Wednesday Dallas Stars Roundup: Bobblehead Bonanza, Oilers Recoiling, and the Cold Reality of "Stay to Play"

Do you think this trip will go better than the last one?

Some of you longtimers will recall that I first started writing about the Dallas Stars back in 2014 for DBD. I spent my first year as a volunteer contributor writing the Daily Links posts. That meant that (almost) every day, I needed to have a post up by 8:00am or 9:00am Central Time with both a leading piece from a salient story on the Dallas Stars as well as a collection of other Stars-adjacent or NHL-centric stories.

For example, if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can go back and read one of my first such Links pieces that came out nearly 11 years ago right here. They were (and remain) a nice way for readers to catch up on recent Stars news, as well as a good placeholder post for commenters to discuss the team.

As I also happened to live on the West Coast at the time, 8:00am was 6:00am my time. So in practice, that usually meant I was staying up late at night throwing those links together, or else (if a 20-something Robert had more fun things to do that night that compile a Links post) waking up early to frantically throw some links together before I drove to my aerospace job at an office 40 minutes away.

Doing that for a full year was a really effective way for me to canvass the media landscape at a time when there weren’t many journalists covering the Dallas Stars outside of Mike Heika and Mark Stepneski. Any ESPN feature story or NHL.com profile was a welcome bit of extra news in addition to the vital storytelling the beat writers provided. Sometimes, I had to really reach to find anything of substance on off days, but every now and then, I’d discover a real gem. It was something I was glad to do, but equally glad to move on from after a year.

In subsequent years at DBD, I moved on to writing features and postgame pieces, and the Links responsibility was shared between two people (or more). That was an act of mercy, giving people regular days off during the week, but shouldering the whole responsibility for a year (as other before me had done) was also a rite of passage in many ways. It was a good way to identify the real hockey sickos, a good crucible for those who wanted a byline more than a beat. If you could do Links posts every day, you were probably cut out to contribute to the mostly unpaid labor of love that was DBD.

That and other places still do Daily Links posts these days. But with social media, Reddit, Discord, and Google Alerts, the really passionate fans can also get every scrap of Dallas Stars Stuff delivered to them every day, instantly. Technology, kids these days, etc.

These Roundup pieces are a little bit different, as you’ve probably noticed. They’re one of a couple of things unlocked for Paid subscribers, and that’s because they’re not a list of links of other stories, so much as a rundown of my bite-sized reporting on a few things that don’t merit a standalone piece of their own.

Hopefully you’ve been experiencing them as such. These Roundups are meant to be timely, but also genuinely interesting and educational. I want folks to learn something new (and ideally a few things) every time they read these, because why do them, otherwise?

Anyway, I have been talking too long, and you’re too intelligent (and good looking, I am sure) not to understand the concept here.

The Stars Are Much Better than You Feel Like They Are

The Dallas Stars are one point better than they were after 70 games last year. How is that possible, when the team won the Division (and the West) after 82 games, going on a heater after acquiring Chris Tanev in February?

I mean, Pete DeBoer put his team on blast after a shootout loss to Tampa last week. Isn’t that indicative of their struggles? How is this team, missing Tyler Seguin and Miro Heiskanen while getting criticized by their coach, doing better than they were last year? That’s crazy, right?

Well, as we’ve said before, the Stars have a really high floor. Even their biggest stinkers against a team like Tampa or that late comeback to tie and then lose in overtime to Colorado were still un-stinky enough to get them to overtime, and that’s not a bad trait to have in the playoffs at all, where you’re never going to bring your A++++ game 100% of the time. No team sweeps every series, and few teams sweep any. The NHL is just too good of a league for that.

That high floor combined with the forgiving nature of the NHL standings meant that the Stars went nine games while winning only twice in regulation en route to a 5-2-2 record. They were just +3, scoring 27 goals and allowing 24, but their moribund play over that span was enough to sustain a .667 points percentage.

Thus, after playing badly and drawing the ire of their coach and fans alike, Dallas now sits…third in the NHL—right where they were a few weeks ago.

If you want to be a pessimist, the process and the details of their game lately have both been flawed (though much better against Minnesota). That sort of play isn’t likely to win them many playoff series, though of course there are no 3-on-3 overtimes in the postseason. But with the higher caliber of competition and the more focused scouting and tactical preparation that happens in a playoff series, the Stars’ recent flaws would be much more likely to get exploited.