Game 66 AfterThoughts: Giving Ground, Proving Grounds

They don't do 3-on-3 in the playoffs

You know the old phrase, “The exception proves the rule”? When you think about it in terms of modern vernacular, the phrase makes no sense. Shouldn’t an exception disprove the rule? It’s not a rule if there are exceptions to it, after all, but only a tendency, likelihood, or frequent occurence.

The key to that phrase is understanding “prove” in an older sense, as in “to test.” The phrase “proving ground” comes from that, as a place where technology or warriors are tested for readiness in the real world.

Getting run out of the building in Colorado twice would not a great way to inspire confidence before an impending first-round matchup. After the rough outing back in January in Denver, the Stars showed up today looking to redeem themselves after getting thumped in Winnipeg. And at first, they did so, grabbing a 1-0 lead early on a nice play from Rantanen and a nicer play from Hintz, before Robertson paused a beat for the path to clear and completed the dunk.

Then, Colorado pulled away and dominated possession and shot-totals on the back of 10 minutes of power play time to Dallas’s two. It was not fun to watch, and it can’t have been much fun to endure on the ice, either. But endure it, Dallas did.

And in the most crucial time of the game aside from the overtime gimmick, Dallas managed a big push, and they tied the game up. And given how much adversity the Stars had faced in this one (some of their own making, as Pete DeBoer acknowledged after the game), I think that’s pretty important.

If the Stars do wind up back in Colorado next month, they’ll need more than the memory of last year’s Game 6 to build on. And in the playoffs, third periods are notoriously fickle. It doesn’t matter how well you play if another team can mount a successful push in overtime, especially with how tight games tend to be. And Dallas, in this one, erased a deficit in 20 seconds, outscoring Colorado 3-2 at 5-on-5. You don’t want to win playoff games with that sort of an approach (and your fans most certainly don’t want to have to watch such playoff games), but it’s important for Dallas, I think, to show that Colorado can look dominant without dominating the most important category, even when a lot of things are stacked in their favor.

Though, you know, if the Stars really wanted to impress their viewers, maybe they could dominate possession next time rather than asking for 50 minutes of forbearance. This is just a friendly suggestion.

On the overtime goal, I’ll give you a short summary of what I break down toward the end of this piece. In essence, the Stars threw away their first possession by a disjointed attack that resulted in an offside. It’s annoying, but it’s also a result of a new trio (Rantanen being on the ice) not quite being in sync yet. They went back to another face-off, and the Avalanche won it (they outplayed Dallas on the dots in this one), and Makar make a great singlehanded play. Superstar players can do that, you know.

But honestly, when it comes to regular season overtimes, I’d rather see Dallas lean a little more towards attacking in the gimmicky portion of regular season games than do what Minnesota did the other night and basically refuse to enter the zone unless they got a notarized invitation to do so, leading to one of the worst overtimes I’ve ever watched and a subsequent shootout. It’s an entertainment product, folks.

If this all seems a bit too sunny, forgive me. I try to follow the tried-and-true rule of the regular season: Don’t get too high, don’t get too low. Fans were ready to forfeit the game when Dallas was down 3-1 with a 27-10 disparity in shots on goal, but one thing that had been encouraging to me earlier in the game was that Dallas had been allowing shots, yes; but not as many glorious chances, like they did to Winnipeg.

In fact, if you want to take Natural Stat Trick’s numbers, the Stars actually had a 10-8 edge in high-danger shots on goal at 5-on-5. Context is so important when looking at giant numbers of shots on goal, and you can see how Dallas’s fewer shots were more densely concentrated in the slot, whereas Colorado was firing pucks from everywhere.

That’s not to say Dallas is pleased with the way this game went—they obviously don’t want to cede that much possession no matter where the shots come from—but Winnipeg really did dominate the Stars on Friday, whereas the Avalanche needed a five-one advantage in power plays just to get to overtime. That may be an unfair way of framing it, but it’s not altogether inaccurate either.

The real question is this: can Dallas keep up with Colorado’s breakneck pace in the playoffs? And without Miro Heiskanen, it is much tougher, to be sure. It’s not a coincidence that two Avs goals came with the third Stars defense pairing on the ice, even if one of those goals was a lucky deflection off Lian Bichsel’s stick. Heiskanen being on the ice does a whole lot for a whole bunch of the game, and instead, Thomas Harley had to do nearly all of that. He played a ton of minutes, including getting trapped for a three-minute shift in the third period that the Stars somehow survived, but you’d like him to have more help in transition than he did tonight.

Though when it comes to help, having Roope Hintz and Lian Bichsel back was a big boost for Dallas, and no mistake. Bichsel in particular made a few important plays using his reach and his size, and I’m feeling a lot more confident about his playoff-readiness than I was midway through the season. This is one of Dallas’s six best defensemen, and they need him.

Hintz, likewise, looked great early in this one, though he sagged as the game wore on, as did a lot of the Stars’ players. Given Hintz hadn’t been exercising for most of this week while recovering from a puck to the head, I wasn’t totally shocked that he wore down a bit.

Wyatt Johnston had a tough game by his lofty standards, including losing Makar on the final goal in overtime. You were waiting for him to create more offense all game, but aside from the second assist on the scramble preceding the Bourque goal, he wasn’t nearly as big a contributor to the Stars’ offense as he usually is. But Johnston also played a lot of minutes against MacKinnon’s line, so that’s a tough assignment for anyone.

You can be unhappy with the Stars’ process in this road game, but I think you have to admire how they bent (and nearly over backward) without breaking in regulation. If you want to be a complete Pollyanna, you might say something like this: Even in a home game where Colorado got every advantage in terms of Dallas’s being without Heiskanen and four power plays in the red, the Avalanche simply couldn’t put the Stars away. That’s not a bad tool to have in your belt, come April.

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Mikko Rantanen got a nice tribute video during the first TV timeout, and he put his hand to his heart in recognition of a chorus of (mostly) positive reactions from Colorado fans—though the reception was far less positive when his name was announced with an assist on the Stars’ first goal.

Rantanen had some good moments, including nearing scoring on Wedgewood in the third before Dallas came back. You would have hoped for some heroics against his old team, but he had to settle for a point and 17:15 of ice time. More power plays would have been nice. This is not news to you, though.

The bulk of the Rocky Mountain Booing was reserved for Matt Duchene, who always gets an enthusiastic reception in Colorado. You have to think he had the second-most money on the board after Rantanen before this one, and that goal was one that meant a whole lot to him, and to his team. Erasing that deficit in crunch time was pretty darn satisfying for fans; it had to be downright exhilarating for the one scoring the goal. Looks like it to me, anyway.

Indeed, there was a playoff atmosphere to this game, with the Rantanen drama only intensifying things further. And while playoff games don’t end in overtime, they do often see crazy swings in the third period when a team tries to defend a lead. So maybe this was as much of a proving ground for Colorado as it was for Dallas.

As an aside, you have to give the Avalanche front office credit for how they’ve won the PR battle with their fanbase. They managed to ship out a beloved superstar before a playoff run while somehow framing it as him “walking away” from a reasonable offer, though nobody is really certain what those offers where, and whether Rantanen would have accepted one close to it before July 1.

No matter what you think about Rantanen, the fact that the team didn’t go down to the wire in an effort to bring him back over the summer and punted him out before the playoffs began tells you they didn’t want to take a risk on losing him without getting assets back, and they’ve managed to convince people that their playoff games this year haven’t been actively harmed by the choice to prioritize future assets over immediate victory. It’s something fans would never have forgiven before 2022, you would think. But then again, the playoffs look likely to offer a chance for immediate return on investment for both clubs.

Obviously time will tell how everything shakes out for them, but I don’t know too many other Cup-contending teams that would be able to ship out a player of this caliber without a massively negative reaction from fans. The Carolina saga has certainly helped the narrative that Rantanen is somehow more demanding or greedy or whatever, but the one thing we know for sure here is that the Avalanche chose to get rid of one of their best players before the playoffs. Somehow, they’ve not suffered much backlash for that choice. That’s not easy to do.

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I generally enjoy TNT broadcasts, as far as national games go. This one, however, was a disaster early on, with a devastating echo on the microhones for the first couple minutes of the game. On the first replay during a stoppage, the audio commentary from a previous highlight then began playing while Olczyk was attempting to break down the replay, stopping everyone in their tracks. I guess those Oscars for sound design are merited ones, after all. Sound engineers, please sound off in the comments on what you think went wrong, other than someone leaving their phone on speaker next to their laptop.

But otherwise, I thought the crew was a decent one, providing insight and adding background and pointing out things you might have missed as the play went along. That’s all I ask from a broadcast that doesn’t cover the teams all year long, and TNT usually does a decent job. They did in this one, after they got out of their own, ahem, echo chamber.

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Dallas’s penalty kill (and Jake Oettinger) were huge in this one, even though Colorado did get a goal in the back half of the Benn double-minor. Dallas’s shorthanded resilience kept Colorado from building a larger amount of momentum than they might other have done, and I think it’s a big deal for Dallas to show Colorado’s power play isn’t necessarily a deadly weapon against them right now. At one point, Colorado had put up 11 shots on goal on the man-advantage, with only one getting behind Oettinger.

It was a nice bounce-back performance (such as it was) for the Stars’ goalie, too, after a sub-par showing by his standards in Winnipeg. Oettinger’s stops on solid chances from Lehkonen and MacKinnon early were much more in line with what Oettinger can do when he’s on top of his game. If you’re willing to zoom out and look at the regular season as a whole, I think there are some real positives to take from Oettinger’s game in Colorado today. He didn’t look like a goal worried about what had happened 48 hours ago. He was calm and collected, even when facing shots from everywhere against a great team. That gave Dallas a chance to win, and they almost did.

As for Colorad, Nathan MacKinnon took 23 faceoffs, winning 11 of them. That seems like a whole gosh-darn lot of faceoffs in a regular season game to me, given nobody on Dallas took more than 13, but then again, Colorado is going to Colorado when it comes to deploying their top guys. If you have the best forward and defenseman in the hockey (right now), I guess you might as well squeeze all the juice from the orange in a big divisional matchup. We’ll see how that works in the playoffs, I suppose. Elite players are good to have.

Lineup

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

With Roope Hintz and Lian Bichsel having flown on Colin Blackwell and Brendan Smith were scratched for Dallas, as they've looked like the 13th forward/7th defenseman with the players Dallas has available.

Scott Wedgewood started in net for Colorado, as Mackenzie Blackwood hasn’t been feeling well over the last few days, per Jared Bednar. Josh Manson also missed Sunday’s game after leaving Friday’s contest against Calgary with an upper-body injury. Thus, the right-shot 5-foot-11 Cornell alumnus Sam Malinski drew in for Manson on the back end.

Brock Nelson and Charlie Coyle also played for Colorado after the Avalanche acquired both at the trade deadline.

Game Beats

Jake Oettinger quieted your doubts with a couple of sharp saves 30 seconds in, including a dangerous chance from Artturi Lehkonen. His job didn’t get easier after Jamie Benn took a goaltender interference penalty where he probably got punished more for allowing himself to be pushed into Wedgewood than for outright driving into the goaltender himself.

Dallas then survived 90 seconds of power play time from Cale Makar and Nathan MacKinnon and Company, with the second unit making an appearance for appearances’ sake. And after failing to take advantage of an opportunity of their own, Colorado would suffer from a bad bounce Dallas capitalized on.

After an attempted clearance hit the referee along the boards, Colorado eventually sent the puck bad down low, after which Rantanen was able to get to it first, to the surprise of everyone except Roope Hintz. Rantanen fed Hintz in front, and the Stars’ center immediately dished the pass back against the grain to Jason Robertson, leaving Wedgewood flailing helplessly after pushing across desperately for the shot Hintz never took. It was a beautiful passing play, and Robertson waited for a beat for traffic to clear, then easily put away the goal to make it 1-0.

Thomas Harley had a great breakup on a dangerous rush by Lehkonen, deflecting a cross-ice setup over the glass. It was Harley at his defensive best, where his balance and anticipation allows him to control a lot of ice without getting out of position.

Jamie Benn then went back to the box midway through the first period after attempting to lift Ryan Lindgren’s stick but catching him hard in the face (with Lindgren’s stick involved) instead. Benn leads Dallas in penalty minutes, and he extended that lead in this one, handomsley.

Oettinger made a huge pad stop on Val Nichushkin in the first minute of the power play, and Dallas made it through the first two minutes without much more trouble. The second unit then came out, and Oettinger had to push across once again to stop Ross Colton. But the third two-minute power play set of the period was too much even for the NHL’s best penalty kill, and Martin Nečas tipped a Makar shot perfectly just a foot in front of Oettinger, who didn’t have a chance on the play.

As the first period wore down, Dallas seemed on the back foot, though not in the same way they were against Winnipeg. Their defensive structure was largely intact, and while Oettinger faced over a dozen shots on goal, most of them later on came from bad angles and distance rather than the interior areas Winnipeg was getting to on Friday.

Shots on goal were 13-4 for Colorado after 20 minutes, with the Robertson goal being the only puck on target from a Dallas forward. Brian Boucher mentioned that he’d heard the Dallas bench talking about “pucks on net” during the period, but all told, the Stars had a decent enough first period on the road in a tough building, and they gladly took a tie into the intermission.

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Oettinger had to flash the glove on a Nečas one-timer early in the second period, with Dallas still looking for a way to tilt the ice. But the Avalanche gave them just such a chance after Parker Kelly (who does not manufacture board games, to my knowledge) gave Jake Oettginger a shot with his right arm in following a puck to the crease. And with the Stars yet to go on the job, it was a call you would always expect to see.

Dallas’s first couple of setup attempts didn’t go well, but Rantanen would put a mid-range one-timer on net just to make sure Wedgewood was awake. The Stars’ top unit stayed out for basically the entire two minutes, with a lot of puck possession in the back half of the penalty but few other attempts toward the net. The personnel got a little out of position, with Robertson back in his old spot on the sidewall, and Rantanen

Mikael Granlund got a better chance at even-strength when he a post right after the power play, and Matt Duchene led another rush just after that to nearly restore the Stars’ lead. But despite getting some momentum, the Avalanche would get the next goal when Val Nichushkin got open on the weak side and walked up to the hash marks and fired a puck top shelf on a Brock-Nelson-Screened Oettinger. The whole play was kept alive by a slick bit of work from Cale Makar, though. It turns out, having your best defenseman in these big games is a very good thing.

The teams exchanged dangerous rushes after that, but Colorado continued to clog shooting lanes, and it took things like a Duchene rush with Lindell just to get pucks to the net. With the Avalanche using a backup goalie, it was not surprising to hear that DeBoer was emphasizing to his bench that they needed to get shots on goal. That is, after all, kind of how you score.

Colorado got a puck-off-referee break of their own 10 minutes into the second period, sending them on a 4-on-2 rush that Harley brilliantly blocked into the netting. These things even out, they say.

Mavrik Bourque got the message from his coaching staff, swinging out from behind the net after a smart Lindell pinch to shove a puck on net with bodies in front. It didn’t result in anything, but in the Stars’ next possession in the offensive zone, they generated a better set of pressure (during which Robertson got a stick up high on Makar that wasn’t called), but the eventual shot was easily gloved down by Wedgewood.

The Avs got a deadly chance after a failure to clear a puck, as Matt Dumba stepped up for a big hit on Joel Kiviranta, but the old friend was able to get a stick on the puck from his knees after the hit, and the puck was sent over to Ross Colton for a sure-fire one-timer goal, only for him to send it just over the crossbar.

Colorado’s first line got a good shift in on the Stars’ fourth line with about five minutes to go in the second, hemming them in for nearly a minute along with Harley and Lyubushkin. The Stars survived, but once again, the second line for Colorado would punish them a minute later.

Sam Malinski broke his stick on a shot in the offensive zone, and the Avs were fortunately able to retrieve the puck. Malkinski would pick up a replacement stick, then pick up a second assist after a Jonathan Drouin shot from the outside of the circle deflected off Lian Bichsel and perfectly under the crossbar. It was a break (well, two breaks) for the Avs, but given their superior possession in the latter half of the second period, a 3-1 lead was no less than they deserved.

Shots on goal in the second period were 7-6 with eight minutes to go, but they would end up 14-6 for Colorado after Dallas struggled to grab momentum back. Things went from bad to dumb when Mason Marchment got called for a penalty after Devon Toews tripped Cale Makar. The astute reader will have noticed that those two players are on the same team, but I suppose when you see a player get tripped and you have Mason Marchment nearby, the refereeing instincts are too strong to ignore.

Thus, Colorado took most of a power play into the third period with Dallas only having amassed ten shots on goal through 40 minutes of play. And this time, that disparity was a genuine reflection of overall play.

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Dallas killed the Marchment penalty to start the third period, though Lehkonen got another Grade A chance from the doorstep that Oettinger denied.

Mason Marchment got out of the box and nearly created a goal on his next shift, driving to the center of the slot and setting up a Duchene chance after a block sent the puck trickling in front of Duchene, who backhanded the puck into Wedgewood’s left pad. Marchment would finish his shift by laying a big hit on Charlie Coyle for good measure.

Wyatt Johnston tried to turn a corner later on and flip a puck over Wedgewood’s shoulder, but the puck sailed past him. Johnston is saving those goals for the playoffs, I am assuming.

Nathan MacKinnon took a hit from Lian Bichsel in the third period, after which his head collided with Roope Hintz’s posterior, and MacKinnon was holding his head on the ice before heading to the bench. Apparently the spotters didn’t deem the hit too dangerous, as MacKinnon came back out for a power play shortly thereafter.

That power play came after Lyubushkin continued his rough run of recent play by he losing a puck after Granlund put him in a bit of a tough spot by not being able to keep the zone on a high cross at the blue line. But despite penalty minutes being 10-2 for Colorado, Dallas managed to survive their fourth (of five) two-minute set, thanks to three outstanding stops from Oettinger, who moved from post to post with excellent form to deny the top power play for Colorado.

Mikko Rantanen nearly pulled Dallas within one on two chances all alone in tight, but Wedgewood denied him twice with the right pad, as Rantanen’s follow-up effort to a wrap attempt just barely got the top of the right leg of the former Stars backup.

This was not a game where the officiating determined the outcome, but it was also the case that yet another missed call on a Too Many Men penalty that even the broadcast noticed was not likely to improve Pete DeBoer’s mood. Brian Boucher mentioned that DeBoer said some encouraging words to the officials after that sequence, which is to say DeBoer telling them it was a big game, and everyone needed to be doing their best.

With under ten minutes to go, the Stars had to bring everything left in the tank. Unfortunately, that meant Thomas Harley’s aggressive work in the offensive zone led to a counterattack that resulted in a three-minute shift for himself.

But that was apparently a karmic investment the universe recognized, because after an absolutely unreal Wedgewood save on Benn, the Stars refused to give up on the sequence, and Mavrik Bourque scored into a net surrounded by prostrate Colorado players to cut the lead in half.

Then the least-loved player in Colorado who could tie the game did so, after Mikael Granlund and company stopped a Colorado clearance attempt. Matt Duchene scored on a rebound after, knocking a puck past Wedgewood after a Lindell point shot. Two goals in 20 seconds, and bam. Tie game.

If Dallas was going to finish the smash-and-grab job, it needed to happen in the wake of that stunning sequence. And Mavrik Bourque nearly did his part with a big reverse hit on MacKinnon with the Stars hunting for another quick goal they wouldn’t get.

Instead, the Avalanche were able to regroup, and Oettinger had to make a sharp glove save on a (far away) one-timer fro MacKinnnon with 2:20 to go. Makar put another puck glove side with 23 seconds left, but Oettinger again brought it down, and the teams headed to an overtime that Dallas was much happier to reach than Colorado.

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Dallas won the initial face-off, but Harley force an offensive-zone entry that pulled Dallas offside, and and Colorado’s Brock Nelson won the next face-off, and after some meandering work, the Avalanche called the “give the puck to Makar in open ice” play, and Wyatt Johnston could neither keep up with Makar nor get enough help from Thomas Harley to close down the chance.

Makar went from here:

to here:

And while Makar didn’t get a great shot off, he did get a clean one off, whipping the puck perfectly against the grain and back inside the post, with Oettinger pushing to his left to keep up with the unimpeded Norris Trophy winner.

It was a bummer of a way to cap an overtime, but still better than Dallas probably deserved. All up, the Stars probably take that point with the assurance that 3-on-3 ceases to exist after mid-April. After all, they have a pretty good defenseman of their own they expect back around that same time.

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Dallas heads home to take on the Ducks on Noche Mexicana this Tuesday evening, where they will hope for a better result.