Once Again, the Dallas Stars Are Diverting the Colorado Avalanche Offense

Let's step back for a second here

The Series is 2-1 for Dallas now. They’ve grabbed home ice advantage back. Things are rosy, which is nice until you realize that this is exactly where the Stars were in the series against Edmonton last year through three games. Which is to say, anything can happen, still.

Today, I wanted to lead with the above screencap because I don’t think there’s a more representative image of this series so far than Ilya Lyubushkin getting in the way of Nathan MacKinnon on the power play.

Goaltending is a great theme, too. Don’t get me wrong: Mackenzie Blackwood has probably been the best goalie in the playoffs so far, and Jake Oettiner has been a titan on the road in the playoffs for a long while now. That’s incredible. But I don’t know that road/home splits are all they’re cracked up to be in most cases, so I’m going to just talk about this series as a whole, because wins are wins, and in the playoffs, nobody cares how or where you win a series, so long as you get to four before the other guy does.

The Stars, right now, are leading a best-of-seven series by a 2-1 margin, and they’ve done so with a trait they haven’t exhibited in a long time: stifling defensive play. Not only would that have been anathema to this team’s recent defensive philosophy of “Let’s just see how this plays out” over the last couple of months, when they were giving up the most scoring chances per game of any team in the league at 5-on-5 since February 1.

Stifling defense also isn’t really what you think of when you think of a “pressure” system like Pete DeBoer’s. As he said the other week: if his team loses, he’d rather lose while his team plays on their toes, attacking. He is not Rick Bowness, in other words.

Though perhaps it’s appropriate that after getting a bit overzealous with their forecheck in Game 1, they’ve channeled that aggressive pressure into a more targeted approach that has led to two straight overtimes of absorbing Colorado’s pressure and generating a better scoring chance, and winning.

Pete Deboer has outcoached this Colorado bench before through precise aggression, and they’ve once again turned a series in their favor by adjusting their play in the most important ways.