Sunday Dallas Stars Roundup: Strategy, Synergy, and Mystery

Sometimes the painful memories can be the most important

If you ran the Dallas Marathon today, I feel for you. Temperature were below-freezing outside this morning (and even worse with wind chill), which meant the Dallas Stars had a full practice in a relatively cozy ice rink on Sunday.

It was a full practice, with Miro Heisaken’s being the only absence of the day. As expected, Glen Gulutzan confirmed that Heiskanen was simply getting the day for rest and maintenance—a strategy the Stars have been using pretty consistently with the player who averages the 3rd-highest ice time per game in the NHL this season.

“We had a couple other guys we thought might need maintenance days, but they didn’t. He’s the only guy.” Gulutzan said.

Forward lines were the same as the Stars used last night, with Adam Erne and Nate Bastian skating as extras. Nils Lundkvist filled in next to Esa Lindell in lieu of Miro Heiskanen, while Harley-Petrovic and Capobianco-Lyubushkin remained intact.

The Stars haven’t had 30 shots on goal in any of their last 10 games, and they haven’t hit 20 shots on goal in their last three games. Gulutzan acknowledged today that some of the lower ends of those numbers are something they don’t love, but they’re more focused on things like scoring chances and offensive zone time.

Still, he pointed to the Panthers’ second goal last night as an example of a “happenstance” goal that comes from a puck being “flinged” to the net—something the Stars need to do a bit more of.

“We’re never gonna be a shot volume team, but we need more shot volume from our bottom-six,” Gulutzan said, though he later amended that statement to apply it to the team as a whole: “All our guys need to shoot a little bit more.”

And to that end, Gulutzan said the Stars “added another wrinkle” to their breakout structure in hopes of generating more opportunities.

Another thing the Stars’ head coach emphasized is just how tight-checking of game that Florida contest was—and how even it was after 20 minutes, when the Stars had largely matched the Panthers in terms of looks, before an early goal in the second period sent things awry, and how it easily could have been the Panthers who got off-kilter in the second period, had the Stars managed to get the first goal.

“Just one of those games. It was tight,” Gulutzan said. “They got the first punch in, and we just didn’t recover from it. And then the second one really hurt. And when players get into that type of game, they know how at a premium chances are. They got a world-class goalie, and your power play gets butted out like a cigarette—now you’ve lost a little juice.”

The key for Dallas will be whether they can encounter this sort of adversity now and dig their way out of it, rather than letting things pile up. So far, Gulutzan’s Stars have found plenty of different ways to win games this year, and you’d like to think that experience will serve them well in stretches like this, when they aren’t playing their best hockey. Because adversity is always going to come at some point during a season and the playoffs, so you might as well learn to deal with it now.

“The path to this thing isn’t linear, that’s for sure,” Gulutzan said on Sunday. “You just gotta keep the energy up. Whenever I’ve seen teams get into [losing streaks], the energy has dropped considerably. That’s my experience, just the whole mood, locker room. We’re not there yet. We’re not close to there yet, but you do wanna nip this as quickly as you can.”

One other factor surrounding the Stars’ coalescence is that they haven’t really had their entire starting blue line outside of the first couple of games of the season. And with Lian Bichsel out until mid- to late-January, that won’t change any time soon.

So, is Gulutzan planning to rotate the eight defensemen they have right now, or would he prefer to develop some rhythm with more of a core group?

“To discuss the eight defensemen, I would probably rather get to a rhythm more than pulling pieces in and out all the time,” Gulutzan said. “You get in a rhythm out of necessity when you’re injured, but you can get out of rhythm by just moving too many pieces around.

What that means for the roster decisions, of course, is up to Jim Nill. When Adam Erne (who practiced today) gets activated from LTIR, our first glimpse of that reduction may come into focus, wherever it might be.

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On the player side, the feeling in the room remains upbeat, as you’d expect from the second-best club in the NHL. And perhaps one big reason for not getting too down even after a humbling loss is that Roope Hintz escaped injury after taking a hard shot to the foot on Thursday in Minnesota.

I asked Hintz today what that shot was like, and he said he’d initially feared the worst.