Game 62 AfterThoughts: Heavyweight Tilt Ends with Heavy Hearts

Roope Hintz had to be helped off the ice midway through an intense game

Song of the Game

In my darkness I remember
Momma's words reoccur to me
"Surrender to the good Lord
And he'll wipe your slate clean"

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What started as a fast-paced, heavy-hitting tilt between the two best teams in the league ended as a crushing shootout loss on home ice.

Justin Hryckowian said after the game that it was one of the most intense games he’s played in the NHL, and you could see that intensity all throughout the game. From a wild, five-goal first period to a last-minute, game-tying goal at the end of regulation, you got repeated reminders that both teams wanted this one more than they’ve wanted most games this year.

“I thought it was a heavyweight battle, to be honest with you,” Glen Gulutzan said afterwards.

And indeed, it was. Like such a fight, this game had painful moments, questions about calls and non-calls, and outstanding individual moments by both sides. Even though the result didn’t go Dallas’s way, their coach was keeping a proper perspective after the game.

“I liked us tonight. I liked us. We had a chance for an empty-netter, and we’d be having a different discussion right now,” Gulutzan said. “We didn’t get it. They got a late, tying goal, then it goes into the skills competition. I even thought 3-on-3, both sides had even chances, and you go to the shootout, it’s anybody’s ball game.”

That’s the cruel part of a loss like this. Dallas really was the better team for the majority of the game, but Colorado’s power play and 6-on-5 attack scored three of their four goals. And in the end, the Stars had to swallow the bitter pill of being on the other end of the type of game they themselves won in similar fashion at times earlier in the year.

Jake Oettinger had a couple of huge saves, but he also allowed four goals and went 0-for-2 in the shootout. Jamie Benn scored a big goal to put the Stars up by two in the second period, but he also missed an empty net that would have given them a win they felt they’d earned. Heroics were mixed with lapses, but on individual levels and as a whole, the Stars had a lot of good in this one.

“A lot of growth from the first game we played them, ‘til now,” Gulutzan said. “But that’s just a preview of what’s to come. There’s more of this to come.”

It’s true, too. In their October meeting, Colorado outchanced and outplayed Dallas, only to end up losing in a shootout. This time, Dallas was the team who walked away feeling like they deserved more. Hockey can be a painful sport sometimes, both physically and emotionally.

Roope Hintz was the biggest focal point in terms of peaks and valleys, as he made his long-awaited return to the lineup after coming back from Milan with a serious virus that put him down in weight, and the Stars’ lineup finally started looking deeper, with two more trade deadline additions preparing to debut on Sunday.

But after a frenzied first half of the game, Hintz suffered an injury after wrestling with Nathan MacKinnon in the corner of the rink away from the play, and clouds covered the sun once again. Hintz fell awkwardly with his legs splayed out, and I’m guessing that what you think of MacKinnon’s part of the play (captured only by distant, grainy video footage) is probably a bit of a Rorschach test.

MacKinnon appears to raise his right knee to try to escape from Hintz’s clutches, and that appears to coincide with Hintz’s right leg flying up, which leads to his left leg bending awkwardly as he falls. But what are you supposed to do with images like this when it comes to proving a point one way or the other?

Ultimately, the path of least resistance when it comes to assessing blame here will probably be to say Hintz bears a measure of responsibility for tying up MacKinnon to begin with, so I wouldn’t expect any kind of discipline on the play, given the DoPS history on such incidents. Certainly the Stars (and the NHL) will be looking at it, but without higher quality video angles that I have yet to hear about existing, it’s likely going to be tough for anyone to draw conclusions that don’t fall along party lines.

None of the players or Gulutzan said they got a good look at the play or a replay of it, and Gulutzan said they don’t have any update on the play yet.

“We won't know for a day or two here,” Gulutzan said. “So we’ll get him looked at, and hopefully it's not too long.”

Hopefully is the right word, because if Hintz winds up missing significant time, the fact that his injury happened less than half a day after the trade deadline—before which the Stars could have theoretically procured some measure of reinforcements— is yet another cruel blow among many in this one.

“It’s tough,” Jamie Benn said after the game. “We’ve been without him since the Olympic break here, so it was nice to have him back. Just a tough break, so we’ll have to manage without him again. We’ll see how he is.”

For a good stretch of time, the Stars looked like they were going to extend their franchise-best winning streak with a statement win over the best team in hockey, a victory won despite losing their top center and missing Mikko Rantanen and Tyler Seguin. It would have been such a wonderful, vindicating moment for a team that has proven themselves to be so much more than they looked to be two months ago.

Instead, they let a two-goal lead slip away twice, and Colorado equaled Dallas’s shootout win in the second game of the year with a skill competition victory of their own. But Gulutzan emphasized after the game that, in spite of the result, there’s a lot of good to take away from this one.

“I learned we’re right there,” said the Stars coach. “They’re obviously the top team in the league, and I thought we were right there with them, toe-to-toe. That was a great hockey game, and I did learn a lot about our group here. We battled. We were resilient, and we just didn’t get the outcome we wanted, certainly. But a lot of growth from October to now.”

If the Stars can shake off a draining, emotional loss like this one, then that growth will be more apparent than ever.

“We know who we are, and what we can do,” Benn said. “We’re a confident group, and it’s one game, like I said. The game could’ve been over, but you give ‘em another chance, and they come down and score, and that’s that. It’s two great teams going at it, and I think we got ‘em two more times, so it’s gonna be fun to play ‘em again.”

Tough as the loss was, the Stars really did make a statement tonight. Despite being shorthanded, they outplayed the best team in the NHL for the majority of the game. And the Stars clearly recognized that after the game.

“You guys know they got great players over there,” Gulutzan said of Colorado. “We got great players on our bench. I thought lots of our role players played very good games, too. Our D played solid. We didn’t give much—probably the lowest chance output they’ve gotten in a long time. Yeah, there’s going to be more to come. Got ‘em two more times.”

Per Natural Stat Trick, Gulutzan happens to be exactly right: Colorado’s 5v5 scoring chances and high-danger shot attempts were both season lows for them. Little wonder that the Stars only surrendered one 5-on-5 goal all night, considering they generated 12 high-danger shot attempts to Colorado’s 3, at evens.

The game isn’t only played at 5-on-5, which is a fact the Stars happily took advantage of for much of the first half of the season. Tonight, it was Colorado’s turn to benefit from playing with an extra man on the ice, and it was enough to get them past regulation.

Still, Dallas can take some real consolation in how they played, in this one. Gulutzan pointed to the team’s growth from their October contest against Colorado, when Jake Oettinger was incredible while the Stars weathered an onslaught and stole the game in the shootout.

This is where Scott Wedgewood deserves a mention, because when he replaced Mackenzie Blackwood after Benn made it 4-2 early in the second period, the Stars were on the cusp of running away with this one. Instead, Wedgewood came up with more than a few outstanding saves, and his shutout relief work enabled his team to pull a snatch-and-grab job in the final minute—something Stars fans saw Wedgewood do more than once in a Dallas sweater.

In multiple senses, the shoe was on the other foot this game. Turnabout may be fair play, but nobody said it was fun.

One other thing worth mentioning here is the officiating, which had a couple of suspect moments on both sides. Gulutzan was asked about the early interference penalty to Mavrik Bourque for his hit on Nicolas Roy, and he was pretty frank about his disagreement with it.

“Yeah, I was upset about that hit,” Gulutzan answered when asked about the call. “I mean, it’s an intense game. That’s a good hit. We’re gonna hit guys like that all day long. They’re hitting guys, we’re hitting guys. That, for me, wasn’t a penalty in this kind of game, and I don’t think it’s a penalty in this game.”

That penalty was immediately turned into a goal for Colorado late in the first, but Gulutzan went on to say that he didn’t view penalties as the deciding factor in this game.

“We got some calls,” Gulutzan said. “We had some power plays, they did. You know, you had a little bit of everything here tonight.”

Indeed, if Dallas scores just one more power play goal, the whole thing is different. They generated plenty of looks, and they proved that they really do deserve to be in the conversation with Colorado as teams in that elite tier of Cup contenders this season.

But losing a top center and letting what looked like the biggest win of the year slip away on a goal by a player Dallas bought out after he went a year without scoring a goal? Well, that’s a cruel, cruel way for even one game to end, let alone to wipe out a ten-game winning streak.

At least it was an entertaining game, though.

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The building was loud well before the puck was dropped, and this game had the feel of the big, divisional bout that it was, until the pace got derailed a tad by special teams.

After a good, pacey start, Oskar Bäck took a holding the stick penalty on an overzealous backcheck, and that ended up costing Dallas—though only after Hintz and Johnston got a shorthanded 2-on-1 rush that didn’t turn into anything.

Cale Makar then snapped a puck home from low in the circles off a nice pass, beating Oettinger’s blocker with Roope Hintz perhaps not helping his goalie’s sightline:

It was only Makar’s third power play goal all season (and only his second at 5-on-4), but it counted just the same, and Dallas was trailing early.

The Stars got their own power play shortly afterwards after some good offensive zone work that led Jack Drury to commit a holding foul, and Miro Heiskanen would put a puck on net that found its way in after two deflections:

Dallas’s momentum only built after that, and Nathan Bastian and Colin Blackwell created some sustained offensive zone pressure that allowed Dallas to outchange Colorado, and Wyatt Johnston and Jason Robertson went to work with some aggressively fancy passing to continue the shift.

Eventually, Heiskanen activated down low and got the puck to Johnston, who promptly made Zakhar Bardakov swing and miss before firing a puck through the aforementioned’s legs and into the top corner:

Barely halfway into the first period, we had a rollicking 2-1 hockey game on our hands. And perhaps it was the noise, or perhaps it was just the nature of a game between two great hockey teams, but Mackenzie Blackwood and Devon Toews appeared to get rattled a bit as a result, because they botched an exchange behind the net that Mavrik Bourque gladly fed to Hryckowian, who double (or maybe triple) clutched before putting into the open net to make it 3-1.

Hryckowian’s glory would be slightly diminished the next minute, when he was whistled for high-sticking on Cale Makar to put Colorado onto a late first period power play.

Oettinger made a couple of solid saves on the sequence, but Esa Lindell probably had the biggest play of the kill when he locked up Gabriel Landeskog on a back-door pass that rattled off some skates, but was kept from further danger by Lindell’s strength, willpower, and probably just generally positive demeanor. (There may be some narrative hyperbole in there somewhere.)

Unfortunately for Dallas, they had to kill a third penalty in the opening period after Mavrik Bourque also got a bit exuberant when laying a hit on New Av Nic Roy just a tick too much behind the play, drawing an interference call:

The rear official made the call, and he was watching the play the whole way. Roy was pretty irked about the hit afterward, too.

In any case, it’s not what you did, but what you do next. And the Stars did not kill the penalty, on account of Nathan MacKinnon one-timing a puck into oblivion with two seconds to go in the period.

In a bit of a role reversal from earlier in the year, the Stars were leading the Avs after the first frame, but Colorado’s power play was keeping them in the game.

Dallas wouldn’t take long to chase Blackwood in the second, however. After some great work in the neutral zone by Adam Erne to hold up play and get the puck to Bourque for a dump-in, Hryckowian bodied the 6-foot-3, 218-lb Josh Manson off the puck behind the net, then grabbed it one-handed and fed Jamie Benn in front, who was very happy to finish the chance:

That goal brought in Scott Wedgewood for Colorado, but the Dallas depth continued to keep the burgundy and blue on their heels, and Wedgewood got a very quick warmup on grade-A chances from Hryckowian and Sam Steel, which he found.

Colorado got a chance to tie it up right after that with their fourth power play of the game, when Sam Steel whacked Brent Burns’s stick just as he was flexing it to get nailed for slashing.

Dallas managed to kill that one off, however, and we crossed the halfway point of the game with the Stars’ one-goal lead intact.

That’s when disaster struck for Dallas and Roope Hintz.

The Stars’ centerman got tangled up with MacKinnon in the corner away from the play, and went down with a painful leg injury as the two wrestled a bit, and the end result was ugly.

Hintz was helped off the ice without putting any weight on his left leg, and a pall was cast over what had, to that point, been an extremely entertaining hockey game.

The Stars drew their second power play of the game when Josh Manson (who was having a tough night) got tagged for cross-checking on Lundkvist at the end of the period, and the Stars took 1:44 of 5v4 time into the final 20 minutes of the game.

Despite a couple of close calls at the netfront, Colorado and Scott Wedgewood killed this one, leaving 18 minutes of tense, one-goal hockey to be played. That lasted for about three minutes, until Brett Kulak high-sticked Hryckowian to put Colorado back on the kill.

Robertson tested his old pal Wedgewood with a quick backhand after dancing around Burns, but the shot whistled just high. Then with 24 seconds left in the penalty, Colorado put too many men out on the ice, and you can’t do that in hockey. Dallas got a brief 5-on-3, but they couldn’t convert it, and the residual 5-on-4 was similarly fruitless.

Colorado then got a gift of a chance when Nate Bastian was called for tripping after Cale Makar appeared to just toe pick.

Nevertheless, Dallas was on a big penalty kill with five minutes to go, and they only barely escaped. Oettinger came up with a big stop on Brock Nelson, and then Colin Blackwell’s stick broke on a shot block. But a strong Sam Steel play eventually cleared the puck, and it looked like the Stars were clear, only for Nichushkin to come back on the final entry and ring both posts with one shot just as Bastian got out of the box.

With 3:12 to go, the Stars were back to 5-on-5, and they still had their 4-3 lead, and Oettinger was playing sharp. Wedgewood was pulled with under two minutes to go, but the Stars quickly got a chance to seal things when Hryckowian and Benn came up the ice with numbers against an empty net—only for Benn to put a soft backhand off the outside of the net.

And that would really end up hurting a minute later, as Nichushkin tied things up through traffic with 13 seconds left in a really demoralizing moment for the home side.

Overtime arrived, and Colorado kept the puck for the first 90 seconds of it. It got exciting after that, though. Sam Steel made a trio of great plays to keep the Stars in possession, and then Heiskanen got two looks on Wedgewood all on his own, the first of which was stopped, and the second going wide.

Oettinger then came up with his save of the game on Toews:

And thus, the biggest game of the year to this point ended in the most anticlimactic way imaginable: A shootout.

The result was unfortunate for Dallas, as a bit too much of the game before it had been:

Robertson: Backhand, save
Nichushkin: Deke, goal
Duchene: Backhand, save
Nečas: Deke, goal

Dallas’s ten-game winning streak was snapped, and in fairly cruel fashion, too.

Lineups

Dallas rolled this:

Robertson-Hintz-Johnston
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Erne-Hryckowian-Bourque
Blackwell-Bäck-Bastian

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Lyubushkin

Oettinger

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Colorado rolled this:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Nečas
Colton-Nelson-Nichushkin
Kelly-Roy-Brindley
Bardakov-Drury-Kiviranta

Toews-Makar
Manson-Burns
Kulak-Malinski

Blackwood

After-AfterThoughts

• If you want to read about the courtroom crossfire happening as a result of respective motions by the Stars and Mavericks’ attorneys today, the Morning News has you covered.

• Jim Nill spoke to the media before the game for his usual post-deadline availability, which you can watch here.

  Some highlights of that presser include:

  • On Mikko Rantanen: "Hopefully he starts skating here in the next week to ten days. Then from there, we'll see how he comes along."

  • On Radek Faksa, Nill confirmed what we had begun to suspect: Faksa sustained a new, lower-body injury in Dallas while rehabbing from the upper-body injury he suffered at the Olympics. Faksa’s upper-body injury was nearly healed, but Faksa’s lower-body injury will keep him out until either right before the end of the season, or perhaps through all of it. They believe he will be able to return for the start of the playoffs.

    • Additionally, Faksa was seen using a knee scooter in the press box tonight. (No word on if Lian Bichsel passed his on to him.)

  • Tyler Seguin’s best-case return would have possibly been the Stanley Cup Final, but in the end, it was also a long shot for him to return from his ACL injury, and the Stars knew it pretty early on. Sam has the entire answer, which is nicely contained here:

    

  • Kyle Capobianco was not put on waivers yesterday in order to be assigned to the AHL for Calder Cup Playoffs eligibility, and Jim Nill said that decision was primarily because he had a pretty good sense that Capobianco would have been claimed if they had done so. It’s a bit of a small bummer for Texas, who won’t be able to get reinforcements from Dallas in the postseason, but it’s great for Capobianco to have increased his value as a player to that extent. He’ll be with the big club for the stretch run.

• It’s worth getting another look at Adam Erne’s play on the Stars’ fourth goal, I think:

  • The puck protection and smart reverse there to ensure the puck got north looked like a small good thing in the moment, but it led to a massive good thing shortly afterwards, when Benn scored.

• Gabriel Landeskog absorbed a hard slapshot from Cale Makar in an area that he would have preferred not to absorb one in.

• Justin Hryckowian played 20:22 in this game, and he also was one of the forwards put on the ice to start in overtime. “He played very well against some good players,” Gulutzan said.

• Miro Heiskanen, meanwhile, played 31:46 tonight, 3:03 of which came in overtime. He was outstanding in this game, and this loss had to hurt, given everything he put into it.

• Dallas will try to regroup on Sunday against Chicago after an emotional, taxing, and costly contest tonight. The Stars’ chances of catching Colorado have slipped from Slim to Very Slim now, but getting some new bodies in the lineup on Sunday should be a boost.