From their fans’ standpoint, the Dallas Stars are making up for 2020.
It was during the early days of the pandemic when the NHL held the entire Stanley Cup playoffs in Canada that the Stars — a bit of a surprise given how they started out — went all the way to the Cup Final before losing to Tampa Bay. It was a nearly two-month playoff run that brought absolutely no juice to Dallas. No home games, no people in Stars’ jerseys in Victory Park, no one piling into bars and restaurants near American Airlines Center to watch.
Heck, our hockey writer at the time could not even get through customs in Edmonton. It was another world.
Now the Stars are playing like a team that’s out of this world and giving Dallas fans their money’s worth at every turn. After taking seven games to vanquish Vegas, the defending Cup champs, the Stars will have another opportunity to wrap up a series for their home crowd Wednesday night (even at a normal time, 7 p.m.) because of what just happened in Denver.
Games 92 and 93 of a long grind toward triple digits were as good as it gets for Dallas. Had it not been for the world champion Texas Rangers going 11-0 on the road last October, we would surely marvel even more at what the Stars have done away from home in the first two rounds. After dropping the first two games to Vegas at home, Dallas won a couple of extremely tight victories to tie that series and give the Stars a chance, which they took full advantage of in Game 7.
Against Colorado, the team that seemed so scary the first two games here, capable of popping in 2-3 goals in a moment’s notice, the Stars tied their skates in knots. I have never seen Nathan MacKinnon, a 140-point Hart Trophy finalist, or Cale Makar, their speedster on defense, negated so smoothly and so definitively for long stretches of hockey. The Stars won 4-1 and 5-1 games in Denver, ending a streak of nine playoff games in which every contest was either a one-goal game or a one-goal game with an empty net score attached in the final seconds.
Stars coach Pete DeBoer said he thought the team’s defensive effort was even better in Game 3 than Game 4, but I’ll take Game 4 where Colorado’s A Team — the assistant captains MacKinnon, Makar and Mikko Rantanen — were held without a single point for the first time in the playoffs. They managed eight shots on goal but put nothing in the net behind Jake Oettinger.
Wyatt Johnston, celebrating his 21st birthday Tuesday, had eight shots on goal to match that group. He scored a pair of goals — one short-handed, one on the power play — to continue his dominant play. If you’re looking at early Conn Smythe Trophy candidates on this team, only Miro Heiskanen is in the same discussion as Johnston.
”He came out possessed,’’ DeBoer said. “No doubt he will wear a letter, probably sooner than later, for this franchise. Just an incredible kid.’’
A letter, of course, is either the Captain’s “C’’ or the “A” that three assistants generally wear. It is that A Team of the Avalanche (longtime captain Gabriel Landeskog remains out with an injury) that produced the comeback win in Game 1, that still gives the visitors Wednesday night a puncher’s chance of getting back in the series and dragging everyone back to Denver for a Game 6 Friday night.
But without leading goal scorer Val Nichushkin, now suspended until at least November as a part of the Player Assistance Program, Colorado is going to have to solve the riddle of getting some speed through the neutral zone that Dallas has shut down.
The Stars have destroyed Colorado’s vaunted power play by both scoring short-handed in Game 4 to open the scoring and by refusing to take bad penalties. It is a complete team effort that allows one to think if the Stars can do this to the Avalanche — and finish the job, of course — it can do the same to whichever Canadian team comes next and move on to the Stanley Cup Final against New York or Florida or whomever happens to survive the Eastern Conference finals.
It’s not a knock on Oettinger to say that the Stars just beat Colorado 4-1 and 5-1 and he didn’t need to be great. He was good in singular moments, but the Avs’ shots on goal were so limited and their true scoring chances so rare that it’s the Stars’ team and not the netminder that has grabbed Colorado’s soul and refused to let go.
One more solid effort at home and a series that was expected to go seven could be coming to a quiet finish for the 2022 Cup champions.