Perspective and Patience, Urgency and Understanding
Programming reminder: Game coverage tonight against Colorado will be indefinitely delayed, so again, don’t wait up for us here.
The Dallas Stars are likely going to make the playoffs.
I don’t say that to patronize those upset with the Stars’ last four periods of hockey. Absolutely, the Stars, their coaches, and everyone in the organization would agree that they have disappointed fans with the results and process of the last two games. And that means the good vibes that started with the Pittsburgh pummeling and which continued as the Stars proceeded to win five out of their next six games are now gone.
The Stars didn’t just cough up a two-goal lead in the third period against Carolina; that was a loss designed in a lab to trigger all the symptoms of Special Teams Anxiety, and it succeeded. It was embarrassing, and the Stars had to weather some justified criticism of a game where Pete DeBoer called their special teams a “disaster.” But with the moribund Chicago Blackhawks waiting for Dallas the day before Thanksgiving, it seemed like the perfect chance to wash that bad taste out of the fanbase’s mouth before a tough home set against Colorado and Winnipeg.
Instead, the Stars laid an egg. Their shooting luck nosedived in what must have been an effort at karmic balancing after the 14 goals against Boston and Pittsburgh, and their backup goaltender and third defense pairing looked like outright liabilities. It was, despite how I would normally hesitate to use this word for the second time, embarrassing.
So, this would be the time for a contrarian to tell all you angsty fans to be quiet. Just because all of your most heated crticisms seem to have been absolutely validated this week doesn’t mean you need to like, say that. It’s a long season, historically the Stars have been good, special teams have been good, positive regression, patience, process, blah blah blah. I could say it, but you already know it, so let’s skip that all.
Yes, the Stars are making the playoffs. No, you can’t overreact to small hiccups in the larger context of a season. 13-8-0 is a perfectly adequate place to be at this point in the year, even if it’s not dominant enough to assuage your anxiety. I think we can all agree on that.
Florida won the Stanley Cup last year, in case you forgot. And they did so despite a stretch in November-December where they lost four out of five, including back-to-back 4-0 losses to Seattle and Vancouver, and a 3-1 loss to Calgary where they surrendered two shorthanded goals.
In other words, even the best teams are going to have nights where they look middling to bad. That’s the nature of the NHL these days, and it’s why coaches preach not overreacting, even as they continually try to tweak things to prevent one misstep from turning into a bad trend. Symptoms can turn into conditions if left untreated, but we don’t wanna throw high-grade antibiotics at the first sign of the sniffles. You have to balance the “sense of urgency” players always talk about with the perspective about the natural ups and downs of the season.
That means you can look apathetic when everyone is calling for your power play to be blown up. It also means you can look overreactive when you scratch a player after one bad game. You’re never going to please everyone when things aren’t perfect, and that is basically every day in the NHL. The best leaders are firmly rooted in their convictions, but also in constant conversations with others who might have information they don’t. It’s a balance of confidence and humility that is all-too-rare these days, although I would certainly not argue with you if you were to say that Jim Nill has shown as much of those qualities as any general manager in the league. (Is that an oblique enough compliment to avoid cries of bias?)
Because the Stars aren’t dominating their opponents so far, fans are concerned that they aren’t prepared to win in the playoffs, when the true anxiety rises to the surface. And no one can do anything about that until the playoffs, other than prepare for why the worst or the best may or may not happen. And when the team loses, it’s natural to point out that the loss validates your concerns, just as a win can be a warm comfort, an assurance that sometimes, this hockey team can make fans feel really good about trusting them with their time and money. Ups and downs, every game. Or every power play, as the case may be.
By the way, did you notice that Matt Duchene scored a power play goal (of admittedly little consequence) last game? That came after Duchene took Roope Hintz’s spot on the other unit, and he put in a rebound from a Jason Robertson shot.
Hintz sounds like he’s back in the lineup tonight, with Logan Stankoven coming out while dealing with a minor issue. So I’d assume Duchene will be back with his linemates on the other power play unit, but it’s something to keep an eye on when things start being thrown against the wall to see what sticks.
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Aside from specials teams, however, the real heat right now comes because Alex Petrovic has been called up, and he will play against Colorado tonight, as will Nils Lundkvist. Matt Dumba and Brendan Smith will be coming back out of the lineup, and that’s after Dumba has already taken multiple healthy scratches in the first quarter of the season, after being signed for multiple years in the summer. That’s…well, I won’t use the word a third time, but it’s not exactly a testament to everything going according to plan.
You all know that Matt Dumba suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in December of 2018. And if you didn’t, a quick glance at his shooting history would suggest as much anyway:
That’s just Dumba’s shooting, to be clear. His overall effectiveness can be measured in more comprehensive ways, but it’s always tough to see a defenseman known for a booming shot losing the ability to unleash it.
Dumba hasn’t been good for Dallas this season, and the coaching staff has quickly admitted this fact through his usage, if not in so many words. Dumba has already been relegated to a third-pairing defenseman in minutes, and that was not exactly the purpose behind buying out Ryan Suter and essentially giving his cap hit to Dumba for two years.
Or rather, perhaps it was, because Dumba is able to play the right side on defense, which is something Suter was never willing or able to do. But what wasn’t part of the plan was for Dumba to continue his decline across the board, making it difficult for the coaching staff to rely on him even as a veteran on a more sheltered pairing than originally hoped.
One comprehensive measure of Dumba’s performance is synthetic goals, which HockeyViz tracks. This is a version of what is commonly called Expected Goals, a way of assigning a consistent number relative to the rest of the NHL. It’s based on a ton of data, and I’ve found it to be a pretty consistently reliable measure of how players are helping their teams in the roles they’re given.
For instance, you can see here that Dumba spent a large part of his first ten years as a consistently NHL-quality defenseman, somewhere between a second-pairing and third-pairing blueliner with a couple of dips (including the season after his shoulder injury). But the most recent years are not encouraging.
Dumba’s plus/minus mirrors this chart pretty well, too. It’s also worth mentioning that he’s taken over 80 penalty minutes in each of the last two seasons, and he’s on track to hit that mark again, with 19 PIM in just 15 games played this year.
I think it wasn’t the worst bet, in a vacuum, to hope that Dumba’s final year in Minnesota (’22-’23, which included the series where he leveled Joe Pavelski) was another dip, and that a change of scenery could get a bit of a bounceback season. I also think it was at least defensible, in a bigger vacuum, to hope that last year wasn’t that bounce, because it was spent mostly in Arizona before a trade to Tampa. Two changes of scenery, one team in disaster mode with the other clinging to hope that it wasn’t as far past its prime as it turned out to be.
Well, through 15 games this year, Dumba has gotten injured again, and the underlying numbers are just as worrisome as the healthy scratches. Dumba may just be getting up to speed after an early injury, and I don’t think there’s any point panicking right now. But the cold, hard facts right now are that he hasn’t looked anywhere near a $3.75 million defenseman, let alone one signed for two years.
The second year is Jim Nill’s problem, and he’s generally found ways to solve the ones he’s assigned. To be fair, I didn’t think he would be willing to stomach a Suter buyout, only for him to surprise all of us this past summer. So while I don’t think we’re going to see a trade any time soon, I do think he’s more immune than most GMs to admitting when a move hasn’t worked, and trying his best to fix it.
The best-case scenario here is that Dumba gets healthier and more comfortable with the new system in Dallas, and that he begins to contribute the way he has for most of his career. That’s absolutely possible, and frankly, it’s something worth rooting for. There’s a solid, veteran defenseman there, and he hasn’t looked completely lost or anything. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to hope that Dumba can be a mildly overpaid third-pairing RHD who figures out how to play well enough in the Stars’ system not to be a liability.
But I also don’t think it’s worth a ton of energy gnashing your teeth about it if it doesn’t turn out that way, because the Stars, like most NHL teams, are always going to have some sub-optimal players in certain roles. A salary cap will do that, more often than not.
Ideally, a team makes all the perfect moves in free agency, and they all work out immediately. But sometimes you’re surprised in a good way (like how both Ilya Lyubushkin and Matt Duchene have started out this year by proving any initial wariness about their ceilings utterly wrong), and sometimes the cynics get to crow.
But no one is really right or wrong until well after the season ends, when we know all (or as much as we ever will). Shout your shouts of support or suspicion, but just try not to get hoarse before April. Root for your team or mourn their ineptitude as you will, but don’t tear people down because they aren’t as positive or as negative as you are.
(Except me. You can tear me and my thoughts down all you want, because I am invincible, like that Boris guy in Goldeneye, who I assume is the hero of the whole thing, guess I should finish watching it someday, but this seems like a pretty safe take to me.)