After watching his team play its worst game of the postseason — quite arguably the worst game for anyone in these Stanley Cup playoffs — Pete DeBoer was blessed. The Dallas head coach found a Christmas present lying unopened in late April, just hours after a 4-0 loss in Colorado in which the Stars were outshot 48-23.
“If you had told me at Christmas we’d be playing Colorado in the first round of the playoffs, and they would have their team and we wouldn’t have (Miro) Heiskanen and (Jason) Robertson, and we’d be tied 2-2 and have home ice advantage for two of the last three,” DeBoer said Sunday, “I’d have been pretty happy with that.”
These are the kind of tortures NHL coaches must put themselves through in the spring, trying to exact ways for their teams to win playoff games even when the evidence is starting to pile high in favor of their opponents. It’s like the Colorado prosecution is loaded with high-powered attorneys and has boxes of discovery at its table that it refused to share and DeBoer (with his University of Windsor Law degree) is sitting alone at his table asking, “What do I do now?”
On Saturday night in Game 4 he benched his best player after two periods. Yes, the Stars already trailed 3-0, but if you watched, you know it was a miracle if Dallas got the puck out of its own end while the Avalanche revved up Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar and took target practice at Jake Oettinger. Goalies in All-star games where no defense is attempted have a better chance. DeBoer rested Oettinger for Monday night and thought perhaps it would light a spark for some sort of pushback in the final period.
It did not.
“Our pushback will be tomorrow,” DeBoer said Sunday with a laugh. “We didn’t have very many good parts in our game. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. The whole group was off a little bit. I’m pretty confident we won’t have another game like that.”
That’s a little like me saying I just played the worst round of golf in my life (not a lie) and none of the 14 clubs really showed up...so I feel good I won’t play like that again.
In my case it could be wishful thinking, but for the Stars it’s the only option they have. They are tied in a first-round series 2-2 despite having been outscored 13-7 and having played with a lead for all of 62 seconds (Game 2, 2nd period, it was a great time to be a Stars fan). Colorado is adding not just energy to its lineup but real power and skill in Gabriel Landeskog. After playing well in Game 3, he scored a goal in Game 4. This is a man who played the same number of regular season games since the fall of 2022 as I did. And yet there he is, a remarkable tribute to dedication and perseverance.
The Stars? Robertson is back on skates but not close to playing games. Heiskanen? The workouts continue but DeBoer said Sunday that nothing is imminent. That doesn’t necessarily rule Heiskanen out for Monday but a heroic return similar to Landeskog’s is probably not the way to bet.
Maybe Dallas’ best hope is that the Avs exhausted themselves while putting on that show Saturday night. Colorado is 2-0 with victories by a 9-1 margin when they have at least an extra days’ rest. But when these teams have played after only a single off day in this series, the Stars are 2-0. Sure, they had to skate into overtime to collect both wins, but they finished the job. And MacKinnon and Makar looked a lot more human when they weren’t fully rested.
Game 5 will be played after a single day off. There’s an extra day before Game 6 Thursday (don’t bet the Stars in that one) but then the clubs will be hustling back to Dallas for a Game 7 Saturday, if such a thing is necessary.
And that’s really Dallas’ goal at this point. Just get this thing to seven games and let the fans have a voice at the finish. The Stars are not the better team in this series, not without Heiskanen and Robertson, and maybe that wouldn’t be the case even if they were healthy. Colorado has played really well after losing one of its prominent forwards, Mikko Rantanen — first to Carolina, then to Dallas — and the addition of Landeskog has given the Avs a visible lift.
But the Stars have shown they can pull the plug from MacKinnon and Makar and the Colorado power play. And they can get big saves from Oettinger. And they can steal wins in overtime.
It’s not the simplest way for a team to go about advancing in the Stanley Cup playoffs, to be sure. But it might be Dallas’ only option for playing hockey past May 3.
Twitter/X:@TimCowlishaw