Dallas Stars: Scheduling Break Means Stars Can Work On Fixing Problems

After three games in the first week of the season, the Dallas Stars don’t play their fourth game until Saturday.

The three-day break that the Dallas Stars have means a lot of time to dwell on their loss before having a chance to get back on the ice, but it also means there’s time to work on things.

Every year, the NHL schedule has some interesting quirks. Some of them are a bigger deal than others.

For instance, when the bye week was implemented, things got hectic with the schedule, but that was ironed out with the change to having all of the bye weeks consolidated to a much smaller window of time.

More from Blackout Dallas

• Dallas Stars Traverse City Tournament: Who had great performances?
• Grushnikov and Stankoven lead Dallas Stars to 6-3 win over Columbus
• Dallas Stars prospects look to wrap up tournament with a win
• Burn the tapes: Dallas Stars prospects lose 5-1 to Toronto Maple Leafs
• Dallas Stars look to continue success today against the Maple Leafs

In another weird scheduling decision, going into play tonight, there are four teams in the league who have only played one game so far, despite the season starting a week ago. None of those four teams (Tampa, New Jersey, Florida, and Edmonton) are playing tonight either, but they’ll all have their second games tomorrow night.

For the Stars, their schedule gave them the opportunity to hit the ground running and use their momentum from the win against the Coyotes to carry them into the game against the Jets two nights later.

Now, they’re looking at three days off, and they don’t even have to travel until their first pair of road games next week.

This break can be really good for the Stars, or really bad.

If the team lets the loss to Toronto get to their head and spends the next few days dwelling on that, it could affect their play on Saturday, when they need to be in top form to face the Ducks. The Ducks have gone 3-0-0 and they are the only undefeated team, with the exception of the Lightning and Devils, both of whom have only played one game so far.

Instead of focusing just on the fact that they lost, they need to take these days to refocus and work hard at the weaker points of their game.

Jim Montgomery is attempting to help them do that. Montgomery’s decisions on how to handle his first loss will certainly set the tone early with the team in the locker room.

After bag skating the team today, he gave them tomorrow off. It’s a good coaching decision to make, forcing them to put in work today as a response to the loss, but then giving them the space to let it go, move on, and come back fresh on Friday.

Now, the only thing is to wait and see how the team works to bounce back from their first loss and improve, hopefully with a little more scoring from depth players, especially now that Valeri Nichushkin is back in the line-up with big expectations to fill.