Dallas Stars Beat Capitals, Revive Faint Playoff Hopes

There typically isn’t much hope for a team with a .628 percent chance of making the Stanley Cup Playoffs. But after last night, the Dallas Stars might be ready to change all of that.

“I don’t think three games is a trend over the years.” This is what Braden Holtby told CSN Mid-Atlantic on Monday morning before the Capitals’ game against the Dallas Stars last night.

His quotes were in direct reference to the fact that going into last night, the Dallas Stars were the only team that he had not beaten in his career. He was 0-3-0 overall, but was confident in his 19-0-2 record over his prior 21 starts.

And why wouldn’t he be? The Capitals were soaring high as the best team in the NHL while the Stars were struggling to stay afloat at the bottom of the Western Conference. Dallas was seven points out of the final playoff spot, while Washington was no more than five or six points away from clinching a playoff berth. It was the ultimate tale of two cities.

Not to mention that the Caps were playing host to the Stars and had yet to lose at home in the 2017 calendar year (15-0-0).

Dallas Stars

Everything seemed to align perfectly in Washington’s favor, signaling a relatively easy win for the club that would only further tarnish what has already been a disappointing Stars’ season.

But then it happened. No one knows quite what it was, but it happened. After a furious start that obviously caught Washington off-guard, Devin Shore, Radek Faksa, and Jason Spezza scored to give Dallas a commanding 3-0 lead over the best team in the NHL just a little under 26 minutes into the game.

With that, Holtby was quickly removed from the net, dropping him to 0-4-0 on his career against Dallas. Philipp Grubauer came in and held the line for Washington while they tried to mount a furious comeback for the ages.

They tried to start it up by using the seventh best power play unit against the worst penalty killing unit in the NHL. But that didn’t work. The Stars went 4/4 on the penalty kill and never really gave Washington any grade-A chances while shorthanded.

So instead they tried to capitalize on the Stars’ sluggishness. That didn’t work either. For a majority of the game, Dallas matched Washington stride-for-stride and kept the pressure on.

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That put the Caps down to their last resort: control the offensive possession throughout the last half of the game, put a lot of shots on net, and some are likely to go in.

That might work with other teams, but Kari Lehtonen obviously had different plans. The Big Finn ended up stopping 42-44 shots in route to yet another season-best performance. All in all, the Stars bested the Caps 4-2, broke a lot of streaks for Washington, and quickly cut their playoff deficit from nine points to five in a matter of four days now.

“I don’t think anyone is counting us in the playoff race right now,” Patrick Sharp told the media following the game. “We’re still hanging around, I guess five points back now. We believe in here and we’re having fun playing.”

Monday night offered something to the Dallas Stars that they haven’t had in a while: hope.

Too many times this season, the Stars have struggled to start a fire. They have either failed to even get a spark going or find a way to get one but have it immediately doused by rain. It slowly contributed to the extinction of their hopes and aspirations.

But if they needed a win to potentially boost their motivation and turn their season around, they found it last night at the Verizon Center. It’s difficult for an underdog to beat a team that was as hot as the Caps, but the Stars found a way to make it happen. It was a full, three-sided effort from the crease on out. The goaltending was brilliant, the defense was well-poised, and the offense was electric and speedy.

“You can’t get ten points in one night,” Devin Shore said back in February before the start of the Stars’ five-game homestand. “You have to focus on the task at hand. When you look at the grand scheme of things, it may be kind of overwhelming. All you really can do is focus on the 8-20 minutes that you’re going to play as an individual and how you can help the team win and chip away at points, then seeing what happens from there. There’s a lot of things that are out of our control right now, so we can only worry about the things that are in our control.”

The Dallas Stars’ playoff chances only bumped up to 1.5 percent, a .9 percent increase, after the win last night, even though it feels like they should be given an automatic bid after a win of that caliber.

Next: Stars' Playoff Status Is Feeding Off Of Pressure

But just know that the Stars are not eliminated yet. After the last two games, they have quickly taken themselves out of the early offseason talks. At this point, it would seem ludicrous for them not to make it. Just know that they’re still alive. They still have a lot of ground to cover, but it’s still a plausible situation.

The next question is whether they will be able to keep this momentum alive, especially after getting a major ego boost from last night. The Stars have struggled with keeping a hot streak going this season, and now there is no time left to fall short or fail. It’s go time.

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