EDMONTON, Alberta — You can’t always explain exactly why these things happen in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but you can at least pinpoint when they started. For the Dallas Stars, this year’s Western Conference finals began to unravel ... a year ago?
Dallas lost control of the Oilers after taking a 2-1 series lead last spring. Edmonton won three straight by a score of 10-4 to advance to the Cup Final against Florida. And as we stand here today, only a bettor with an eye for the considerable long shot would bet against a Florida-Edmonton rematch starting in about a week.
The Oilers beat Dallas Tuesday night in a rare showcase of power plays, 4-1, to take a 3-1 lead in the series. This playoff would have been a sweep for Edmonton if not for a weird outburst of man-advantage opportunities at the start of the third period in Game 1. The Oilers have beaten Dallas three in a row for the second straight year and while this playoff is not technically over, there’s no aspect of the Stars’ play that says they have a three-game win streak in them.
Sure, they might win Thursday night at the AAC to force everyone to go through customs one more time, but the Stars lack the scoring punch to handle a team that goes beyond the strength of superstars Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. Jason Robertson got Dallas’ only goal Tuesday, making him the only Star to score on this ill-fated trip to Edmonton. This one came on the power play. The Stars have scored a grand total of three goals at even strength against Stuart Skinner in four games. Mikko Rantanen has gone seven games since his last goal. I don’t even need to run down what the lesser players have not done for this team.
Scoring twice on three power play chances compared to Dallas’ 1-for-4, the Oilers won the battle of power plays in Game 4. They piled it on with a pair of empty-net goals — the first one a perfect execution of a clean faceoff win in the defensive end, flip of the puck and score in eight seconds — just to maintain Dallas’ streak of suffering all of its losses by at least three goals.
But Edmonton won the battle of wills a year ago. The Stars play like a team as stressed as their head coach. Pete DeBoer, in his eighth conference final with four different teams, badly wants to win his first Cup, and he can get testy when he’s asked about why his team struggles 5-on-5, possibly because he has no answers, either. You can almost feel the Stars squeezing their sticks, trying to shake the pressure that the Oilers exert with their remarkable efficiency night after night.
Meanwhile, you sense Edmonton playing with the confidence that comes from having your opponent’s number. Winning six of the last seven playoff meetings going back to last May, Skinner and the Oilers have allowed Dallas six goals in the six defeats. The regular season statistics say this should be a shootout series, but it has never come to that. The Stars put up an incredible five goals in the third period of Game 1 (three on the power play, one into an empty net) and a total of three goals in the other 11 periods.
“Dallas is one of the last four teams standing, so they’re going to have their push,” said Draisaitl, who scored one power-play goal and won the face-off to set up the crucial empty-netter. “But I think we’ve managed it pretty well.”
The Oilers don’t even have to fear retribution from the Stars, whose businesslike approach as mandated by DeBoer does not include retaliation. Dallas lost star center Roope Hintz for Game 3 after a Game 2 slash from defenseman Darnell Nurse, and even with Game 3 turning into a blowout, the Stars never went after Nurse in any fashion. On Tuesday, after Evan Bouchard took a chop at Hintz’s injured ankle in the first period — a play visible to all — ESPN’s Emily Kaplan reported that DeBoer told his team between periods, “We’re not built for that, stay focused, nothing after the whistles.”
It’s one thing to play smart, of course. But the Florida Panthers are defending champions and I don’t think they have ever sent the message to Carolina or any other playoff foe of “yeah, we’re not going to respond to your cheap shots.”
Besides that, how smart were Dallas’ three penalties on Jamie Benn, Mason Marchment and Mikael Granlund, all taken somewhere down around the Edmonton net? The first two turned into power-play goals and the third took a precious two minutes off the clock in a 2-1 game late in the final period.
Not tough and not smart, either, is a bad way to go through the playoffs.
Beyond not being able to answer McDavid and Draisaitl’s magic with the sticks, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins has had four multi-point games against Dallas. That’s 4-out-of-4.
Multi-points? The Stars have two scored goals in three games. They have another one to play, but the idea that they can answer Edmonton’s three-game win streak with one of their own feels nothing like reality.