One Dallas Stars Playoff Goal I'll Never Forget

No, it's probably not the one you're thinking of

Sidney Crosby turned 38 this week, which is impossible, because that would mean I have also aged 20 years since he broke into the league. And since I know that hasn’t happened, I guess this is just another one of those Media Hoaxes I keep hearing so much about.

Still, one of the sweet things about Crosby’s birthday this week, much like Alex Ovechkin’s goals record chase last season, is how it gave the hockey world permission to indulge in the awesome moments from an awesome player’s career while the awesome player is still playing. Take, for instance, these great little moments from Sid’s career that Josh Yohe mentions, or this list of his top goals so far. There are a lot of unbelievable highlights and stories, but even more that never got reported as a result of The Next One’s aversion to excessive media coverage.

The Kid’s birthday also made me think of one of my own favorite Sidney Crosby Moments™. And while it is admittedly not going to make any of the aforementioned lists, I think the venerable readers of this publication might already know what moment I’m talking about.

Yes, that’s right: October 16, 2014. The season had barely begun, and the Dallas Stars were hungry. Fresh off a surprising playoff berth and a more surprising playoff heartbreak in Game 6 against Anaheim, the Stars had taken another step forward, as Jim Nill followed up the Summer of Seguin by making a big trade for Jason Spezza, who exercised his no-trade clause to block a prior move to Nashville.

The Stars would light up the NHL that season, but unfortunately on both ends of the scoreboard. Other noteworthy players were also acquired in the 2014 offseason, including two ostensible backup goaltenders. But the night of October 16 would fortunately involve neither Jussi Rynnäs nor Anders Lindbäck.

The Penguins, meanwhile, were fresh off a painful Game 7 loss in the second round to the New York Rangers, who would go on to lose to the Kings in the Stanley Cup Final.

Still, everything was looking up for the Pens in 2014. They had a killer duo of Evgeni Malkin and Crosby, and a stud defenseman in Kris Letang (who would play over 26 minutes in a cross-conference game against Dallas in October, for reasons only Dan Bylsma knows). They also had Marc-André Fleury, still in the prime of his career.

This was a special time to be a Stars fan. Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin were in the thick of the conversation about the best duos in the league, along with Crosby/Malkin and Toews/Kane, and with Lindy Ruff leading a team built for attacking and speed, all they needed was for the goaltending to just do its job adequately. (This is called “Foreboding.”) At the time, there was every reason to believe that Kari Lehtonen was still the franchise goaltender he would be paid to be until 2018. At the time.

The Penguins were hot stuff, but the Stars knew they had something cooking. Dallas’s two best forwards were young, full of beans, and ready to keep proving everyone wrong. And this was the game where they would have to do so a bit more than usual.

Dallas had flown into Pittsburgh after a Seguin hat trick led them to victory in Columbus two nights before. But from the drop, Crosby reminded everyone who was still Aces in the NHL, effortlessly splitting Jordie Benn and Brenden Dillon before chipping paint behind Lehtonen as Dillon brought him down.

And, this is the point in this story where I started getting major déjà vu. Why did I feel like…

Ah. Yeah, that’s right. It turns out Sean Shapiro had already revisited this game just after the COVID shutdown five years ago.

So, go back and read through his excellent reliving of that night, if you’d like to, or just watch the highlights. But for today, I still wanted to talk about a goal I was planning to talk about anyway at some point this summer for well over a month now. It’s a goal that has nothing to do with Crosby, but it still lives vividly in my memory, and has a certain timely quality to it. And hopefully, six other people haven’t written about it this year.

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April 14, 2016 - The Dallas Stars have finished the season with the best record in the Western Conference. They’ve set the NHL record for empty-net goals in a season, and the two-headed goaltending monster of Antti Niemi and Kari Lehtonen has been Mostly Adequate, which is more than enough for an offense this outrageous.

And hey, here’s something crazy: Because the NHL was normal back then, finishing first in your conference didn’t mean you had to face the defending Stanley Cup champions in the first round! Instead, it meant you actually got to face a markedly inferior team. And if the words “markedly inferior” didn’t already tip you off, I will be clear: we are talking about the Minnesota Wild.

That 2015-16 Wild team was in trouble coming into the playoffs, and they knew it. Zach Parise, Erik Haula, and Thomas Vanek were all injured, and that was scoring the Wild couldn’t afford to lose, Parise in particular. The other half of the Ryan Suter Free Agent Bonanza in 2012, Parise was second on that Minnesota team with a rip-roaring 53 points, just three behind Mikko Koivu, who “led” the squad with 56 of his own.

For context: leading an NHL team in scoring with 56 points in kind of like winning a spelling bee by correctly decoding “FBI.” You are technically naming letters, but nobody is going to invite you on Hollywood Squares because of it.

Anyway, that Game 1 against Minnesota was a mismatch from the outset, which is, again, kind of supposed to be the whole idea behind the first round of the playoffs. The Wild had struggled so much that they’d even fired Mike Yeo midway through the season, with John Torchetti getting a brief interim stint before Bruce Boudreau would arrive to take over the bench the following year.

So the Stars were licking their chops going into the game, looking for their first playoff series win since Brenden Morrow’s goal in 2008. That hunger showed, as the Stars dominated the Wild in all three zones for 20 minutes, earning three power plays in the process. But after 20 minutes, Minnesota had somehow hung around. And when I say “somehow,” I mean this:

Yeah, it didn’t make sense at the time, either. But Minnesota regrouped a bit in the intermission, and play was more level as the second period progressed. Would the Stars squander all the momentum by letting Minnesota counterpunch?

No, they would not. Instead, Ryan Carter passed to Jarret Stoll, who tried to Make A Move Around Aleš Hemský in the neutral zone.

As you can see, Hemský has support behind him, so he makes an aggressive play for the puck, and he wins it.

But just as Hemský collects it at the blue line, there’s a problem: Jamie Benn is about to come onto the ice to replace Roussel—but Roussel hasn’t left it yet. So to avoid a Super Silly Too Many Men on the Ice Penalty, Benn intelligently waits until Roussel hits the gas and hops onto the bench with both skates. That allows Benn to come on and join the rush, which he does.

The Roussel hop is a fun little detail that gets more fun the more you watch it, but we’re not done with the fun parts yet. Because watch what Benn does as soon as he gets on the ice.

Benn makes a beeline for the net, briefly putting his stick down in case a pass is coming, but when he sees Hemský looking behind him, he simply drives a helpless, young defenseman named Matt Dumba right to the front of the net.

But the last part is what I thought about most on July 1 this year, when the Stars announced they were bringing back a free agent. Because despite all the high-flying offensive firepower of that 2015-16 Stars team, do you remember who scored their first goal of those playoffs? A certain rookie checking-line center, of course.

I remember laughing at that goal when it happened, because of how entirely characteristic it was of that team, that year. Everyone was scoring. They had eleven(!) double-digit goal-scorers on that team, for crying out loud.

But despite the onslaught that had been the first period, it was Radek Faksa who finally solved Devan Dubnyk with the first Stanley Cup Playoff goal of his career.

The other cool thing there is the Czech connection between Faksa and Hemský, the latter of whom was an importance presence for the young Faksa in his early days with the Stars, even hosting Faksa during the holidays.

But after feeding him off the ice, Hemský would also continue to feed Faksa in the playoffs, setting him up (somewhat inadvertently) for the game-winner in the opener of the Blues series, too, as the duo found some magic on a line with Antoine Roussel that postseason.

In fact, Some People were saying at the time that Faksa’s emergence was one of the biggest factors in helping Dallas ramp up for that postseason run (particularly with Tyler Seguin out for what turned out to be nearly all of it). Prescient, I’d say.

Faksa would score three goals in that playoff run, as he did in the Bubble Run of 2020. Of course, Faksa’s most recent Stars playoff goal was the biggest one of all, as you surely remember. (He might have scored a decent one for St. Louis too, if you care about such things.)

While scoring goals isn’t what he’s primarily paid to do, it’s worth remembering that Faksa does have nine playoff goals in 79 Stars playoff games (which became perhaps slightly less impressive after Mikko Rantanen scored nine goals in his very first Stars playoff run). In fact, Faksa has found the net in the playoffs more than former Stars like Guy Carbonneau, Pat Verbeek, Mason Marchment, or even Jason Spezza, albeit with more opportunities.

Now, the Stars brought back Faksa for another two years. He’ll turn 32 years old in January, but if he scores yet another big playoff goal this spring, would it really surprise you at this point? Because if you have this goal embedded in your memory as deeply as I do, it probably shouldn’t.