Game 63 AfterThoughts: New Scorers, Old Ghosts, All-Too-Familiar Injury

Pete DeBoer called it a "pond hockey game," and he's not wrong

Mikko Rantanen is every bit as wonderful as advertised. He’s an elite puckhandler who can skate like the wind, and he’s a great passer who can make elite connections and beautiful setups, and he got an assist on the Stars’ first goal after starting on the top power play unit.

Oh, he can also fire a lethal one-timer, as evidenced by his goal in his first game as a Dallas Star. In other words, he looked every bit like the sort of player you’d give $12 million a year to play hockey for your club.

Unfortunately, he had to show that excellence in the face of a whole lot of adversity, much of which seemed targeted at Rantanen’s countrymen in particular, as he and his Finnish brethren took the worst of the bad bounces in this one. And that’s not even counting the bounces and mistakes that got the Stars to a 5-1 deficit after 40 minutes—though they would battle back to make a game of it in the third period, eventually falling by 5-4 with Edmonton hanging on for dear life.

Let’s start with the human beings who got hurt, though. Rantanen got hit hard a couple of times—he’ll soon get used to being the primary target for the other team—but it was Esa Lindell and Roope Hintz who had the scariest moments, with both of them suffering puck injuries that got play whistled down.

And this all comes with another Finn, Miro Heiskanen, undergoing a long recovery from a knee surgery after the Mark Stone “what are you doing?” collision.

Lindell, for his part, took a hard shot to the side of his knee, and he left the ice in obvious agony. Somehow, Lindell was back before long and ended up playing over 21 minutes in this one. We’ll see how his knee looks tomorrow after it surely gets a nice purplish bruise tonight, but his return was a relief after the initial play.

Hintz, however, left in even more concerning circumstances after a shot ramped off his outstretched stick and right into his face.

We’ve seen far, far too many injuries to players’ faces this year in Dallas, with Mason Marchment’s “shattered” nose and face being the most serious thus far. Marchment had to have his face pieced together, and he missed a month after the surgery. He’ll be wearing a face shield for a while yet this season, from what he told me a couple weeks ago.

Hintz’s injury is less certain. Other players have taken pucks to the face that just required some stitches and nothing more, but the fact that Hintz couldn’t return to the game suggested the injury was more serious than mere stitches, which Pete Deboer confirmed afterwards.

“He’s at the hospital I think right now, getting some tests,” DeBoer said. “The initial reaction was, everyone’s optimistic that it’s not ‘serious serious,’ but we won’t know until we get testing.”

If Hintz isn’t too hurt, the Stars will be grateful, though gratitude isn’t exactly the emotion that springs to mind after watching the Stars get badly outplayed by the team that knocked them out of the playoffs last year.

This was a “pond hockey game,” in DeBoer’s words after the game. That’s code for, “we were getting chances and giving up chances, and never really controlling the neutral zone.” Also, it’s code for, “that was bad.” Or it is possible I just saw Windtalkers once and I don’t really know how codes work.

Mikko Rantanen pointed to the breakaways and 2-on-1s that Dallas surrendered as the culprit for the large deficit, and it’s hard to argue with him. Edmonton came out like a team desperate to right a 2-6-0 ship in their last eight games, while Dallas looked like a team that had been running over opponents even when they hadn’t brought their best game, most nights, and the Oilers caught them napping.

The first shift of the game was a warning to Dallas they took far too long to heed. Edmonton was getting great chances repeatedly, and while Dallas was getting their own looks, only Edmonton was capitalizing. Given how Dallas has been on the other side of that (like against New Jersey), maybe this is just karma. That doesn’t make it fun to watch, though.

Jake Oettinger drew the ire from fans On The Internet, as goalies usually do when your team is giving up goals. I think it’s fair to say Oettinger didn’t have his best night, but it’s also fair to say that you can’t keep giving looks to Connor McDavid and Zach Hyman and expect no harm to come of it. Oettinger wasn’t the reason Dallas lost, but he also wasn’t the reason they were able to come back.

One more save from him on the Hyman or McDavid breakaways, and maybe Dallas heads to overtime in this one. I’d like to see Oettinger stop that Hyman shot, personally. But then, how many goalies have tried to stop those two players over the last few years and said the same thing? Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that the other guys did better. Those are two pretty great guys, after all. It’s not like Oettinger was giving up soft goals from distance—he gave up two breakaway goals, a tap-in behind him after McDavid dangled him off his post, a one-timer that never should have been allowed, and a blocked 2-on-1 pass that bounced perfectly for Connor Brown.

He gave up five goals, but give the shanked Brett Kulak shot, the Stars’ skaters probably earned five goals against, regardless. Oettinger didn’t step up in a key moment, though, and that’s one of the reasons they lost by one goal.

Another such a reason was Ilya Lyubsuhkin, who got victimized by McDavid on a one-on-one (who among us…), then made a rough turnover in the second period to give up a 2-on-1 that eventually became the game-winning goal. Harley and Lyubushkin wound up -3 on the night, but again, if Lyubushkin cleans up just one of those mistakes, maybe it’s a different hockey game. Ah well.

It’s dangerous to use a game like this as a referendum on anyone or anything except Mikko Rantanen, in my book. (The referendum: He is Great At Hockey.) This was a weird one, as games in Edmonton for Dallas so often have been, over the last few decades. It would’ve been nice to see this one get just one goal weirder at the end, though. (I’m still waiting on the Patrik Stefan karmic reversal.) You can’t always control everything in this city.

What Dallas could control, they didn’t do all that well with, either. I think you want to see a bigger response to the second hit on Rantanen than just mild retaliation from Oskar Bäck (though good on him for doing something). Then again, we always decry players fighting over clean hits, and that Jake Walman hit on Rantanen at the blue line was a clean as it gets, albeit thundering as well. But Rantanen popped up and got back into the play before things really got going, so nothing more happened in the moment. I’m sure the team will talk about it, but the fact that neither Benn nor anyone else went after Walman for the remainder of the game suggests the Stars had bigger fish to fry. If it doesn’t bother Rantanen, then it doesn’t bother me.

Speaking of the captain, Jamie Benn had one of those nights where he made a couple of delay moves near the goal to try to set up a perfect pass, but they didn’t turn into anything on the score sheet…until his backhand in the third period 11 seconds after another goal. Sometimes, I miss the Jamie Benn who was confidently ripping snap shots in those situations rather than looking for passes, but Benn also scored a goal tonight in a game the Stars nearly reclaimed after putting it on waivers after two periods. Maybe he’s playing chess while we’re all putting together the pieces for Mousetrap.

By the way, the Stars went 2-for-3 on the power play, while Edmonton never got a single chance on the job. Rantanen had a goal and an assist on the top power play unit tonight, with the goal coming with Duchene back in the group for Hintz, after moving down to the second unit initially.

Initially, I was surprised Duchene was moved down, but when you watch Rantanen, you can’t imagine him playing anywhere else. He’s just that good, and early returns suggest Steve Spott knows more about the power play that we do.

You wanted to see some further heroics from Rantanen in the final few minutes, but alas, it wasn’t to be. I’m curious to see how teams that aren’t Edmonton adjust to playing Dallas with Rantanen in the mix. Tonight, the Duchene line with Granlund and Marchment got some really nice looks of their own, and that’s the general idea, when everyone’s healthy. Dallas is a matchup nightmare with Robertson and Rantanen on one line, Duchene and Granlund on another, and Wyatt Johnston just waiting to pounce against whatever you roll over the boards for the third shift in a row.

If I’m an opposing coach, though, I’m sending out my best guys against number 96. Because if he can look this good in a game this bad, I can only imagine the good times that await the Stars when things are clicking—for years to come.

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The Stars began the game with this lineup:

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

Harley-Lyubushkin
Lindell-Ceci
Bichsel-Dumba

Oettinger

Colin Blackwell and Brendan Smith were the healthy scratches again. If Hintz can’t go in Vancouver, Blackwell will finally get back into the lineup, but we’ll have to wait and see.

One note on Smith: With Dumba having scored, Smith is now the only active Dallas Stars player without a goal. Personally, I’m rooting for him to get one before the end of the year.

After things deteriorated in the second period, lines had to be shuffled out of necessity, but it’s not worth digging into those for any real answers for the future.

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As for the Oilers, Edmonton came into the game on a 2-6-0 skid, including four straight losses coming out of the Four Nations break.

John Klingberg was out with an undisclosed injury, which was unfortunate. He’s played 10 games for Edmonton in his comeback tour, with one goal and three assists to his name so far. You’d like to see him get his career back on track, but he’ll need to keep playing games to do that.

Jake Walman, for whom Edmonton paid a conditional first-round pick to acquire before the trade deadline, started the game next to Darnell Nurse. Walman, like Rantanen, is wearing number 96, making Walman the fifth Oilers player with a sweater number in the nineties. Bunch of iconoclasts up there in Alberta, I tells ya.

Walman, however, played like he was born to be an Oiler, playing over 24 minutes, registering 3 shots on goal, and finishing +3 with an assist. It continues to be mind-boggling that Steve Yzerman paid a second-round pick to ship Walman out of Detroit, but then, maybe he asks a bunch of questions during the season finale of a Netflix series he’s never seen, or something. There’s obviously more to the story than the hockey, there, but as far as the hockey went tonight, Walman was fantastic.

First Period

The teams traded chances early in this one. Mikko Rantanen set up Thomas Harley for a quality chance from the slot just a minute in, but Harley tried to go back against the grain and missed the net. That also came after the Oilers gave Jake Oettinger an early scare on the very first shift of the game, with a hot cross that rattled around his doorstep before Oettinger found it.

Edmonton generated another scary moment after a rough exchange between Oettinger and Harley behind the net, which led to this chance, which Brett Kulak somehow scooped just over a wide-open net.

Leon Draisaitl took a slashing penalty in the offensive zone, which led to the Stars’ new power play:

Harley
Johnston-Robertson-Rantanen
Hintz

That power play promptly went 100%, as a Rantanen feed to the front of the net (after an extended set by the first unit) got nutmegged home by Wyatt Johnston, giving Rantanen his first point as a Dallas Star:

The lead wouldn’t last long, however, because the Stars are playing a game in Edmonton and those are never boring contests. Connor McDavid was the one to create a one-footer for Zach Hyman, as the NHL’s best player pulled everyone including Oettinger out of position, then tucked the puck onto the goal line, where Hyman had gotten behind Cody Ceci and Esa Lindell. We were tied back up.

Mikael Granlund got a beautiful pass on the backdoor that he just wasn’t able to grab the handle of, and Razor remarked that the game could have been 4-4 to that point, which, yes. It reminded me of how the playoffs felt at times, when Dallas seemed to be generating a lot of chances without result.

But the Oilers would get a second result when Walman told Hyman to run a post route, and the defender flipped a two-line pass that would have been blown down before 2005. Why did we ever change the rules, folks.

Hyman took the puck in on Oettinger and made a strong move to his backhand that the goalie seemed ready for with a solid push across. But Hyman did not score 54 goals by accident last year, and he lifted a backhand that just did manage to leak past Oettinger’s right arm and trickle into the back of the net to make it 2-1, Edmonton.

Rantanen was clearly in “first impressions are everything” mode—a mentality which extended to his checking, as he outmuscled Leon Draisaitl on a breakout for what would probably be called a penalty, were he not just that big, and thus, that capable of an ostensibly legal body check that only kind of looked like he dragged Draisaitl down afterward (though Draisaitl may have grabbed him too, the more I look at it).

Dallas got a few more good chances from there, with both Lindell and Harley getting pretty good wristers on Stuart Skinner from the circles, but the ghosts of last spring began to haunt the Stars’ shooters again, and none of them could beat Skinner before Viktor Arvidsson extended the lead to 3-1 with a pretty one-timer at 5-on-5. But let’s go back to the zone entry that preceded it:

You can see all five Stars staring at the puck here as Draisaitl enters with the puck along the wall. He’ll take it low before Lindell gets to him, and Draisaitl is able to feed it back up high to Evan Bouchard, beating Jamie Benn with the pass along the wall.

Benn probably needs to stay a bit higher along the wall here in order to prevent that pass, but he and Dadonov are also at the end of their shift, so the legs are probably a bit heavy. Lindell also probably wants to close on Draisaitl more quickly than he does, but there’s a reason he won the Hart Trophy a few years ago and has scored over 90(!) points already this year: he’s good at not letting players get to him on time.

At this point, things are already Quite Bad. All five Stars are below the hashmarks, with three Oilers above it. Bouchard takes a couple of steps to contemplate a glorious goal himself, but he wisely changes the angle of attack, setting up Arvidsson:

Oettinger pushes over well, but there’s a reason teams love to set up one-timers: they make the puck move more quickly than normal. And in this case, the puck whistled past Oettinger’s left shoulder into the net, high and against the grain

It wasn’t a pretty period for Dallas, who could easily have given up five goals. To that point, a hot pass nearly made it 4-1 before the intermission, when Matt Dumba’s skate got doinked by a pass and sent the puck in on Oettinger, but the goalie dragged his left pad properly along the ice as he pushed across, and the (further) disaster was averted. Only regular disaster had taken place, and what’s a hockey game without a li’l ol’ disaster?

Second Period

Dallas nearly got one back early in the second when the Duchene line turned over a puck, but Mikael Granlund got fed for a bang-bang chance that he put over top of the net.

The scariest moment of the game up to that point came when Esa Lindell took a Darnell Nurse shot to the inside of his right knee, sending him right down to the ice in pain.

Play was blown down, and Lindell was in a whole lot of pain after getting to the Stars’ bench. But he would return later in the period to continue, which was a tentatively good sign.

As for signs of another sort, once again, the Stars managed to do what they did last spring, and miss a Grade-A chance of their own, only to surrender a goal at the other end.

Granlund made a gorgeous delay and pass to set up Duchene, who really ought to have thought about turning into a right-hand shot before the puck arrived here:

Duchene still got enough of it to threaten the goal, but he put it just wide, as you can see here:

From there, things got very bad, very quickly, as Ilya Lyubushkin found himself in the least enviable of spots on the Oilers’ counterattack: 1-on-1 with Connor McDavid.

The puck looked initially like it was far enough for Oettinger to come out and get it, only for him to realize at the last minute that McDavid’s incredible speed was going to win the day.

So Oettinger backed off and tried to regain his net, but he never really got all the way set, and McDavid made a strong move to the backhand that beat Oettinger’s glove, which puts him in the company of hundreds of goalies over the years. 4-1, Oil.

The Stars would get another power play after that, but it failed to do much of anything, looking a lot more like four players with a new guy as the fifth, and the aggressive Oilers’ penalty kill was able to execute more effectively and kill it off.

You may have noticed that we said “so far” earlier when describing the puck Esa Lindell took to his knee. That is because Roope Hintz blocked an Adam Henrique shot into the side of his face that looked much worse.

Hintz was able to skate back to the bench, but he was not able to return to the game. We will find out more, later.

The next installment in the Nightmares in Edmonton franchise came courtesy of Lyubushkin, who took a pass from Harley and tried to beat Connor Brown along the wall to gain the red line and send the puck in deep. But Brown made one of those perfect poke checks to take the puck away, and he rushed in with a 2-on-1.

“It has been that kind of night,” said Josh Bogorad, when Thomas Harley successfully broke up the 2-on-1 pass from Connor Brown. Bogorad said that because the breakup went right back to Brown, who had the world’s easiest chance after Oettinger had pushed over for the pass attempt, only to see the puck bounce right back to Brown.

And just to make sure you understood that This Was Not Their Night, the Stars suffered the indignity of seeing their shiny new superstar get decked, when Jake Walman laid the second of two big Edmonton hits on Rantanen at the end of the middle frame. Rantanen got caught receiving a breakout pass with his head down at his own blue line, and Walman planted him with a clean, hard hit.

He was on the ice with Steel, Lindell, Lyubushkin, and Bäck, the final one of which gave a little bit of guff to Walman, but that was all. That might have spoken to the generally dispirited atmosphere of the team as a whole, but nonetheless, you couldn’t help but wish for a more cathartic show of solidarity from the other players on the ice, if only for team morale.

In any case, Rantanen would get right up and make a nice stickhandling move at the other end to show he wasn’t too fazed, but would anyone have blamed the Stars if they’d just kept him in the locker room and ceded the entire third period to Edmonton, given how badly things had gone up to that point?

Third Period

Skinner robbed Rantanen on a backhand rebound attempt, because this was not a night where even easy goals were going to be given without divine intervention.

Well, the closest thing to divine intervention is a referee’s intervention, and the Stars would get their third power play of the night (with Edmonton yet to get one of their own), and with Hintz out for the night, Duchene moved back up to the top unit. It seems to work all right, as Duchene set up Rantanen for his first goal as a Star on a one-timer that even the Edmonton Force Field couldn’t stop.

The one-knee one-timer is a beautiful thing to see, and it was nice to see Rantanen get rewarded for his work on the evening. He’s not Brett Hull or Adrian Beltre, but comparison is the thief of joy anyway. He’s ding-danged Mikko Rantanen, and he can do amazing things.

That goal brought the shield generators down for a while, as Jamie Benn flipped a backhand fadeaway chance past Skinner’s glove just 11 seconds later to make it 5-3, after a perfect feed from Dadonov from below the goal line.

Everyone knows backhands are harder for goalies to read, but this one just left Skinner helpless, as Benn’s languid lift of the puck was more than he could handle. And from there it was #herecometheoilers something fierce, with belief suddenly flooding the Stars’ bench, even unto the third defense pairing.

Thus, Matt Dumba. The Stars’ defenseman had a quirky sequence where he pinched hard and kept forechecking below the red line, and it ended up forcing an icing from Edmonton. That sort of aggression is fine in DeBoer’s system with players covering for him (as they were), and a few minutes later, Dumba’s work would get him an even better reward than an icing: the icing on the cake, which is to say his first goal as a Dallas Star, courtesy of a fortunate rebound off Skinner into Ty Emberson, and back into the Oilers’ net.

Look, they aren’t all gonna be Picassos Rantanens.

After a Mikael Granlund slot shot missed the net, the puck bounced back up high, and Dumba managed to send it on target, where Skinner got it without too much trouble as you can see below, unless you have already spotted the trouble.

Turns out, said trouble was coming from inside the house, as Emberson was standing in the wrongest spot possible, and the puck richocheted off Skinner, off him, and right back in:

Skinner sent A Look at his defenseman, who surely felt about three inches tall after a 5-1 lead had become 5-4 in under five minutes. Was this a sign the universe was going to balance out a ludicrous game? Was this going to be as memorable as Brad Richards’s five-assist debut in 2008?

Well, not in that way, no. But not forgettable, either.

Down the stretch, Edmonton was rattled. Dallas got a couple more good chances, with Mavrik Bourque ripping a puck away from his man in the offensive zone in an effort to even the score singlehandedly (and he almost did). Even Oskar Bäck was dangling a bit down the stretch, with every player looking to be the hero—after all, this was a game where any puck might go in.

The Stars’ depth kept a minute of solid pressure in the Oiler’s zone with about six minutes left, but they couldn’t quite pull the trigger, looking for a better chance that never came.

Harley sent a great shot off a cycle with 4:00 to go that Marchment nearly dragged past Skinner, but the puck went just wide. That, in retrospect, was probably their best chance to tie things up.

From there, it was a cagey final few minutes, with Oettinger leaving the net with just over 2:00 to go. Dallas managed to force an offensive-zone faceoff for the final push, but they couldn’t get much through at first, and the clock ticked down to 37.3 seconds remaining after Harley managed a great keep and just flung the puck on a surprised Skinner, who took the puck to the gut standing up straight.

Edmonton won that face-off and cleared it, however, and Dallas didn’t get another chance. The 5-4 lead held up like a screen door on a submarine that surfaces just in time, and the Oilers escaped with two points after a wounded and depleted Stars team nearly erased a four-goal deficit in the third period.

The Stars play again in Vancouver Sunday night, so there’s not much time for them to catch their breath. Hopefully, it will be enough time for Roope Hintz to get patched up, but it’s hard to know what that entails until we hear more.

But if you want to take away one good thing from this game, it’s that the Stars can turn even their worst game into a close game—no matter how big of a hole they dig early on. If they can keep generating these kinds of big pushes in third periods where they’re trailing, that will serve them well in the playoffs, when you need a comeback or two in almost every series. You play.

(How many points is “close” worth, again?)