Monday Dallas Stars Roundup: The Two-Thirds Degree, Penalty Kill Secrets, and Playoff Bluelines

In the final third of the season, most of the focus will be on what comes next

Through 55 games, the Stars have done better than Florida, Vegas, Carolina, Colorado, Toronto, and (just barely) Edmonton. In the entire NHL, Dallas has got the third-best points percentage, the fourth-best goals differential, the third-best goal-scoring at 5-on-5 (really!), and the best penalty kill there is.

You probably know some or all of that. But to be a fan of a team is what I imagine it’s like to be a younger sibling of a celebrity: you tend to spend more time thinking about their quiet flaws than their well-known virtues.

And as we are two-thirds of the way through the season, those flaws are now pretty well-documented:

• The power play spent the first half of the season in quiescence before the Great January Awakening

• The defense has been the analytical equivalent of that guy in Lady in the Water who only lifts weights with one arm, except it’s his left arm

  

• Perhaps as a result of that last point, Dallas’s goaltending has made their defense look better than it’s been at evens.

• Some of the younger players have gotten off to slow starts on the scoresheet, with Logan Stankoven being the most obvious among them.

• Injuries to Miro Heiskanen and Tyler Seguin mean question marks for the postseason about both players’ fitness levels come April 19.

And…that’s about it for the major gripes, right?

Jake Oettinger has been a top-ten goalie in the league (albeit with the fifth-highest workload), and that’s much better than how he was looking last year in the regular season. The power play has been on fire since the calendar turned to 2025, and the addition of Mikael Granlund gives the Stars not just a Tyler Seguin backup plan, but a genuine playmaking threat that didn’t cost them anything from this year’s team to acquire.

Last year, the Stars rode hot hands to overcome goaltending struggles early, and they feasted on the opposition down the stretch after acquiring Chris Tanev, which helped to balance out Matt Duchene and Joe Pavelski’s struggles in the second half of the year.

This year, the forward lines really are as deep as any in the league—so much so that the Stars chose to healthy-scratch each of their top two penalty-killing forwards in successive games. And the defense has gotten by thanks to continued excellence from their left side, with Thomas Harley in particular taking his game to new heights this season.

In other words, there’s a lot to be content with through 55 games, and the good things far outweigh the bad. I don’t expect fans to echo that (or any) contentment, but it’s worth remembering that, in spite of all the chickens you dread will come home to roost in the postseason, Dallas is looking about as intimidating as any team in the league when it comes to first-round matchups right now.

That’s not to say they won’t lay a proverbial egg, because any team might; but being really good in spite of adversity is as encouraging as sign as any that this team could Do Things in the playoffs.

In fact, I had a chance to chat with Colin Blackwell in Anaheim last week, and he had an interesting take on the adversity the Stars have dealt with that I wanted to share with you all. I asked Blackwell about how the team’s overcoming different types of adversity so far this year made him confident that the Stars could make a deep playoff run this year, and he thankfully gave an answer far better than the question: