Game 67 AfterThoughts: 55 Days Later

The Dallas Stars lost a game in regulation

Song of the Game

You ever stop to think about
Where you are, where you are now?
You tripped and you slipped
On the things you thought you needed

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Glen Gulutzan probably summed up every fan’s opinion after this game.

“Someone told me that we hadn’t lost in 55 days,” Gulutzan said. “But whenever you lose, it still feels the same.”

For the Stars, that feeling couldn’t have been pleasant. Riding a franchise-best 15-game points streak coming into a matchup with Utah, the Stars overcame some early hiccups to reach the final 20 minutes with the score tied. They even got a power play early in the third period with which to grab the lead. It was all right there, ready for them to take.

Instead, their best player made an impossibly bad mistake to give up a shorthanded breakaway, and Utah went on to score four straight third-period goals to end the Stars’ brilliant run in a walk.

“He tried to keep it in,” Gulutzan said, “It was kind of a hot rim, and it bounced in the air. He tried to tag it, and he actually made a nice pass actually on the second whack, the double-whack on it. Those things happen, but it’s how you react to it, and I thought we got a little loose after that with the odd-mans [rushes].”

Indeed, you’d probably bet on these Stars to have tied the game up again after that goal—had they not overpushed, and given up the next goal…on an odd-man rush borne out of a turnover by Matt Duchene.

“I didn’t like some things in the third,” Gulutzan said, in perhaps a tad bit of an understatement. “Actually, for the first two periods, I liked our game. We were very stingy. We didn’t give up much.”

That’s true, too. After both of the first two periods, the Stars were the better team, but they just couldn’t manage to reach an intermission with a lead, despite getting chance after chance.

Gulutzan said that the Stars’ lack of execution on offense early in the game was something they had to accept some blame for, given how loose Utah was with the puck. And you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with him. You wonder if Dallas might have gotten lulled into a bit of overly patient play given how many pucks were finding them, and if that led to a bit of the overpassing we saw at times when shots would probably have been the safer bet. In a weird game like this, a bit of simpler play may have been called for, but that’s hindsight talking from 300 feet away.

To the Stars’ credit, even the ugly first Utah goal from Clayton Keller (scored from a sharp angle over Casey DeSmith’s shoulder) didn’t wind up being the difference. But it also sapped Dallas of momentum just when it looked like they were going to build on their 1-0 lead. Tonight wasn’t one of DeSmith’s best outings, and that was a bad combination alongside his teammates’ allowance of odd-man rushes, many of which were converted.

“We’ve had a lot of good things happen to us for a long period of time,” Gulutzan said. “You look around the league, and that happens to everybody and every goalie. The shot from the corner, just […] caught him. A heck of a shot. Probably couldn’t duplicate it very often, but those things happen.”

As of this moment, Colorado is down 6-2 to Pittsburgh, so I can’t really think of any better reinforcement of Gulutzan’s final sentence than that. Indeed, these sorts of things do happen to everyone, eventually. Now it’s about the next one.

“It’s a lot like playoffs right now,” Jamie Benn said afterwards. “You can’t let one game affect the next. It’s about moving on quick here.”

One of the biggest shames about tonight’s result is that Benn himself looked great, with the Duchene-Steel-Benn combo creating chance after chance early, including Steel’s goal in the first. When that line has been clicking, it’s almost always meant great things for Dallas. But tonight, it wound up making one of an unfortunate bunch of critical errors.

Tyler Myers was excellent tonight, too, making a long solo rush through the ice that ended with him nearly putting a puck home. There were flashes, and over the past 55 days, those flashes have usually been enough to get the job done. Tonight, unfortunately, the Stars ended up being their own worst enemy.

Well, except for Utah, because the Stars took two fighting majors against them, with Lian Bichsel and Adam Erne both squaring off at different points. But energy was hard to come by at times, and perhaps the reality of missing key players like Rantanen and Hintz was a bit too apparent tonight, when the power play finally dried up, and the offensive execution fell short, for once.

Wednesday’s game will be important, because it was always going to be. But now it’s got the additional psychological merit of yanking everyone’s eyeballs and memory from what took place on Monday, when the Stars handed out chances and couldn’t get a save or a goal when they needed it. It wasn’t just one thing tonight, but many things. Perhaps the most optimistic thing you can say about this one is that so many uncharacteristic mistakes were all concentrated in a single game, rather than being spread throughout their last 15.

Win on Wednesday, and you earn the right to forget about this one. No pressure but the same pressure that’s always been on this team, and every team since 1999: Do what they did, again. In one respect, at least, these Stars did that. Now it’s about the most important bit of copycatting, which starts in 15 games.

Highlights and the Lowdown

On the first shift of the game, the Duchene line immediately generated an odd-man rush thanks to some good work along the boards by Benn and Steel. Duchene couldn’t quite slip the last pass back to Steel to complete the sequence, though.

Jamie Benn would find Steel a couple shifts later, when he fed Steel with a pass from behind the goal line on his second try in short succession, and Steel did the rest:

Seven minutes into the game, the Stars had a goal while Utah was still looking to put their first puck on DeSmith.

The Mammoth would do so a minute later, and DeSmith had to flash the left pad out to stop a sneaky shot. But the sneakier shot came from Tyler Myers shortly thereafter, when he made this rush up the ice that would have brought the house down:

What did bring the house down was an Adam Erne fight with Brandon Tanev in the neutral zone with 8:34 remaining, and that got folks a bit more fired up on a frigid Dallas evening.

The Mammoth’s second shot of the game would not get stopped by DeSmith, as Clayton Keller took advantage of a turnover and then took further advantage of the RVH post lean by DeSmith, which left just a tiny bit of space on the short side, and Keller hit it:

It was, as they say, not a great goal to give up.

Jamie Benn nearly put Dallas back ahead when he was all alone in front of Vítek Vaněček, but his five-hole effort got shut down. Still, that Duchene line was humming, and they generated the vast majority of Dallas’s scoring chances in the first.

Lian Bichsel then generated another five-minute fighting major when he dropped the gloves with Jack McBain after the two traded shots while skating back, and the resulting fight had some serious animosity underneath it.

Still more animosity resulted after yet another scoring chance by the Duchene line, only for Keller to shrewdly draw a penalty on Steel in a manner Steel was extremely unhappy with, after the fact:

The Stars killed the penalty with brutal efficiency, however, and the period ended without any further fights or goals, still tied at 1-1. And considering that shots on goal were 10-2 for Dallas at that point, Utah had to feel great about being level.

Gulutzan started the Duchene line in the second period, and you couldn’t blame him. But it would be the Johnston line that drew a penalty on Utah on the next shift, putting Dallas on its first power play when John Marino channeled his inner Clayton Keller and grabbed Bourque’s stick.

Dallas wouldn’t score on the two-minute minor, despite a dangerous backhand in tight from Bourque late in the set that Vaněček got just a piece of the glove on.

So we played on, but unfortunately for Dallas, they would play on for a couple of minutes with their same five players, while Utah outchanged them in the Stars’ zone. When a shot finally got deflected into the netting, Nils Lundkvist had been out for nearly three minutes straight.

But after escaping from that pressure, Dallas would get victimized when a cross got through the slot, and Nate Schmidt hit the very far corner of the goal with a perfect shot past a screen to give Utah the 2-1 lead:

Sean Durzi took a tripping penalty a minute after that (on Bourque, again) to give Dallas a chance to equalize. But despite an early net-crashing frenzy, Dallas couldn’t muster a finishing blow, and Utah escaped.

Midway through the game, some frustration was creeping in for Dallas. Despite a largely solid start, they were trailing, and Utah was playing its typically quick, frustrating game. Arttu Hyry came up with a big faceoff win after an icing to get them out of a jam, however, because he does that.

And then Wyatt Johnston did something that he does: Score. After Johnston and Bourque turned over a puck high in the zone, Robertson eventually won it again and fed it sharply back to the point. Miro Heiskanen took a beat at the point to find a shooting lane, and Johnston knocked it down and back against the grain to even the scoring at two.

The top line started cooking after that, with Robertson and Johnston each getting a great look before the end of the second period. But after Barrett Hayton and Lian Bichsel got into some more nonsense late in the period, we entered the second intermission without any further scoring.

Lian Bichsel drew another penalty for Dallas three minutes into the final period when he and Hayton reunited, only for Hayton’s stick to get into Bichsel’s hands as he turned away with the puck. It was a golden chance for Dallas to get the lead back in what was shaping up as a very tense period.

Unfortunately, that tension came to a head at the worst of moments, when Heiskanen couldn’t quite keep a puck in, and then compounded the problem with a mishandle in the neutral zone that handed McBain a shorthanded breakaway from the red line in, which he put through DeSmith’s five-hole to re-take the lead in fairly brutal fashion.

The question for the rest of the third period was pretty simple: Could Dallas dig their way out of the mess they’d made?

DeSmith did just that with 12 minutes to go, coming out to make a big save. But it would go for naught when Duchene passed up a shot and turned the puck over, leading to a 2-on-1 for Utah that Kailer Yamamoto easily finished past a flailing DeSmith to make it 4-2.

Robertson nicked the goal mask with 11 to play on a gift from Utah, but once again, a Dallas failure to convert a look was followed by a Utah opportunity, as Bourque was penalized right after the shot for roughing. Utah had a chance to clamp down on the game for good, but they would fail to do so.

Dallas then got two more great looks off loose Mammoth puck play, but Jason Robertson and Jamie Benn couldn’t put the puck past Vaněček with two great chances in a minute. And of course, that meant Utah was going to get another power play, which they did, when Bunting’s cross check on Ian Cole (who didn’t sell it, to be fair) was given two minutes with just 5:31 to play.

Utah was clearly looking to just bank two scoreless minutes, and a hungry Dallas PK took advantage with four successive shorthanded scoring chances. But nothing found the net, and it was the sort of night where you practically knew the next Utah shot was going in, which it did, thanks to Michael Carcone:

Utah added an empty-netter, and then Adam Erne scored a consolation goal with 2.3 seconds left in the game for the most morose Stars goal horn for the home crowd in recent memory.

Moral victories count for something, but only a very little something in this case. Credit to Arttu Hyry for the assist, however. No quit in that player.

Adam Erne celebrates a goal.

Lineups

Dallas was composed of these groups:

Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bunting-Hryckowian-Blackwell
Bäck-Hyry-Erne

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

DeSmith

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Utah trotted this out:

Keller-Schmaltz-Crouse
Peterka-Cooley-Guenther
McBain-Hayton-Carcone
Tanev-Kerfoot-Yamamoto

Sergachev-Weegar
Schmidt-Marino
Cole-Durzi

Vítek Vaněček

After-AfterThoughts

• Jake Oetter was named the NHL’s Second Star of the Week this morning.

  

  Going 3-0-0 with a .940 save percentage deserves some recognition, I’d say.

• By the way, Hannah Bilka was at the Vanity Fair party for the Oscars on Sunday. Not bad for a hockey player from Coppell.

• This graphic from the Victory+ pregame show was also pretty striking, I thought:

  

  Trivia: Can you name all eight of the different power play goal-scorers over the Stars’ twelve-game stretch?

• Lian Bichsel hasn’t fought much in his career, but when he does, he can make players like even the 6-foot-4 Jack McBain look small:

• Here’s another look at Utah’s second goal. There’s a lot of battling and puck-winning going on here that the Mammoth have to feel good about. Watching it from a Utah perspective, it’s a hard-working, smart goal. That immediate shot by Schmidt despite being at a sharp angle is a really smart decision.

• One thing’s for sure: facing Colorado in the Stars’ next game will only be a good thing when it comes to forgetting about this one. If there’s one team in the league the Stars will be fully awake for, it will be the Avalanche.