Thursday Dallas Stars Roundup: Tyler Seguin "Knocking on the Door," How Scott Arniel Built on Rick Bowness' Foundation, and Talking Power Plays with Kyle Connor

The Jets are for real, folks

The Dallas Stars play their second-to-last home game of the regular season tonight. Colin Blackwell is sitting (DeBoer says it’s a healthy scratch, not for any injury), and Jake Oettinger will face his countryman in Connor Hellebuyck.

The Stars may also play their last truly meaningful game of the regular season tonight when they face the Winnipeg Jets.

That’s because the Jets are four points ahead of Dallas with four games to play. The Jets also have one more regulation win (RW) than Dallas right now, which is the first tiebreaker in the standings. The second tiebreaker is regulation wins and overtime wins (ROW), of which Winnipeg has four more than Dallas.

So, that means Dallas needs to not only catch Winnipeg in points, but also to pass them in regulation wins (or pass them in points outright, which is an even longer shot).

In other words, even if Dallas beats Winnipeg in regulation tonight (which they did back in December), they’ll still be two points behind them and tied for the first tiebreaker, and too far behind in the second tiebreaker to catch up.

So if Dallas wins tonight and in all three of their remaining games, they’ll still need help. That help would look like Winnipeg losing at least one of their final three games, which are against Chicago, Edmonton, and Anaheim.

Entering tonight, Dallas has to make up either four points and two regulation wins on Winnipeg, or else make up five points to render all tiebreakers moot, which would mean Winnipeg losing two of those last three games. That’s pretty unlikely.

And this is all assuming Dallas can beat Winnipeg in regulation tonight—the top team in the NHL.

Well, they say you have to take it one game at a time, right?

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Today, I had a chance to chat with Jets’ head coach Scott Arniel and leading scorer Kyle Connor. We’ll get to those conversations in a moment, but I want to point out that I have to make up for all the time I spent this year waiting for Winnipeg to finally slow down after a record-setting 15-1-0 start to the season. They never really did slow down, other than a couple of small losing streaks (four games in regulation starting in late November and couple other three-game skids with some overtime points mixed in). Otherwise, they’ve stayed ahead of Dallas more or less all year long.