Texas Stars Win Sixth in a Row as Rémi Poirier Saves the Day

Friday night hockey is the best kind of hockey

I may be a bit biased after spending many hours talking, watching, and writing about the Texas Stars today, but man: Friday night’s tilt between Texas and Manitoba was a really fun game.

Texas went up 2-0 in the first period, and they ended up riding that offense the rest of the way, thanks to Rémi Poirier’s game-saving stop with 16 seconds to go in a 2-1 game. The H-E-B Center at Cedar Park absolutely exploded after he made this stop on a Manitoba cross-crease pass that looked like a slam dunk on the back door.

“Looked like” are the key words there, however:

That save, combined with a huge shot block in the final minute by Matthew Seminoff, felt like confirmation that the defensive doldrums of Texas’s early season are well and truly behind them. Despite not being able to convert on the man-advantage in repeated opportunities to salt the game away, the Texas Stars found another way to get the horse into the barn. Diligent defending prevented most of the best chances for the opposition until the final 10 minutes of the game, when the Moose got desperate and began to pour it on, but ultimately to no avail.

Texas has now matched the NHL club with their sixth straight victory—a season-long winning streak. Gavin and I spent all day on Friday talking to various players and people in and around the Texas Stars organization, including a great conversation with Toby Petersen earlier today that you can listen to right now.

But while you wait to listen to that calvalcade of great audio, here are a few thoughts on tonight’s victory, and how a few of the players are fitting into the team in a broader context.

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• Trey Taylor got Texas on the board with his sixth goal of the season after coming down between the circles to fire home a rebound. He’s been one of a few Texas Stars players on a hot streak lately, with an eight-game points streak now in progress:
  

  • Taylor is currently on the second power play unit, and you wonder if Jeremie Poirier’s arrival in the Gavin White trade could move one of Taylor or Tristan Bertucci (who mans the top unit) off the power play for the time being.

  • Jeremie Poirier isn’t yet with the team, but if past visa situations with players acquired from Calgary are any indication—fans will remember Chris Tanev’s delayed arrival—one would expect Poirier to be able to cross the border and join Texas before next weekend.

• Antonio Stranges made it 2-0 less than five minutes into the game, beating Manitoba’s Domenic DiVincentiis from in tight on the right side, with a wide-open chance that Manitoba probably won’t love watching on replay.

  • Stranges has had a slow start to the season, and his -21 led the team by a large margin coming into the game. If he can get back to his pace from last season, it would give the team as big a boost as any, following the All-Star break next week.

  • Stranges is on the top power play right now, and he nearly scored a second goal with a one-timer off the outside of the post, during a double-minor for high sticking Manitoba took later in the first.

• Remi Poirier made a sprawling stick save in the first period on a cross-crease pass from Manitoba. It’s hard to overstate just how solid he’s been this year in a clear #3 role in the organization, and on the podcast Gavin and I did with Stephen Meserve this weekend, Stephen reiterated how much of that steadiness Poirier showed during that third-round series against Abbotsford last spring. The playoffs can do some very good things for your confidence.

• Kole Lind had an extremely eventful first period:

  • First, he had the primary assist on Stranges’s goal. Lind is well behind his scoring pace from last season, but points are points, and it was a nice pass from below the goal line.

  • Second, Lind had a turnover in his own zone as the last man breaking out the puck during a 4-on-4 set, giving up a clear breakaway that ended up being shot wide of the net, much to his (presumed) relief.

  • And third, Lind was boarded pretty significantly by Nikita Chiprikov at the end of the first period, sending him down to the ice in pain, and shortly thereafter, down the tunnel. Trey Taylor would jump into the fray without hesitation, sticking up for the fallen Lind.

    Lind would return to the game partway through the second period, which was good to see.

• Cameron Hughes and Matthew Seminoff are two players who have really stepped up to fill the gaps in point production this year from other players, with Hughes in particular leading the team in scoring by a healthy margin at 29 years old.

• Artem Shlaine is another such player taking a step forward this year, and he came into the night leading the team in power play goals (4) and goals overall (13). Like Taylor and Harrison Scott, Shlaine joined the team last year as a college free agent, and he’s looked very solid in his first full AHL season, even earning a spot on the top power play.

  • If you missed it, I spoke with Shlaine during training camp last September about his winding road to the Stars’ organization:
    

  • Shlaine is on an AHL deal right now, but he is putting himself in a good position for when the organization has to decide what his next contract offer might look like.

• Cross Hanas is in the middle of his fourth and best AHL season so far, already topping his previous high in points. He looked like a confident player on Friday, even demanding the puck with a bang of his stick on the ice during a good bit of offensive pressure for Texas in the second period. That’s what you want to see.

  • Gavin and I spoke with Hanas earlier on Friday, so keep an eye out for that podcast when it drops in the coming days. One word that sticks out from out conversation: Gratitude.

  • And in the meantime, you can also check out this interview I did with Hanas after his preseason game with Dallas back in October, when he was on a PTO and hadn’t yet been signed by Texas:

• Vladislav Kolyachonok is a good, mobile defenseman who helps Texas. It wouldn’t entirely shock me to see him get another recall to Dallas at some point before the end of the regular season, especially depending on how the trade deadline shakes out.

  • But with that said, sequences like the one below have to be a little confounding. There are better decisions than the two made here for #18 in white:

• Texas’s power play was a fearsome weapon last season, with Matěj Blümel and Justin Hryckowian doing heaps of damage. But without those two (and for much of the year, without Kyle Capobianco), Texas’s power play has plunged from 2nd last year to 30th in the league. They went 0-for-6 on Friday night, though they also took a couple of penalties to hamper two of those power play efforts.

• Last year, Kyle McDonald had 9 points in 43 games. This year, Kyle McDonald has 9 points in just 16 games. And he perhaps could have had 17, had he opted to shoot on this chance rather than make a pass that exploded off Cross Hanas’s stick:

  

  As Ilya Lyubushkin says: Always shoot.

• Luke Krys was noticeable tonight, making a couple of critical shot blocks and defensive plays. He was one of many Texas players whose sticks were constantly getting a piece of Manitoba passes in the Stars’ zone.

  • Put it this way: until the first Manitoba goal in the final minutes, Krys looked like a player in this game playing the sort of sound, top-four RHD role that Dallas needs to find at the NHL level.

• Manitoba pulled their goaltender with three minutes to go down 2-0, and they finally got on the board with a fortunate bounce after Krys went behind the net to play a deflected shot, only to have a puck get put past him for Mason Shaw to jam in off Poirier with just over two minutes remaining.

• It was a raucous crowd in Cedar Park tonight, and their response at the final buzzer proved that you don’t have to mimic the recent Stars/Blues drama to send folks home happy.