Game 62 AfterThoughts: Sheepish Smiles Are Smiles All the Same
There are some reasons to smile after this one
It’s okay to give a sheepish smile when the breaks go your way.
With 1:28 remaining in overtime, the Stars had three forwards on the ice. And much to their chagrin, those three forwards were forced to play defense. How did it go? It went like this:
Nazem Kadri found himself facing a net as open as a Buc-ee's on Memorial Day weekend, with nobody around to help.
And he promptly rang it off the post.
Now, why was Kadri so open?
“Yeah, I mean, Kadri did a nice job kinda holding me and jumping into the play there, and he got away with it, so he got a Grade-A [chance],” said Duchene. “Thank god he hit the post. I don’t know if I’ve been that tired in a game in a while. I think a lot of us were a little run down tonight, and didn’t have our best. But we found a way to get it done.”
Pete DeBoer said after the game that the Stars are running a bit short on offensive defensemen. And with Thomas Harley starting to get fatigued, and with he and Esa Lindell both beyond 25 minutes of ice time, his options were limited, so he went with Jason Robertson, Matt Duchene, and Roope Hintz for a shift.
And after Kadri hit a target far smaller than the gaping net in front of him, the Stars went the other way. And before long, the three forwards did what three top-caliber forwards do.
Tic.
Tac.
Toe.
Ballgame:
“We thought we’d roll the dice there,” DeBoer said afterwards of putting three forwards out together. “And we got away with it. They hit the post just before [Robertson scored], so if that goes in, we’re probably having a different conversation.”
Just to add a little frosting on the heartbreak cupcake for Calgary, Robertson barely got anything on the shot (you can kind of see it falling off his tape above). But it didn’t matter because he got the puck on net, and the puck trickled underneath Dan Vladar like the first bowling ball you ever tried to roll, and the goaltender reflexively did his best impression of a certain SNL commercial:
Sometimes, you’re just livin’ right.
Just like Tuesday’s win against New Jersey, when Harley scored a buzzer-beater after the team had blown a 3-1 lead in the third period to win in regulation, this game was also a departure from their form earlier in the season, when they found ways to lose.
In fact, go back just a bit to a few minutes left in the third period of a tie game, when Thomas Harley turned the puck over when breaking out across the blue line, giving up a 2-on-1 with just Ilya Lyubushkin back. In past games, that puck gets stuffed home for a heartbreaking loss.
But these days? You must not have met Goalscoring Wonder Ilya Lyubushkin, my friend. Because he stopped that 2-on-1 dead in its tracks, and the Stars lived to fight another day.
Dallas was 1-15-1 this season when trailing after two periods. Now they are 2-15-1, but the way the hope around this team is brimming right now, it feels like they’re the favorite no matter what the score, most nights.
Jason Robertson only scored seven goals in his first 33 games of the year. Right now, he’s gotten so hot that he’s scored seven goals in his last six games, and he’s now leading the Stars in both goals and points.
They say turnabout is fair play, but the Stars’ turnaround in scoring has felt distinctly unfair, to their unfortunate opponents. Especially if you’re a team like New Jersey or Calgary, who really did give everything they had against a Stars team that wasn’t at their best in the last two games, only for both of those squads to walk away without two points.
Right now, the Stars are, say it with me folks, finding ways to win. Even if that means they’ve been winning them in a fashion equivalent to digging in the couch cushions and finding fifty dollar bills. Fifty bucks ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.
Calgary came into the game fighting for their playoff life, tied with Vancouver for eighth in the West in a season when nobody really expected much from them.
Tonight, Calgary probably feared, in their secret hearts, that they would take a loss. After all, they were playing backup goaltender Dan Vladar against the most fearsome offense of the last couple months that also boasted a power play that recently went 4-for-4 on the job just to see if they could. (They could.)
Calgary, meanwhile, came into the game as the lowest-scoring team in the NHL with the 27th-ranked penalty kill in the league. It wasn’t a fair fight, on paper.
But give them credit: the Flames, complete with old friend Joel Hanley on their second defense pair, forced the Stars to come from behind for most of the night, even jumping out to a 2-0 lead for a glorious minute and a half. Dallas looked tired—Duchene confirmed after the game that a lot of players were running low on energy in this one—and they played tired, with even the fearsome Lian Bichsel getting walked by Joel Farabee for the game’s first goal.
And when Calgary scored a second goal on some less-than-maximum defensive work by Dallas around the crease, it looked like it was going to be one of those nights from the first half of the season. But it turns out, “those nights” really are turning into a thing of the past.
One such reason that’s the case, and that Calgary’s two-goal lead only lasted ninety seconds, was the reason so many games have gone the Stars’ way all year: Wyatt Johnston.
Just as Robertson has been his old self (or even a new one altogether) since Christmas, so also has Johnston been the player DeBoer keeps going back to. And man, why wouldn’t you keep going back to him, when he keeps delivering the way he has been? He can play in every situation, and he can deliver in every situation. DeBoer has loved him since training camp of 2022, and the teenager-turned-21-year-old has not lost DeBoer’s trust yet. That’s a remarkable, remarkable, thing.
Tonight, the Stars’ top three forwards in ice time were, yes, Johnston (3rd), Robertson (2nd), and…I don’t think you’ll guess the first one. Did you guess it? I don’t think you did!
It’s Mikael Granlund, who was moved to the top line to start the game. In fact, let’s talk about lines.
The Stars began the game with this lineup:
Robertson-Hintz-Granlund
Marchment-Duchene-Bourque
Benn-Johnston-Dadonov
Bäck-Steel-Stankoven
Lindell-Ceci
Harley-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-Dumba
Oettinger
We talked about this before the game, but it makes sense for Dallas to explore Granlund’s potential chemistry with Hintz and Robertson, as it makes equivalent sense to put Seguin back with Duchene and Marchment whenever he’s back to game readiness, even if that’s not until Game 1 of the playoffs.
As far as that chemistry goes, however, early returns weren’t terribly positive, as the combos didn’t make it through the game. The top-nine were shuffled halfway through the second to make these trios:
Robertson-Hintz-Johnston
Benn-Duchene-Granlund
Marchment-Bourque-Dadonov
DeBoer said after the game that the shuffling gave the team a little bit of a spark, but not a huge one. It was enough to get the tying goal, but not much more than that.
And given that the team’s energy as a whole wasn’t where it’s been on their better nights, perhaps this game can’t be used as a referendum on Granlund’s fit with Robertson and Hintz. The good news is that there’s a whole lot of time in Canada for the Stars to do some more experimentation.
The early part of the game should have told us, had we all been listening, that this wouldn’t be a six-goal performance from Dallas.
The first great chance in this game came when Wyatt Johnston pulled up at the far blue line with the puck and found Evgenii Dadonov streaking down the middle of the ice, giving him a breakaway that Vladar stopped clean.
The trio generated a couple more looks on that same shift, but Dadonov got a bit handcuffed on a great feed at the front, too.
After that, things went the other direction for a bit. Joel Farabee got 1-on-1 with Lian Bichsel, and Farabee pulled an NHL deke on a rookie defenseman that left Bichsel flailing, and Farbee all alone, after which he ripped the puck past Oettinger’s blocker for a beautiful goal.
In watching the play, you can see Bichsel put his left knee down, so I think he was anticipating a shot from Farabee and trying to block it, only for Farabee to drag it back around him and leave him behind.
DeBoer said after the game that it’s part of the learning process, and he’s not worried. Bichsel also rebounded well from the moment, to his great credit. As did the team, of course.
Lian Bichsel redeemed himself a couple minutes later with a crucial backcheck on Farabee, who got behind the Stars during a line change, only for Bichsel’s poke check to save Oettinger’s bacon at the last minute.
The Stars’ new-look top line got a chance seven minutes in, when Granlund fed Robertson with a slick feed to send him in 2-on-1 with Hintz. But Robertson went for the shot, and it was blocked harmlessly over the net.
Granlund would get his best chance at a goal with Dallas so far courtesy of a fantastic shift by the fourth line, who hemmed the Flames’ own fourth line in the Calgary zone for two minutes, outchanging them in the process. But Robertson’s perfect cross to Granlund here was one-timed just wide of the net:
Thomas Harley sent a puck over the glass a bit later on, and the Stars had to weather two minutes of the Calgary power play. But Jake Oettinger only had one really quality chance to deal with, and he came across well on a Nazem Kadri one-timer along the ice, keeping things closed on the way over—doing what Vladar wouldn’t be able to do against Robertson in overtime.
Lian Bichsel further showed his confidence wasn’t shaken after the Farabee goal when he led a rush into the zone late in the first period, streaking to the net. The feed didn’t make it to him, but it result in a prolonged offensive zone sequence that resulted in a trip on Wyatt Johnston to send Dallas to the power play with a chance to tie things up before the first intermission. It’s good to see confident defensemen.
The first unit couldn’t get anything together in the offensive zone, but the second unit at least managed a net-front chance that Vladar scooped out of the air with his glove. Otherwise, it was a fairly tame time on the job for Dallas, and Calgary took its 1-0 lead into the break.
That would be the only power play Dallas would get.
The second period had a similarly ignominious start, as Mikael Backlund scored off a scramble on the doorstep that Dallas just didn’t really defend as desperately as they needed to. The puck eventually slid to Backlund, and probably, you’d like to see Matt Duchene doing just a bit more on the left side of your angle to prevent Backlund from having a free shot here.
But that goal would wake the Stars up a bit, and they would end up punching right back thanks to—would you believe it?—Wyatt Johnston.
First, Jamie Benn cut to the middle of the ice and laid the puck back up for Matt Dumba, who then fired a long shot on Vladar that he easily saved, but with a rebound too easily converted, for someone with the abilities of Johnston, who easily put this puck right back into the net over Vladar’s blocker to make it 2-1:
The Flames’ bench was not happy, as Dumba came on to play the puck before it looked like the Stars had completed a line change, but the linesmen endured the verbal darts from Ryan Huksa & Co., and the goal stood. 2-1 Stars. (How much longer before coaches can challenge for Too Many Men to take more goals away, do you think?)
Defensemen were going to the net on both teams, with Matt Dumba getting a chance to do his best Joe Pavleski impression on a tip attempt on the doorstep that would have been an all-timer of a highlight had it gone in. That was followed by Rasmus Andersson attempting to dig a puck out of Jake Oettinger’s arms, only for Lian Bichsel to register his objections in such a way that Andersson flew into the net, displacing it entirely. Strong arguments make strong impressions.
The second period was largely mundane after that, with the biggest bone of contention being an offside call on Dallas where Johnston’s skate lingered on the ice in the offensive zone just a tick too long as Duchene attempted to enter. And do you think we’re actually gonna talk more about a random offside call?
Yes.
Granlund hopped on the ice and did a frog squat in order to get onside, and you could see the injustice written on his face when the linesman blew the play dead. But afterward, the linesman pointed at Johnston to indicate that the offside had been committed by the offending skate of the most inoffensive player on the Dallas roster (not counting Esa Lindell).
Oh, and because this is Stars Thoughts, where [motto still in focus group development], let’s dig back a bit. This sequence reminded me the old Antoine Roussel moment from the playoffs a while back, where he leapt into the bench to avoid just such a scenario:
We have now spent entirely too much time talking about an offside call that didn’t mean anything. By which I mean, “the exact amount of time I wanted to spend.” Thank you for subscribing.
Jason Robertson had a dangerous chance in the offensive zone late in the second, but he fired it off Vladar’s left pad, and things got worse shortly after, when Hintz got called for hooking Yegor Sharangovich in the neutral zone to put Dallas on its second penalty kill of the night.
They got better though, because Dallas killed this one off with little effort. They even got themselves a good shorthanded rush with Johnston and Benn, only for Johnston to make a pass nobody in the crowd wanted him to make, given how hot he’s been lately. The pass didn’t get through, the the second period ended with a one-goal deficit still in place. The lesson here is simple, so allow me to quote a famous goal-scorer:
“Shoot. Always shoot.”
-Ilya Lyubushkin
Matt Dumba hit a post early in the third off some Stars pressure that mounted as the period went on. Calgary racked up a few icings in the first five minutes as shots on goal grew to 6-0 through the first eight minutes of the period. Calgary was preparing to park the bus, and Dallas had to prove they could cut the brake lines. (Pretend the bus is not filled with people you care about, in this scenario.)
And indeed, Jason Robertson proved he could do just that (the pushing, not the brake line cutting). The Stars’ top line gained the zone after a bit of a goofy lob pass by Esa Lindell that Johnston brought down right at the blue line, and the reunited top dogs set up Robertson for a shot from the top of the faceoff circle that, in all honesty, probably doesn’t get through Dustin Wolf.
Vladar might not have tracked the puck well, as you’d really expect him to be able to take care of a shot from that distance. But then again, Jason Robertson is leading the Stars in scoring (after this point) for a reason, and that reason is he is good at scoring. So who knows what Wolf would have done? Not Vladar, certainly.
Things got cagey from there, and it looked like both teams would nurse the tie to overtime.
That’s when a Thomas Harley mistake skating the puck out into the neutral zone nearly gave Calgary a chance to pounce with just four minutes left, when Harley lost the puck in a bad spot.
But once again, Ilya Lyubushkin picked up his defense partner, and he blocked the subsequent 2-on-1 pass. Jake Oettinger swallowed the eventual shot from distance to allow the Stars to catch their breath.
That was the scariest moment for Dallas in a period where Calgary only mustered there shots on goal, and the time ticked away, with the crowd booing the Flames when they thought about running out the final 20 seconds by just holding the puck behind their net. But the booing moved them along, and things went to overtime as amicably as you could expect.
As for overtime, let’s just hit the highlights:
A clutch sweep check from Oettinger saved the Stars’ bacon early, as a long shift for the first trio (Duchene, Harley, Granlund) was turning into trouble after Calgary was able to outchange them. but Oettinger disrupted Calgary’s possession at the most crucial of times, and that gave Dallas a chance to reset.
Wyatt Johnston made a great play to rip the puck away near the corner and stickhandle to the front of the net. But he couldn’t bury it past Vladar’s left pad, and the game went on.
Mavrik Bourque got a nice look after an equally nice Benn cross, but he double-clutched, and his eventual shot was blocked before it got to the net.
That’s when DeBoer put out the three forwards. And that’s when Duchene said Nazem Kadri was holding him down the ice, but wasn’t called for it. And indeed, Kadri was the one who made it back up the ice on the rush first, and got the chance to end the game, only to hit a post next to an empty net.
Was it fate? Karma? Bad oatmeal in Calgary’s breakfast smoothies? The world will never know. But personally, I choose to believe that Duchene is a very kind person. And kindness, while being its own reward, is also an investment. And sometimes, that return on investment comes a lot more quickly than you expect.
The Stars went 4-0-0 on their homestand. They now have just 20 games to play, and 84 points banked.
That’s a great reason to smile, sheepishly or otherwise.
"In fact, let’s talk about lines." Somewhere, Sean Shapiro is rolling his eyes