Monday Rundown: Shootout Debates, Video Review from 2003 to 2026, and Mikael Granlund's Mike Legg

Let's talk about the Dallas Stars

The Texas Stars walk it off, figuratively speaking

Good morning! Welcome to the latest Monday Rundown.

In case you missed it, Gavin and I recorded something like eight different podcasts over last weekend while we were in Cedar Park;.

What did we learn? Well, Trey Taylor had this key to cooking a good steak: Make sure you have a timer. That was the second-best piece of advice he proffered during our chat.

Our chat with Toby Petersen is also up, which features Petersen talking about things like:

• Playing against Sergei Samsonov for the first time in a tournament in Japan

• Playing on a line with Mike Modano, whom he grew up admiring in Minnesota

• How many of his old jerseys he’s kept over the years

Anyway, keep an eye out for more of these as they keep dropping this week.

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Coppell native Hannah Bilka and Team USA will face Switzerland on Monday afternoon (today) in a game which you can stream on Peacock.

So, do you have your Peacock subscription all paid up? Peacock is one of my favorite streaming services for soccer and the Olympics, but probably my least-favorite for streaming TV shows or movies, given the glut of in-show advertisements found in the lower tiers of their subscriptions. Also, all streaming services just make me vaguely sad, as watching television just doesn’t seem nearly as special as it used to when my dad would go on the roof to adjust the TV antenna to reduce static for Monday Night Football. He never fell off the roof, but my brother broke his arm while using a three-foot stool one time, so I guess the lesson here is that streaming services are, at the very least, safer than going outside.

Okay, onto the Dallas Stars stuff.

Statistical Oddities

With just 25 games left in the Stars’ regular season, here are a few of the oddest stats I’ve come across so far:

• With his two hits against the Blues just before the break, Justin Hryckowian has finally passed Lian Bichsel for the team lead in hits, with 86. Bichsel had led the Stars with 85 hits in just 26 games before his prolonged absence at the end of November.

  • How long does it take Bichsel to recapture the lead when he returns after the break? I’m betting he’s back atop that leaderboard within the first ten minutes against Seattle on February 25.

• Mikko Rantanen still has more penalty minutes than fellow Olympians Tom Wilson and Sam Bennett.

• Rantanen is also 2nd in the NHL in power play assists, with a whopping 25. (Connor McDavid leads everyone with 29.)

  • For context, Matt Duchene led the Stars in that category last year (‘24-25), with 19 power play assists in 82 games.

  • Robertson and Heiskanen tied for the lead the year before (‘23-24) with, yes, 19.

  • The first year under DeBoer (‘22-23) is the Stars’ recent high-water mark: Heiskanen recorded 32 power play assists, and Jason Robertson was just behind him, with 28.

  • By the way, the year before that? John Klingberg paced the Stars with—you guessed it—19 PP assists in his last season in Dallas.

• Two players on the Stars have yet to record an assist this season: Casey DeSmith, and Nathan Bastian. The latter has three goals, however, which are even better than assists.

• Bastian has the 5th-highest shooting percentage on the team, in fact.

• After his recent tear, Matt Duchene is now 2nd on the team in shooting percentage, having scored 10 goals on 50 shots on goal for a rip-roaring 20%.

  • In first place? That would be Tyler Seguin, who scored 7 goals on 31 shots before his ACL injury for a 22.6% mark. When you’re a sniper, you snipe.

Coach’s Challenge: A Hall of Mirrors

If you remember Robby Fabbri’s goal against Dallas a couple weeks ago that the Stars challenged for offside, you might have seen his reaction when the Stars initially challenged, when he appears to say, “It’s offside”:

As well as his reaction a few minutes later to the announcement of the goal counting on the ESPN broadcast:

Well, I’ve since been told that the reason for his shocked reaction after the goal counted is that the St. Louis bench and coaching staff were confident the goal was going to be overturned after review—much as the Stars were confident when they challenged for offside.

Here’s the clip where the broadcast paused the replay when Faulk touched the puck after it crossed the blue line, appearing to show Mathieu Joseph’s skate still on the wrong side of the blue line:

I’ll enlarge the top portion to show the apparent space between Joseph’s skate and the blue line:

Forgive me, but it seems incredibly harsh to assess a penalty to a team who sees this view in the handful of seconds a team has to decide whether to challenge for offside, and pulls the trigger.

At the very least, I think it’s reasonable to ask that the NHL release some kind of convincing evidence for why such calls are upheld, because this one still seems like one you’d challenge every time, right? In my humble opinion, offside review either needs to be gotten rid of entirely (which is the best-case scenario), or it needs to be entirely adjudicated by the league, rather than being locked behind a coach’s challenge that triggers a forensic review capable of conclusions beyond human comprehension.

Speaking of reviews: Four days later, the Stars challenged a Kailer Yamamoto goal in Utah for goaltender interference.

Gulutzan said the Stars were told that there wasn’t sufficient contact with the goaltender to merit overturning the call, which more or less accords with the official explanation (which is no explanation at all): “Video review determined that Barrett Hayton’s contact with Casey DeSmith did not constitute goaltender interference prior to Kailer Yamamoto’s goal.”

One other thing I’ve heard about this is that the main thing the referees were reviewing for was the skate contact between Hayton and DeSmith:

But equally as aggravating to DeSmith, I’m sure, was the stick of Barrett Hayton, which was contacting his mask and chest as the shot came in:

As far as the Stars heard, the referees solely focused on the skate contact during the video review and did not even consider the stick contact as a part of their review.

Hayton went into the crease on his own, then contacted the goaltender’s skate, then his stick contacts DeSmith’s mask (which is worn on the head, where the eyes and brain are according to Science), and yet the goal was upheld.

By contrast: The below goal was disallowed on January 20, despite Perry’s being high-sticked before the contact with the goaltender.

And for stick-to-mask contact, this goal was also disallowed on January 5:

Honestly, I don’t know what teams are supposed to conclude from how goaltender interference has been handled this year, because it sure seems like the precedent is changing every month, and there’s not a shred of transparency to help anyone glean wisdom from how rulings are handed down.

Entering the blue paint and contacting the goaltender before a goal had, for a while, been the most reliable factor for taking goals off the board. Apparently, that’s no longer the case. Good luck figuring out when or why.

(Oh, and make sure you do it in the few seconds you have to decide whether or not to risk a challenge.)

Shootout Preferences

We already know that Jason Robertson’s preference as a shooter is for the Stars to shoot first when they’re in a shootout at home (the home team gets to choose whether to shoot first or second). Robertson generally goes first in the order, so he enjoys putting the pressure on the other team by scoring right off the bat.

However, I was curious about what a goaltender’s preference would be: Shoot first or second? And it turns out, it depends on which goalie I asked.

Casey DeSmith answered right away that, all things being equal, he might prefer that the Stars shoot second, so that he can get an opportunity to make the save right off the bat and put pressure on the other team. So, basically the same reasoning as Robertson’s, but just with the thing a goalie can control, rather than the thing a shooter can control. (Professional athletes are confident, and they like to have an impact on the game as soon as possible, which is no surprise.)

But Jake Oettinger, after thinking about it for a moment, said that he’d like the Stars to shoot first, because as a goalie, he enjoys when the game is on the line, and he can win it with a save.

Interestingly, Vegas chose to shoot second in the skills competition against Dallas a few games back, and Robertson scored right off the bat. Oettinger made two saves, and then Rantanen won it with a second goal, which meant Oettinger never had to even bother making a third save attempt. I can’t imagine anyone minds when it breaks that way.

Captain Mikael

If you haven’t seen it yet, Mikko Rantanen (along with Sebastian Aho) will be one of Finland’s alternate captains in the Winter Olympics:

Mikael Granlund will be the team’s captain, in the absence of the injured Aleksander Barkov.

That’s the choice that always seemed like the obvious one, given the respect Granlund has in Finnish hockey. His gravitas was apparent even last year after his arrival to Dallas in trade, right before the Four Nations Face-Off.

“When he puts on the Finnish jersey, it’s like he elevates his game to another level,” said Mikko Rantanen of Granlund, talking to NHL.com.

Granlund carries himself like a player who has earned some respect, because he has. Granlund has been well-known for stepping up for his home country ever since scoring a Mike Legg goal against Russia in 2011:

That goal came in the semifinal of the World Championships, but don’t miss Granlund’s toe-drag to draw a penalty a minute into the next game, the final against Sweden.

Of course, Finland won that game, earning their first World Championship victory in 16 years, as you can hear joyfully narrated in those highlights.

Also on that 2011 championship team: Ossi Väänänen, who is now one of Esa Lindell’s partners in the Jokerit ownership group, and Niko Kapanen, former Dallas Stars draft pick and scorer of a few big goals in the 2002-03 playoff run, including the Stars’ second goal in the final game of their playoff run:

The Stars would end up losing that game 4-3 as the Ducks advanced to the Western Conference Final.

That Ducks series is famous for the 5-OT marathon in Game 1, but that final loss in Game 6 was cruel in its own right. If you don’t recall (and who would?) A third-period Stu Barnes goal that would have tied the game was called off after (of course) a video review said that this goal had to be chalked off. Can you guess (or remember) why?

Well, it’s because the net was allegedly slightly off its pegs thanks to contact from an Anaheim player, so that goal was taken off the board. This was not a challenge; it was a unilateral decision made by the NHL in an elimination game in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and Stu Barnes was not pleased.

I guess it’s comforting to know that some things haven’t changed, even after 23 years.