Game 7 WCQF AfterThoughts: MikKO

Mikko Rantanen. Mikko Rantanen. Wyatt Johnston. Mikko Rantanen.

There was a moment in this game where Mikko Rantanen first put the team on his back, for the third game in a row.

That moment was when you started to feel that Dallas winning this whole thing was actually, improbably, possible again, despite what Colorado had done to put up a 2-0 lead with 19 minutes to go in the Stars’ season.

That moment came when Rantanen was double-shifting, as he did for much of the game, taking Colin Blackwell’s spot on the fourth line for a shift. Rantanen has been asked to do for the forwards what Thomas Harley has been doing for the blue line, and he’s buoyed and sparked and ignited and carried and every other catalytic participle you can think of. And tonight, he did it yet again, somehow outdoing a Game 6 performance that would itself have been enshrined into legend, had the game not gotten away from Dallas late.

Remember, Mikko Rantanen had only one measly assist through four playoff games. The Stars were tied 2-2 in the series, and after a thumping loss to Colorado in Game 4, everyone was preparing to anoint the Avalanche as the deserving winners of the series. Nice couple of overtime wins there, Dallas, but it’s time to let the big Canadian superstars make another charge at a Cup. They traded away MacKinnon’s old sidekick, but he’s the real deal.

But the record scratched in crunch time, and loudly. In Games 5-7 of this series, Rantanen went psycho and piled up eleven points like he was playing all four of the Hungry Hippos by himself. In three games, five goals, six assists, and eleven points. In three games! The most important three games of a seven-game series!

And while Dallas didn’t win Game 6 (we don’t need to talk about why ever again, actually), it was anybody else’s fault but Rantanen’s, who had a preposterous four-point second period that…somehow wasn’t enough.

So Rantanen followed that up with a splendid, ineffable performance of scoring four points in a single period again. But this time, Rantanen decided to do it in the third period, just to make sure the lead he spiked into Colorado’s hearts would stay there.

After the game, Rantanen demurred when asked if it meant more to eliminate his old team, but man, can you imagine any human not wanting to absolutely wax the other side after Colorado kicked him out the door?

He’s just spent three games in Denver hearing boos he didn’t earn, and he’s spent longer than that for most of 2025 so far answering questions he never wanted to be asked about how it feels to be unceremoniously dumped by a team he never wanted to leave, because they thought they were better without him.

Put it this way: Rantanen has surely spent entirely too much time talking to moving companies over the last four months. If you don’t want to punish somebody for suffering that experience, I don’t know that human blood flows through your veins.

But Rantanen’s heart was beating tonight, surely. There are playoff legends in Dallas Stars lore, but it’s the nature of an insane Conference Final In Diguise like this one to make one round seem like a whole playoff run in itself, and any such heroism to be reflected prismatically into many times its original size.

Rantanen is shining in Dallas Stars lore, already. And we are only through one round.

Personally, I am exhausted. DeBoer says the team is, too. But not all exhaustion is created equally, and the Stars are enjoying the very best kind, right now.

And guess what? Mikko Rantanen is here for a long, long time. And if he never has a bigger game than this one, or even a bigger three-game set, he could still have one of the best playoff track records in Stars history when all is said and done. He is simply capable of doing things that almost nobody else can do.

Seems like the Stars might have won the trade, folks.

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Back to that moment, though. Right here, as the Stars are rushing back roughly 4-on-4, Rantanen has a choice to make: go wide and look for a cross, or cut to the middle and see what play he can make.

He cuts to the middle, where Sam Steel ends up boxing out/picking his man in a play that poetically bookended the Brock Nelson pick play on Val Nichushkin’s goal a few games ago.

And Rantanen finds his choice to cut to the slot rewarded with a glorious shooting lane, albeit one still a ways out from a goaltender that was frustrating him and many other Dallas Stars all series.

And Rantanen rips a video game shot off the crossbar and down, slamming into the ice just on the best side of the goal line to enliven a team that, by their own admission after the game, had been “flat” for far too much of it that point.

You can see the puck in the top left of the goal, where you couldn’t place it any more perfectly if you picked it up and carried it over there yourself.

Rantanen’s second goal (which we’ll discuss toward the end) was even more shocking, in its way. But the first goal was hope ex nihilo, and that is so often the very best kind.

NB: Oh, and did you notice who was leading the rush, pushing the play down at the net, forcing a defenseman to cover him, allowing Rantanen just that extra little bit of space?

It was Ilya Lyubushkin.

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However you drew up the playoffs going this year, you never would have chosen this particular set of six defensemen, in a vacuum. Lyubushkin was the stalwart right-side defenseman on the Stars this season. Through thick and (much more) thin, Lyubushkin was there, taking whatever assignment he was given, and rebounding from a tough play, and holding the fort while Thomas Harley did magical things.

Lyubushkin isn’t a scorer—though you surely remember his one goal—but that didn’t stop him from leading an offensive rush, because that’s what you do when the time and situation dictate that an offensive rush be led. You go. Lyubushkin went and did, just like he’s done whenever he’s been asked. And he’s done so as well as you could have possibly hoped, and often, far better.

All series, defense looked like Dallas’s biggest vulnerability. Lian Bichsel is a 20-year-old rookie who looked like he got his shoulder popped out and back in like a Ken doll last game, and he responded by looking like a steady veteran, winning battles and skating pucks out of trouble like a seasoned NHLer. I do not know what his body is made of, but is sterner stuff than most tree trunks, I am starting to believe.

Cody Ceci was a much-maligned defenseman on the worst team in the NHL who came to Dallas and has been asked to be a sort of great-value Chris Tanev, playing tons of minutes against some of the best hockey players in the world. The Stars watched him with Edmonton last year, playing those big minutes, but also having his workload shifted around to keep him from being overburdened as the playoffs went on.

But the Stars didn’t have a choice but to ask Ceci to resume his prior workload from earlier last year, because when Miro Heiskanen gets taken out with a nasty injury for months, you have to do something. And when Nils Lundkvist goes out for the year at the same time, you have to really do something.

And with the limited options the Stars had, they moved around chess pieces, and that meant Cody Ceci, Ilya Lyubushkin, and the AHL defenseman making his second straight postseason cavalry ride named Alex Petrovic, facing down two of the three finalists for the literal award NHL players give to the player they think is the most outstanding one in the league. Colorado has two of those guys.

All four of those defensemen above, along with the two cornerstones you know, would be asked to play important minutes against elite NHL players. And against all odds, they would do it, and come away with a win you’ll remember for a long, long time.

We’ve talked about them endlessly, but again, Thomas Harley and Esa Lindell shouldered the load. Heaved it, dragged it, even. Harley suffered a nasty fall later in the game that looked like disaster incarnate for a split second, but he apparently got a blood transfusion from Lian Bichsel recently, and he resonstituted himself to hold the Avalanche off the board for the rest of the game.

Esa Lindell is Esa Lindell, and he was Esa Lindell everywhere tonight, but perhaps most especially on the Colorado power play and the final two minutes of the game, when he was tasked with sussing out the highest of dangerous chances and subverting them at the last monent. And he did it, and did it, and did it again, even laying down a shift three times longer than any player really wants to play in one frantic sequence. But I’ve never seen Lindell look frantic. I don’t expect anyone has.

Still, two defensemen cannot win a whole series, and the Stars’ two best defensemen in Harley and Lindell only got the relative rest they did because of yeoman’s work by the other four guys on the back end. Not all heroism looks the same, but it all matters in the end.

Pete DeBoer was honest about it after the game, too:

“I thought Alain Nasredinne and that core, besides what Mikko [Rantanen] did, was the MVP of this series. That core, if you put the names up on the board, there's not a lot of household names there. Thomas Harley, we had to overplay him because of the situation with Miro [Heiskanen] out, but those other five guys just battled and scratched. It wasn't pretty.”

-Pete DeBoer after the Game 7 win

That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell. But DeBoer went on to really lay out exactly what that group of blueliners had to do. A lot, turns out.

We're not making a lot of plays coming through the neutral zone or jumping into the rush. We had to defend hard. What I liked about what they did, we got eaten up in Colorado in Game 4 and in Game 6, just absolutely on our heels, rush chances. They responded, they locked it down tonight and they gave us a chance to win tonight. They made them earn the two goals they got, one a shorty and one 6-on-5, but we didn't give them anything 5-on-5. We shut down a lot of their rush and those guys grinded, they grinded hard all series."

-Pete DeBoer, again

Colorado did generate looks at 5-on-5, as they did all series. But the goals didn’t follow the expectations, because in a seven-game gauntlet, bounces are everything. And Dallas consistently dodged the bad bounces they got, and made the most of the ones they got. You can talk about “clutch” in a vacuum, but this is what it looks like in reality: it defies the odds.

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Wyatt Johnston responded to DeBoer’s calling him out after a lackluster Game 6 by checking Nathan MacKinnon all night, shutting down shooting lanes in the final four minutes, and generally just matching up against the best player in the world and winning the battle.

Ceci, Lindell, and Wyatt Johnston. Those were the three players DeBoer chose against MacKinnon in every situation. And because the Stars had Game 7 at home, DeBoer got to make that choice.

I guess the regular season isn’t completely meaningless after all.

And because of that diligent defensive work, the score was tied before Johnston scored the biggest of Game 7 goals—he has a lot to choose from, now—from the same angle as Joel Kiviranta’s second goal in 2020 (look it up).

Wyatt Johnston is 21 years old.

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Jake Oettinger isn’t thrilled with the MacKinnon goal he let in for what felt like a backbreaker at the outset of the third period, but I think it’s the nature of great scorers like MacKinnon (or Rantanen, or Jason Robertson, or Wyatt Johnston) to score goals that make goalies feel silly.

Besides, Jake Oettingerin this series was incredible, including his performance down the home stretch of this game, by which I mean the entire third period, when Colorado had tons of chances to salt the game away and put it far beyond the reach of even a superhero like Rantanen.

Oettinger knows one series does not a playoff legend create (Rantanen notwithstanding), but this was as big as any challenge they’re likely to face, given the players they’re missing and the opponent they were facing. For Oettinger to get them two overtime wins and two more late-series wins the way he did in Game 5 and Game 7? That’s what franchise goaltenders do. And he did.

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Some last things before I send this out after 1:00am:

The Stars’ early power play was a huge chance to grab the game and play with a lead early, but the Stars couldn’t do it. They ended up with two power play goals anyway, and they finished the series with a 7-3 advantage in power play goals over Colorado (albeit with two shorthanded goals allowed). Special Teams was massive for them in this series, but I think even Steve Spott will say that he had very little to do with Rantanen’s second goal on the power play, when he just decided he was going to score, and made it happen. That’s something nobody can draw up.

Jamie Benn’s double minor joined a long list of missed opportunities for the Avalanche power play, and Bednar acknowledged as much after the game. The power play’s failures may not have lost Colorado the series, given how close it was, but it most certainly didn’t win it for them despite golden chances before or in overtime, and early in Game 7. That’s going to sting for a long time.

Colorado’s PK surrendered goals, yes, but their pressuring Dallas high on the power play (and on a risky entry play by Hintz in this one) paid off in spades. But Josh Manson cannot beat all four forwards up the ice on that goal, and Matt Duchene surely knows that. But you know, I think Duchene also found redemption in this game, even if he graciously handed the commemorative Avalanche Vengeance Baton to #96 this year and taking care of the final goal last time around.

Oskar Bäck was huge in this game, multiple times making calm plays under pressure and smart decisions with or without the puck. Again, he’s been asked to do so much on the kill and on a team that rolls four lines, and he’s not only earned trust, but validated it. You should be rooting for Oskar Bäck regardless of your team allegiances.

Lineup

The Stars began the game with this lineup:

Granlund-Hintz-Rantanen
Marchment-Duchene-Seguin
Benn-Johnston-Dadonov
Bäck-Steel-Blackwell

Lindell-Ceci
Harley-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-Petrovic

Oettinger in goal

Both teams kept the same lineups as they did in Game 6, which means the Avalanche started yet another game with Mackenzie Blackwood in goal. It would be their last, this year.

Game Beats

After icing the puck on the first shift of the game, Colorado showed more early nerves when their fourth-line center Parker Kelly took an offensive-zone holding penalty on Ilya Lyubushkin.

Dallas generated a great look on the delayed penalty sequence, which saw Blackwood make a save on a puck I’m not sure he saw. Dallas generated another good luck early on the power play with a high tip, but Blackwood never had to come up with anything special, and the Stars didn’t capitalize.

Colorado then get a glorious chance to grab the game’s first goal on a Jamie Benn cross check to his old linemate’s face.

Val Nichushkin went down understandably grabbing his mouth, and after a brief review, the double minor was confirmed. Dallas had a big hole to get out of.

Dallas killed the first half of the four minutes with some crucial defensive stick work, while Oettinger also had to make to make a big left-pad save on MacKinnon off the rush. Martin Nečas also had a couple kicks at the can from the back post, but Oettinger was in position.

In the end, the penalty was killed, with a couple of dangerous shots whistling just wide before Oettinger had to stop Nichushkin on the doorstep as he attempted to use his huge reach to tuck it around him, but couldn’t. Predictably, the building exploded after the Stars finished up the kill.

Mikko Rantanen got the next great chance on a 2-on-1 with Hintz, but MacKinnon’s backchecking and a rolling back conspired to prevent Rantanen from getting more than a late backhand shot off, and the Avs kept things 0-0.

Lian Bichsel, Jamie Benn, and Alex Petrovic all found a chance to lay hits on the opposition (and in nearly the same spot low along the boards), which further engaged the already raucous crowd.

Overall, it was a cagey first period that both teams probably felt they ought to have grabbed a lead in, but then, would you expect anything other than a tight, defensive start to this one?

Second Period

Mackenzie Blackwood had the nerviest moment of the early second period when he tried to sweep a dump-in away, only to whiff on it, allowing Dadonov a chance to poke it in, but it went just wide of the far post.

The Finnish line then got another great chance after some hard work down low, as a failed zone exit by Colorado got sent back to an open Granlund, but his attempt to drive to the net and discombobulate Blackwood bore no fruit, and Colorado was able to clear.

Dallas got another couple of great chances off shaky rebounds with the Johnston line out there, but neither of Dadonov’s attempts were poked past Blackwood. The line got one more odd-man rush at the end of their shift, but Johnston’s back-door pass to Dadonov didn’t connect for what would have been a tap-in goal.

Sam Malinksi took an interference call on a slicing Roope Hintz at the Colorado blue line, and Dallas’s power play had a chance to grab the lead halfway into the game. Unfortunately, the power play would repeat its gaffe from earlier in the series and tun the puck over at the blue line, allowing Josh Manson to beat all four Dallas forwards up the ice to receive a Logan O’Connor pass off the rush, after which Manson shot it off the post. But it rebounded off Oettinger’s back and trickled just over the goal line for a crushing shorthanded goal.

Oettinger had to come up big on an extended bit of offensive zone pressure by Colorado, which trapped Lindell and Ceci in their zone with the fourth line. When all was said and done, Oettinger had made a couple of remarkable saves through traffic that he may not have picked up early if at all, and the Stars finally got Lindell off the ice well after two minutes of work.

The Finnish line gave a push with two minutes to go, generating some low-angle looks that could’ve turned into more. But the period ended 1-0, with Dallas having 20 minutes to answer some questions they really would have preferred not to have to answer.

Shots on goal were just 14-10, for Colorado.

Third Period

Rob Schneider was apparently in the house, and he was shown on the video word waving a towel to energize the home crowd.

Right after that, something terrible happened. I’ll let you decide how closely those two things were connected.

After having 18 minutes to talk about how to manage a 1-0 game, the Stars began the second by losing the opening faceoff and promptly taking a penalty in their zone. But on the delayed penalty, Nathan MacKinnon came off the bench as the sixth skater, got the puck from Nichushkin, and put a crafty shot at the near post, where Oettinger was just barely flinching. It would cost him.

Dallas had a 2-0 hole to climb out of, and they frankly looked uncertain of how to do that for the next couple of minutes. Colorado was sitting pretty, and in the moment, I was reminded of the 2007 Vancouver series, when the Sedins and company would just cycle the puck infinitely while defending leads, completely exhausting the Stars’ forward line facing them.

Thomas Harley had a scary moment six minutes in when Landeskog’s stick got under his skate as the two were going into the corner for a puck, and Harley lost an edge. He went into the boards hard, and he took a good little while to get back up, but once he was able to stand without effort, you could bank on his returning, and he did shortly afterwards, even making a great, diving play at his blue line to avoid an odd-man rush.

Another great chance came when Mikko Rantanen (double shifting for most of this game) walked into the slot. He did so thanks to Sam Steel, setting an uncalled pick play that seemed almost poetic in its cosmic justice.

Rantanen walked into the open slot, and promptly ripped a shot bar-down to cut the lead in half and inject some desperately needed hope into the home crowd.

But after another good push by Dallas, during which Marchment fell over an Avalanche player and looked for a call that didn’t come, Duchene took a pretty awful tripping penalty in the neutral zone when he got caught reaching with his stick.

It was a moment that could have sapped any life from the comeback, but all was not even close to written in this game, yet. Colorado’s power play continued to be their own worst enemy, and then Dallas got the biggest break of the series in every sense: a Cale Makar one-timer ended with a shattered stick, and Roope Hintz got the puck and headed the other way, 1-on-1 with the unarmed defender. Hintz forced the issue with Makar, and Makar had to sweep his leg to take down Hintz.

After the game, Makar said he thought he got the puck with his leg, but as with sticks, that’s not the end-all, be-all it used to be. A penalty was called, and 4-on-4 would happen for just under a minute, after which Dallas would have half a power play to get a tying goal.

The 4-on-4 period was tilted toward Colorado, making it feel more like a penalty kill for Dallas than anything—and with Nichushkin’s 4-on-4 goal earlier in the series, who could blame them?—but Dallas weathered some scary chances (which is to say Oettinger did), and then the power play went to work.

Initially, they looked rough, and you wondered if this chance was destined to be frittered away, with overtime looming. And then, Mikko Rantanen reminded everyone that Nathan MacKinnon was not the only superstar with a huge playoff track record, and he took the puck, facing a 1-on-3 situation, and decided One Mikko Rantanen is still an advantage.

Rantanen sliced through all three skaters and took it to the net, where he drew out Blackwood.

He then took it powerfully around the net and attempted a wrap-around that he couldn’t quite complete. But that’s where the fortunate skate of Sam Girard showed up to, miraculously, bank the puck in, sending the crowd into absolute bedlam.

Dallas got another big break at the biggest of moments, and the game was tied.

Here’s what Nathan MacKinnon said afterward:

“I don’t know. It’s pretty shocking. Felt like we were in total control and then Mikko, credit to him, he made some amazing plays. He was a difference maker and he took over. I don’t know. I’m in shock to be honest with you. Felt like we were in complete control of the game the whole time and just lost it.”

-Nathan MacKinnon on Game 7

And with the home crowd at full volume, Jack Drury lost his composure. After Tyler Seguin won an offensive-zone face-off, Drury didn’t want to let Seguin get to the net. And in his desperation, Drury grabbed on and ended up dragging Seguin down.

Despite an incredulous Drury, Dan O’Rouke insisted upon the call, and Dallas’s power play went to work.

That’s where Matt Duchene then redeemed himself for the slow backcheck on the shorthanded goal.

Duchene and Wyatt Johnston recreated their power play goal from earlier in the series, and Duchene threaded a pass perfectly through the crease to Johnston, who was never going to miss from that angle, least of all in a Game 7.

He did not miss.

And just like that, a 2-0 deficit turned into a 3-2 lead. It was unimaginable, because nobody’s imagination seriously contemplates that sort of insanity. Thankfully, hockey doesn’t require imagination to blow our minds.

From there, it was all about Jake Oettinger and the Dallas Stars defensive desperation. Colorado threw everything at them, which is to say the same players they’ve been throwing at them: The top line. The top line again. Landeskog, as the extra attacker, and Cale Makar and more Cale Makar.

And after a final minute of Colorado getting far too few looks (Landeskog probably had the best one, which glanced off Oettinger and just wide), Oettinger finally grabbed the puck with just 13 seconds to go.

The crowd roared. One more face-off, probably, and the Stars would get away with a victory equal parts theft and heroism.

But there was one more heroic moment left.

Mikko Rantanen looked like he was set to strip Makar at the point and take the puck down the ice at the empty net, but Makar make an incredible play to keep possession here. Genuinely, this play was all-world, as Makar shielded the puck and absorbed the giant Finnish forward’s hit, sending the puck down low.

But after Esa Lindell chopped a puck up toward the point, Tyler Seguin, whose hip is working just fine now thank you very much, went to a knee and forked a puck out to the neutral zone. Where Rantanen, whose tank is never completely empty, found it, and took it, and sealed it.

This screencap has two specks between Rantanen and the empty net. One is the puck, sliding along the ice for a hat trick. The other, larger speck is a hat in mid-flight, as the ice was being littered before the puck even made it in.

Some messes are no trouble at all to clean up.

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Dallas doesn’t know whom they play yet in the second round. It will be either Winnipeg or St. Louis, who have their own Game 7 showdown Sunday night.

This series took everything Dallas had to give. But regardless of what else happens this spring, they will be forever glad they had the chance to give it. No Miro Heiskanen? No Jason Robertson?

No more Colorado Avalanche.

Onto Round 2.