Seven Ways in Which Dallas Stars Fans Will Learn to Love to Hate the Minnesota Wild, Again

Not that you really need too much encouragement

The player who tormented Minnesota last time won’t be there to start this series.

At last, we know the time and date: Dallas will begin its 2026 playoff run at 4:30pm Central on Saturday, April 18.

They’ll be facing a team called the “Minnesota Wild” (real name), and I wrote a more concise series preview about the Stars/Wild matchup for D Magazine that went up today, so you can check that out here.

But today, we’re doing something a bit different, because playoff hockey is different. Radically so, even. You can bring an almost entirely sports-illiterate person into the building for a playoff game and walk out three hours later with them fuming about high crimes that were committed by the other team. It’s special stuff, the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and this series profiles to be the most intense and bloodthirsty of the first eight series we’ll see.

We know this, because the series kind of got started a week ago when the Stars stiff-armed the Wild back into third place in the Central for good, but at the cost of Miro Heiskanen.

That game was filled with vitriol from start to finish, from Mikko Rantanen jumping Quinn Hughes to Nick Foligno refusing to let Colin Blackwell celebrate a goal in peace.

The phantasm of Nick Foligno, helping Colin Blackwell celebrate a big goal.

The game also featured a certain Wild antagonist putting a hit on Miro Heiskanen that ended his regular season, as a stick got behind Heiskanen’s legs while he took contact from the front.

Now, there’s still some hope that Heiskanen could return for Game 1, but given that the Stars have already lost a top player to another altercation with a player on a division rival, this moment will overshadow the entire matchup until Heiskanen finally returns to the ice. And from there, every run a Minnesota player takes at Heiskanen—and they will take plenty—will draw a Hearty Response from the Stars that wasn’t always there in prior years.

The blood will be boiling throughout this series. And if you can’t quite remember or picture what that feels like, I want you to go back and watch the highlights from 2023’s Game 1 right quick, just to remember what it feels like to experience the despair, anger, jubilation, and devastation of just one game of playoff hockey between these two clubs:

Okay, welcome back. How’s the heart rate? Should probably get that blood pressure checked, by the way.

Now that you’ve got that series fresh in mind, let’s get to the modus operandi of exactly where Stars fans’ ire will be directed over the next week or two, based on what we’ve learned this year, and from that 2023 matchup.

1. You will be furious at Ryan Hartman

To be honest, I don’t see the Hartman hit on Heiskanen as a dirty play. The result was bad, but there was more bad luck than malicious intent, from what I could see.

But Hartman lost the benefit of the doubt a long time ago, so much so that his ability to stay on the windy side of the law is a big talking point in Minnesota even today. And little wonder, given his ten-game suspension last season for a play that was not just dirty, but incredibly dangerous:

Hartman at his best is prime Steve Ott, a player who uses his speed, tenacity, and edginess to provoke other players into foolishness rather than beginning it himself. If you are a Stars fan, you will find yourself being furious at him, at some point.

Of course, Wild fans will easily counter any finger-pointing by gesturing to Mikko Rantanen and Michael Bunting, both players who have been fined for embellishment in their careers, with Rantanen also having served a suspension for the second of two dangerous hits himself, one of which ended Alexander Romanov’s season.

I hear Jamie Benn has caused an injury or two over the course of his career as well. so if you are foolish enough to start barking at opposing fans on social media, remember that all NHL fans live in glass houses to a certain extent, and a playoff series tends to involve this sort of fury. Ride it out with as much composure as you can muster. If you’re lucky, there will be a lot more hockey you’ll need to save it for.