Erik Cole And Shawn Horcoff: A New Dynamic Duo?

The Dallas Stars seem as though they have shaken off all the preseason and start-of-season jitters and are finally at their full potential, after knocking off an impressive 3-1-0 Vancouver Canucks team by a whopping score of 6-3. All lines contributed in the Stars quest for the win, even Kari Lehtonen, who stopped a beautiful 43-46 shots on Tuesday night.

Lindy Ruff took the opportunity to shift the lines around after a 6-5 overtime loss to the Philadelphia Flyers last Saturday, a game in which the Stars should have won had they played hard for the entire 60 minutes. So with a new chance to display a new scheme, Ruff took advantage of it. What many people noticed soon after the release of the new combinations was that Jason Spezza had moved up to the center position on the first line, shifting Tyler Seguin to the right wing. Ales Hemsky had moved down to the third line with Curtis McKenzie and Vernon Fiddler. That was about the sum of what most people noticed.

What most did not notice was the makeup of the fourth line, consisting of Colton Sceviour and two rather old and somewhat irrelevant names from the Stars season, Erik Cole and Shawn Horcoff. No one seemed to notice because Sceviour had recently stepped back in the lineup after an injury, and Cole and Horcoff were not yet surging with points.

But starting in the Philadelphia game and following through in the Vancouver game was a bit of a budding partnership between these two veterans. In the Philadelphia game, the warm-up lines resembled those that the Stars had used for the entire year, with Cole sitting on the second line with Spezza and Hemsky, and Horcoff sitting on the fourth with Fiddler and newcomer McKenzie. But if you know Lindy Ruff, you know that his favorite thing to do is mix the lines even more right off of the opening draw. Low and behold, the two found themselves on the same line multiple times during the night.

It was with 17:14 left in the second that these two first clicked. Brenden Dillon shot one up to center ice where Patrick Eaves tipped it off to Shawn Horcoff who snatched it up and took it into the zone. Once in, he sent a beautiful, sizzling pass from the left circle across to Erik Cole who sent the puck to the twine off of a crafty backhander. This goal tied the game up for the Stars and led to two more unanswered for the Stars, sparking them to life and giving them a 4-2 lead at the end of the second period. This was also the first point of the season for both players. Though the Stars lost, these two performed magnificently together during each shift they met up on.

But they did not stop there. Tuesday night came, and Cole and Horcoff found themselves matched on the fourth line. With 2:14 remaining in the first period, the Stars were on the power play and held the 1-0 lead. Jordie Benn received the initial assist from Horcoff and he sent the puck to Cole who was waiting at the “NHL Faceoff” logo near the blue line, and he sniped the puck in for a PPG and his second goal in two games. Horcoff tallied his second assist and the two had found a way to connect once again.

Later in the second period, after the Stars had given up their first goal of the game and had been reduced to a 5-1 lead, Horcoff once again found his way to the left circle and Cole once again found himself crashing the net. Horcoff sent a saucer pass that collided with Dan Hamhuis and found its way to Cole’s shin, where he helped it ricochet past Eddie Lack, regaining the Stars 5-goal advantage and scoring the team’s final goal of the game.

These two have proven that age is merely a number and that when you do things on the ice, it’s best that you do them as a team, or at least a duo.

The great and well known duo of Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn have tallied played the goal-and-assist strategy six times this season, but to be fair they have been playing on the same line for six games, while Cole and Horcoff have spent time together for three games, with the third in Columbus where they were centered by Vernon Fiddler but could not come up with anything, and converted three times.

What is great about these two working together is how Cole always looks for ways to get to the front of the net if he can and set up a screen or wait for a redirection, while Horcoff takes the outside boards as his path into the zone and looks for an open teammate to pass to. No team has picked up on it yet, but if Ruff continues to pair these two up on the same line, they could soon be the two names at the top of every opponent’s whiteboard.

Are these two meant to stay together? Could they end up giving the Stars a one-two punch pairing that they could so gratefully use?

Tomorrow night’s game is against the New Jersey Devils, and Ruff has been practicing with the “regular” lines as mentioned above, plotting Cole on the second line with Spezza and Hemsky, and Horcoff on the fourth line with Fiddler and Eaves. But Ruff is known for jumbling lines, and we could see that happen tomorrow night.

Leave your comments and questions below, and as always, thanks for reading! Go Stars.