, we should talk about a big save Oettinger made on Colton Parayko at about 10:30 remaining in the first. That shot could have given St. Louis a 2-1 lead, with Dallas reeling and surrendering shots for the next period and a half. Instead, Oettinger kept Dallas in it, with the Blues piling up shots as the first went on, before Matt Duchene was able to score a one-timer on a long-distance bounce pass from Marchment in a fashion that Tyler Seguin would be proud of:

Genuinely, that play was silly. Hofer went down for the shot, but it ended up whistling over his shoulder (as opposed to straight into the crowd, which is where most mortal people would send a puck like that) and into the net to give Dallas a lead on one of their first chances since the opening goal.

Again, though, the Blues refused to sag. Cody Ceci slashed Dylan Holloway’s stick, and it turns out he knew what he was doing, because Holloway’s stick would end up scoring on the ensuing power play. A tie game, once again, with the Stars giving up a lot of ice time and possession to the Blues.

What’s the worst kind of goal to give up? That’s a hard question, because context is everything. A soft goal is a bummer, because you start to lose confidence in something only one player can control, which is to say goaltending. A bad bounce off your own player is also stinky, because it feels like fate is against you. And of course, a dominant play like McDavid had on Heiskanen in Game 7 last year is a rough one to absorb.

But generally speaking, a goal in the final seconds of a period just stinks to high heaven, every time. All you want to do is get to the room and regroup, hoping to continue pushing this team around after grabbing a lead of your own.

But instead, Wyatt Johnston somehow goes from sitting at the blue line without the puck with six seconds remaining here…

…to playing give-and-go with Roope Hintz all the way ‘round the rosies until he gets this shot five seconds later:

I can’t imagine Jim Montgomery was terribly pleased with the penalty kill after this first period. And indeed, he would make a change, albeit the only big one a coach can really make, by pulling his goalie in favor of Canadian Hero Jordan Binnington. How would it go?

Yeah, that’s about right.

I’m sure you, dear reader, know this already: but the chant was a bit of Dallas vengeance, somewhat on behalf of USA goalie Jake Oettinger (but mostly on behalf of aggrieved US hockey fans). It was a fun moment.

Anyway, the point of all this is: Binnington would go on to allow two power play goals of his own. But those would come after he allowed a (comparatively rare) 5-on-5 goal by Dallas on the first shot he faced, from Roope Hintz.

To really rub salt in the wound for Binnington, the Blues would score a (wacky) goal in the second to close the gap to 4-3, meaning that the eventual loss would now be on Binnington’s ledger, rather than Hofer’s. This is all cumulative payback for the 2019 playoffs, and rightly so.

Still, the Blues would lay a lot of rubber on net, and Jake Oettinger had a ton of work to do. After the game, Oettinger said he probably would prefer to get a lot of shots from everywhere rather than relatively few shots from high-danger areas, as Dallas generated. And given the 6-3 result, can you blame him?

Anyway, Lyubushkin was able to return for the second period after being termed “questionable to return” during the intermission, so that boost was big for the team. But the biggest boost came on the power play, where Wyatt Johnston would score his third hat trick, and his second on one of his parents’ birthdays, and his first at home. How did he do it? Well, take a look at a chart that made me guffaw:

Yes, you’re reading that right: Dallas had only six shots attemps on four power plays. Five of those attempts were on net. Four of those attempts went into the net, which is, and I am estimating here, Very Very Very Very good.

After the game, DeBoer acknowledged that you have to win all kinds of games. Mason Marchment said Oettinger kept them in the game early when they weren’t stifling the Blues nearly enough. And Wyatt Johnston? He was just humble and happy, as you’d expect.

Cam Fowler hit a post in the third, and Jordan Kyrou took two penalties that ended like the other two penalties did. The Stars got outshot 9-5 in the final frame, but they held St. Louis to single digits for the first time, and that was more than enough to get the horses back into the barn.

As for the Wyatt Johnston power play goals, I’m barely going to spend any time on them, because you should just go watch them all. All of them involved great passing—Hintz managed “only” three assists in this one after his four assists on Friday—but they also involved Johnston getting an opportunity and converting it, each time.

Do we realize how insane it is that Johnston has three hat tricks and is only 21 years old? Mike Modano didn’t get his third hat trick until 1996. Tyler Seguin got his third hat trick while 21 years old, but that was after joining a Lindy Ruff team and being a 2nd-overall draft pick who had won a Stanley Cup two years prior.

Johnston is just unreal. This game was very real, unfortunately for St. Louis. And the Stars, despite icing a shell of the blue line they’re hoping to have for the playoffs, are continuing to pick up points with just 22 games left to go.

They don’t ask how, they ask how many. But when you score this many, sometimes it’s fun to talk about how, anyway.

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Stars Lineup

The Stars began the game with this lineup, and they stuck with it once Lyubushkin returned for the second period.

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

Harley-Lyubushkin
Lindell-Ceci
Smith-Dumba

Oettinger

Colin Blackwell deserves a game here soon, but the fourth line was good tonight, including one really great shift in the third period where Bourque got into it with Oskar Sundqvist behind the play after the Stars hemmed the Blues’ third defense pairing (Suter/Leddy) into the defensive zone for nearly two minutes. So, who knows when Blackwell will draw in?

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Quick Notes

• There were a lot of Blues fans in the building, as heard during a fairly loud “BLUUUUUES” at the end of the national anthem and after the first two Blues goals. Many of them were not there at the end of the night.

• Roope Hintz has seven assists in his past two games. I am not going to look up where that ranks in History, but I believe it to be Very Very Very Very Good.

• The second power play unit scoring a goal was huge, especially as it came on the penalty for the Faksa board on Lyubushkin. Just as Robertson scored two goals during the three-minutes of major penalty time to Cizikas, this was a cathartic conversion.

• Mikael Granlund got some time on the penalty kill tonight. He’s gotten some of that duty in a couple of the last few games, and tonight in particular, he took Hintz’s spot when the Stars’ number one center went to the box in the second period. It’s valuable to have that flexibility, and the Stars love it.

• How important has the acquisition of Cody Ceci been, given the defensive depth issues the Stars have encountered recently? Nobody is saying he’s a top-pairing solution (and he isn’t), but he’s an NHL defenseman, and the Stars have ended up needing any of those they can find. He’s had some very big games for them in a short time. That’s how you get through a long season, and a long playoff run. Hopefully.

• Jake Oettinger had a chance to shoot at the empty net when the Blues pulled Binnington down 6-3 with a few minutes left, but he instead chose not to (and obviously played the puck through the no-no triangle without getting penalized). Here are how three people described that moment:

  • Pete DeBoer says he heard the crowd cheering, but he then laughed and said he was probably the only one in the building yelling “No.” Ah, coaches.

  • Mason Marchment said he was “mad” at his good friend Oettinger for not shooting on the empty net, because Oettinger had said he would attempt it previously. Marchment is one of the people whose image is drawn on Oettinger’s mask, and I know of at least one instance where Marchment has told Oettinger that his face made a save after the game.

  • Oettinger smiled and jokingly blamed his teammates for not telling him how much time he had to shoot. You know the vibes after a game are good when everyone can talk about a goalie’s missed opportunity while having this much fun with it.