The Morning After a Demoralizing Loss

Some further thoughts, if you will

Mikko Rantanen, staying calm

Just a short little post this morning before a busy day, but I had to get these thoughts out while they’re fresh.

In the regular season, the Stars scored 170 goals at 5-on-5, good for exactly mid-pack: 16th in the league. Minnesota scored two fewer this year, coming in at 17th.

In the playoffs, Minnesota has again been mid-pack (when adjusting for games played per team), while Dallas has plummeted to the bottom of the pile. They simply can’t find the net, or even get pucks to the net, in last night’s case.

Shooting under 3% at 5-on-5 is laughably low, in the same way that sometimes you have to laugh at the absurdity of your own misfortune in order to avoid crying. And here’s where I think a distinction in terms would be helpful: the Stars are not a bad 5v5 offensive team this playoff run. They have, rather, been an abysmal finishing team at 5v5:

HockeyViz.com

Jesper Wallstedt is going to finish the series with like a 98% save percentage at 5-on-5 at this rate, and I’m not sure he’s had to work particularly hard to do it, either. Dallas has either missed the net, had shots blocked, or failed to hit the spots of the net they hit so frequently in the regular season.

That’s really it, and I’m going to plant my flag there. Sure, Tyler Myers. Sure, Esa Lindell and Miro Heiskanen have lost their (heavy) minutes pretty consistently all series. Sure, Roope Hintz. You can go down the list of reasons for why the Wild have what feels like a commanding 3-2 lead in the series, but there is one overriding Reason: the offensively lethal Dallas Stars have lost their touch when the space has disappeared.

And no, this isn’t a Glen Gulutzan problem. I’ll plant another flag there. Because if you’ll recall last year against Edmonton, we were talking about this exact same phenomenon. The Oilers outscored the Stars 13-5 at five-on-five last year in the Conference final. At the time, it made sense to blame a rush-based offensive attack, and Gulutzan was brought in. He pledged to create more in-zone offensive looks and a stronger defensive structure. I’d argue both of those things have happened—though the overall offensive output has decreased at five-on-five as the defensive strengths improved—but in this series, they haven’t happened in the most meaningful way. Minnesota is up 11-3 in five-on-five scoring, and you know all about how they’ve done it.

What we should be talking about alongside all these things is what Minnesota has done well: they’ve ceded more shot attempts and expected goals and junk, and I’ll bet that the Stars have likely had more offensive zone time in Games 2-5 as well. But Minnesota, a bit like Dallas against Colorado last year, has figured out a gameplan.

They’re blocking shots and packing the house, getting to rebounds first and daring the Stars to get shots through traffic from up high. The shots aren’t getting through. And when they do, they’re getting stopped, fairly easily.

Wallstedt’s confidence has to be enormous right now, and it should be. He’s been the perfect goalie for the defensive structure Minnesota has played, while the Wild have capitalized on a lot of ugly chances for their own goals, but ugly in the sense that they’re feasting on leftovers and mistakes rather that cooking up a gourmet scoring chance.

I just can’t muster the energy to make this series about Jake Oettinger, except in the sense that he hasn’t scored a five-on-five goal for the Stars either. Add him to the list, I guess. It’s a long one, which is to say it’s everyone except Jason Robertson and the end boards.

It would be one thing if Dallas had gotten in as a wild card team with bottom-ten 5v5 offensive production, and this series were a further reflection of that. They haven’t, though. Instead, they’ve gotten a mix of bad luck and worse responsiveness to Minnesota’s defensive phalanx. The Wild have 92 blocks, which leads the playoffs. Dallas have 81, by the way.

As for unblocked shots, the Stars have put about 67% of their unblocked attempts on net, whereas the Wild have put about 75% of theirs on goal. NHL shot trajectory adjustments aside, that’s been a critical 8%, in this series. And last time I checked, 8% is a lot bigger than one degree.

• Yes, Michael Bunting needs to come in, both for political reasons and offensive ones.

• Heiskanen and Harley need to be paired up, and probably would have been stapled together earlier, if not for the Nils Lundkvist injury. Dallas is losing the strength-on-strength battle too frequently not to load up.

• I don’t actually think they need to go a full game with Robertson on the wing with Johnston and Rantanen, but sure, give it a go to start. Honestly, the issue in this series might just be that Rantanen has not been playing like he’s 100%, no matter what anyone says.

• Is it a coincidence that the one star player snubbed from Olympic participation has looked the freshest for Dallas in this series?

• Is it ironic that the Stars are looking at an outcome where Jason Robertson has increased his value through his playoff performance while the team at the same time could be facing playoff disappointment? I don’t think anyone would have thought those two were likely to converge, going into this series.

• Tyler Myers makes good plays that remind you of the fact that he’s Tyler Myers, but the mistakes have overshadowed everything in this series for him, and that’s a shame. I still think he’ll be a positive addition next season, but I do wonder if the Stars would benefit from trying Lyubushkin with Lindell and Petrovic with Bichsel in Game 6, if only to mix things up.

• But I used the word “wonder” there intentionally because, in all honesty, the Stars could execute this exact same gameplan and get two more goals with just a tad more finishing precision, and we’re having an entirely different conversation. Only Game 1 has really been a blowout in this series, even if the two straight wins by Minnesota make it feel like a lifetime since the Stars were the more confident team. They’re that close, even if it feels a mile away right now. Elimination games will mess with your head that way.