For the third straight season, the Dallas Stars are one of the last four teams remaining in the NHL playoffs, yet the jollies could very well be short-lived. After surviving a seven-game battle against the Colorado Avalanche and eliminating the President’s Trophy winner and Central Division foe, the Winnipeg Jets, in six games, the Stars now find themselves in a 3-1 hole against the Edmonton Oilers, the same team to end Dallas’ Stanley Cup dreams a year ago, in the Western Conference final.
Last season, Edmonton extinguished the Stars 4-2, winning three straight to close out the series. It was just the last in a stretch of heartbreaking playoff runs in recent years for Dallas as they’ve tried in vain to bring home the club’s first championship of the 21st century. The boys in Victory Green have been perpetually “around the rim,” as Head Coach Pete DeBoer put it, with this current trip to the final four the third straight under the bench boss’ tutelage and Dallas’ fourth overall in just the last five years. Prior to falling to “the Oil” last season, Dallas’ championship aspirations in the conference final the previous year were ended by the Vegas Golden Knights. The Stars made their first Stanley Cup final appearance since 1999 in the bubble year of 2020, yet what’s now remembered as the “We’re Not Going Home!” season failed to break the championship drought that’s plagued the league’s second-winningest team of the last 25 years, as they fell to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who won their first of back-to-back titles.
After a second consecutive hairpulling loss that saw the Stars wildly outplay Edmonton in large stretches only to come out on the losing end on Tuesday night, it appears all but inevitable that the playoff heartbreak streak will continue. Despite Edmonton’s gaudy 16-8 goal differential and the series advantage, the play has been fairly even, if not tilted slightly toward Dallas. Still, if not for the unlikely power play-fueled comeback for the Stars in Game 1 that saw Dallas rattle off five unanswered goals in the third period, it’s possible that the series would already be over.
If not fully recovered from the dreaded “lower body injury” that saw him miss eight games late in the season, Oilers captain Connor “McJesus” McDavid – the consensus best hockey player on the planet – is on a Conn Smythe Trophy-worthy tear. Aided by a pair of goals on Sunday, he has seven points through four games in the series, and his 24 total points leads the NHL playoffs. His counterpart, center Leon Draisaitl, who suffered his own injury heading into the postseason, is keeping pace, trailing McDavid in scoring by a single point. Ever inconsistent, Edmonton goalie Stuart Skinner paired his first two games of the playoffs with a save percentage above .834 that wasn’t a shutout. (He has three goose eggs so far.) Over the past three tilts, he’s stopped 86 of 88 shots on goal. He picked a hell of a time to get hot.
If things are to be different for the Stars’ Cup chances this year, they have a slight, if fading, reason for hope. Dallas acquired superstar winger Mikko Rantanen from the Carolina Hurricanes at the trade deadline, and the superstar has proved to be for the Stars the exact opposite of what the Luka Dončić trade was for their American Airlines Center bunkmates in the Dallas Mavericks, an elite player in his prime in exchange for next to nothing in compensation. “Moose” is on his own Conn Smythe campaign with his nine goals, which leads the postseason.
Sunday’s game, however, showed the impact of the loss of one of Rantanen’s linemates, Roope Hintz, who missed the tilt after a brutal ankle slash from Oilers goon Darnell Nurse late in Game 2. The “Finnish Line,” with Rantanen, Hintz, and Mikael Granlund, accounts for nearly half of the goals Dallas has scored in the playoffs (19 of 40), and Hintz’s absence was obvious. His return for Game 4, and DeBoer’s line tinkering, did little to reignite the stagnant Dallas offense, however.
If Dallas is to miraculously turn the series around, it will be an uphill climb. Teams up 3-1 in a conference final have gone on to win the series more than 90% of the time, though you have to go back only two years to see the most recent time such a comeback was successful. The Florida Panthers managed the feat over the Boston Bruins in the 2023 Eastern Conference final.
If they’re to have a chance, the Stars’ offense has to get going. When they score, it tends to come in bunches (six games of four or more goals), but when they struggle, they struggle mightily (nine games of two or fewer goals, including four shutouts). In 17 playoff games, the Stars have given up the first goal in 14 of them. “They don’t make it easy,” as a buddy commented in a sports-centric group chat.
Even if they manage to claw their way back, get their revenge on the Oil, and make it out of the Western Conference and to the Stanley Cup Final, the offensively challenged Stars will then have to face the Florida Panthers, who were on the verge of sweeping the Carolina Hurricanes in the East and boast the goalie with the best save percentage in the playoffs. In the immortal words of Def Leppard, I’m afraid the hockey gods are once again bringing on a heartbreak.
