Monday Rundown: Toronto Reunions, Michael Raffl's Scuffle, Leaderboard's Finalizing, and Some Calder Cup Playoff Intrigue
Also, some Mavrik Bourque MVP season highlights
Welcome to the Monday Rundown. It’s the final week of the regular season, and also the first week of the postseason. The Stars will host the Wild this weekend, but first, they have two games to play in Toronto and Buffalo.
Last year at this time, the Leafs and Sabres’ fortunes were reversed. Toronto finished 4th in the NHL, while Buffalo was down in 26th, missing the playoffs yet again. The Leafs would defeat Ottawa in the first round before pushing Florida to seven games in the second, but that would be as far as they got.
That might as well have been a lifetime ago, for the Leafs. This year, Buffalo is the team in 4th, while Toronto is even worse: 28th, as things stand right now. The two clubs were once on opposite ends of Fortune’s wheel, and you may have heard a thing or two about how that ol’ circle can turn.
These last two games won’t mean terribly much for Dallas, but it’s always fun to see what Nick Robertson manages to do against his brother’s team. You may recall him scoring and assisting on two important goals in Dallas around a year and a half ago.
With Cameron Hughes being loaned back to the Texas Stars yesterday, one suspects former Leaf Michael Bunting might get into the game, too. One suspects he’d enjoy putting up a goal against his old club, given the chance.
Texas Stars at risk of falling into qualification playoff round
In the AHL, the playoff format is a bit wonky to account for the different number of teams in different divisions. But all you need to know right now is this: Texas’s pair of losses in extra time to Manitoba over the weekend have put the AHL Stars at risk of slipping from third to fourth, thus having to play an additional best-of-three round against the fifth seed before advancing to play the juggernaut Grand Rapids Griffins, the top seed in the Central.
Because of tiebreakers and Manitoba having a game in hand, the Stars no longer control their own destiny in terms of avoiding that first play-in round. If it’s any consolation, however, the Stars did have to go through the top seed in the West last year, when they took down the Milwaukee Admirals.
Speaking of which, Texas also faced Milwaukee in 2024, and you might enjoy watching these highlights, which include Lian Bichsel hitting someone into the bench, Mavrik Bourque making a diving assist play (and a second nice assist), Justin Hryckowian trying a backwards between-the-legs shot, and a Bourque empty-netter.
If you want to get an idea of how good Bourque was in his MVP season two years ago, the evidence is all right there.
Team Leaderboard
All right, let’s take a look at where things stand with just two games left to play in another very solid regular season.
Goals
Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston have 44 goals apiece. Robertson has 29 even-strength tallies (11th in the NHL), while Johnston has a franchise record 26 power play goals—seven more than Kaprizov and Dorofeyev, who are tied for a distant third in the league, with 19.
Robertson’s 29 goals at evens is four shy of the 33 he tallied in his 2022-23 All-Star campaign. Also, here’s a fun fact: Robertson’s 288(!) shots on goal are 3rd in the entire NHL this year.
As for the rest of the team, the Stars will finish with nine double-digit goal-scorers this year. Mikko Rantanen is third on the team with 22, and the next six guys all have between 12 and 16 goals. But perhaps the most striking thing of all about the below list is that Duchene, Hintz, and Benn are all within a goal of fourth place on the team despite none of them having played even 75% of the team’s games this year:
Assists
As for assists, Mikko Rantanen ranks 19th in the NHL with 54 helpers, the same total as Miro Heiskanen, who won’t play again until the playoffs.
So the apple crown is right there for Rantanen to grab outright, so long as he can get one assist before Robertson gets five. Will we see a furious 2-on-0 sequence where the duo just refuse to shoot, each passing hard and harder back to the other’s tape until the puck disintegrates from sheer velocity? Well, it’s not technically impossible.
However, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see that the assist crown has really been locked up already. Because of those 54 assists by Rantanen, 33 have been primary helpers—nine more than Johnston, whose 24 first assists rank second on the team. Robertson and Heiskanen’s helpers have, more often, been the secondary kind.
(By the way: David Pastrňák leads the league with an unbelievable 56 primary helpers this year.)
Points
Jason Robertson has 94 points, first on the team by a mile and 10th in the NHL. Johnston has 84, good for 19th in the NHL.
Rantanen has 76, and Heiskanen 63. Those are the Big Four for Dallas, and the Stars can ill-afford to lose any of them—particularly the one who plays defense better than almost anyone else in the world.
Plus/Minus
In plus/minus, Esa Lindell has run away with the title, barring late drama. He’s at +29, while Robertson is trailing at +21.
(Yes, it’s still a major bummer that we didn’t get to see Tyler Seguin keep playing as well as he was for a full campaign.)
Hits
This is still a legitimate race: Lian Bichsel has racked up 138 hits, while Adam Erne is at 136, albeit in five fewer games played.
Keep an eye out for how hits get recorded in these last two games. There could be a (very unimportant) heavyweight belt on the line.
PIM
It always annoys me that the “P” in PIM is plural (penalties), which means I feel weird saying “PIMs.” And yet, we say “RBIs” all the time in baseball even though it “should” be “RsBI,” so maybe it’s just a thing we need to all get over this, becuase “PsIM” would be a dumb thing to say, let alone type.
Anyway, okay, yes, the stats: Mikko Rantanen has a ton of penalties in minutes. He has 93, to be exact. Jamie Benn is in a distant, distant second with 51, while Petrovic, Hryckowian, and Blackwell are all in the 40s.
If you look at rate stats, things get interesting: Tyler Myers is taking the most minor penalties per hour, but he’s also drawing the most penalties of anyone in Dallas this year, even more than Bunting or Rantanen have been.
Admittedly, it’s only been 14 games for Myers, and he’s historically taken more penalties than he’s earned (as most defensemen do). Still, that high stick to the mouth the other night was far from the only power play he’s earned for Dallas, so you have to give him credit: He’s taken 6 penalties and drawn 8. The math checks out, so far.
Goals per-game oddities
With two games left to play, the rate stats are shaping up to make fun trivia questions:
Cameron Hughes’s one goal in three games while playing just 7 minutes per night means he’s far and away the most efficient scorer on the team this year, though keeping up that 50% shooting pace will be a challenge. Nathan Bastian and Jamie Benn have likewise scored more goals per minute of ice time than Matt Duchene or Mikko Rantanen, which is not an indictment on anybody. We call these “oddities” for a reason.
Compared to last year, the scored numbers are down overall, except for Johnston and Robertson going Psycho Mode. That dip, despite a host of injuries, hasn’t turned out to be quite as drastic as we’d feared it might be a few months ago, though. Compare the above to last year’s squad, for instance:
I’d say that any worries of Gulutzan’s team being offensively challenged have turned out to be somewhat overstated (yes, I realize saying this a few days before the playoffs is tantamount to tempting fate). The Stars have scored the ninth-most goals in the NHL, Now all they have to do is keep that up as the pressure mounts. No problem, right?
Random Fight of the Week
For today, let’s take a look at just how quickly a series can heat up:
Raffl didn’t light the world on fire during his one year in Dallas, but he was good in that playoff run, chipping in two goals as well as taking no guff from the Flames. (You can see he landed at least one very solid punch that had Tkachuk wincing on his way back to the room).
That 2021-22 year would turn out to be Raffl’s final NHL season, as the Austrian native would head to the Swiss-A league from 2022-2025, before finally returning to play back in Austria on EC Salzburg, a team whose captain is Thomas Raffl—Michael’s older brother.
Hockey is a grueling profession, but I’d imagine there are few things more special than getting to spend the last years of your pro career on a team with your brother, back in your homeland. The fact that Michael just so happened to lead the team in scoring this year probably doesn’t hurt, either.
As for the Stars in Raffl’s final NHL year, the 2022 Dallas club was the first wild card seed, so they crossed over and faced Calgary, the top team in the Pacific Division. Meanwhile, the Avalanche were the first seed in the West, so they got the cupcake Kings in the first round, whom they swept 4-0, beginning what was easily the most ideal path to the Cup Final they could have asked for.
The Stars were struggling to score goals in Rick Bowness’s final year, ranking 21st in the league. This was the series of legend for Jake Oettinger, who dragged his team to the brink of victory in Game 7, only for sheer volume to finally rear its head, as the late Johnny Gaudreau made an unbelievable shot just under the crossbar to win the series in overtime, which was as heartbreaking for Dallas as it was thoroughly deserved for Calgary.
But back in Game 1, the hatred was already flowing. John Klingberg and Rasmus Andersson got into it at the end of this fight, and that would not be the last of Klingberg that we’d see in that series. For he and Tkachuk would get into it early in Game 2, getting two minutes apiece, and then the duo would also kick off Game 3 in Dallas by dropping the gloves for a full-on fight. And while that tilt went about as well as his bout with Andersson had, I’ll never forget being at that Game 3 and feeling like we were witnessing the most outrageous sort of swan song for Klingberg’s time as a Dallas Star, as that series turned out to be.
Also, the Stars went up 2-1 in that series after Klingberg’s bout fired them up en route to a 4-2 victory. Would they have defeated Edmonton in order to face Colorado, whom they also would have humbled? We’ll never know. But also, definitely, because the craziest fact of all is what we’ll end on today: In Colorado’s Cup-winning 2021-22 season, they and the Dallas Stars were basically identical in 5v5 expected goals for, at 13th and 14th, respectively.
In terms of actual goals, you’ll recall things going very differently. The Stars just weren’t a very dynamic team that year, and many players were looking slow. They only had three players hit the 50-point mark that season, despite very solid health among the forward corps.
Every year is different, and the Stars are two coaches removed from that era. Still, it’s worth remembering how things once were before turning back to the most intense time of year in which to contemplate how things are.
Appreciated the historical Bourque appreciation!
You’ve probably already caught this but 21 and 53 sit at 44 goals and not 40.