Dallas Stars Must Finish Last Three Games On Undefeated Note
By Josh Clark
The Dallas Stars’ 2016-17 season has almost reached its untimely end. If the Stars want to carry something positive into the offseason and next year, they need to finish the season on an undefeated note.
In 180 short minutes of playing time, the Dallas Stars will officially close the book on the 2016-17 season. You might consider it a great relief or even a great accomplishment that they actually made it this far. But remember that after April 8, there will be no Stars hockey for about six months.
That’s an awfully long time, but it’s not like they haven’t been in this position before. Before they qualified for the postseason in two of the past three years, they endured a five-year playoff drought where nothing seemed to go right.
If the recent past has taught us anything, it’s that the Dallas Stars are more accustomed to only playing a regular season and then enduring the long offseason. But for some reason, this season in particular feels much different than the other ones.
Maybe it is because of the severe drop-off that Dallas has experienced over the past year. Or perhaps it is the frustration that has built up considering the lack of progress that the Stars are showing with an extremely talented lineup.
Dallas Stars
Whatever the case is, this season is going nowhere but downhill. The Dallas Stars enter tonight’s game against the Arizona Coyotes with a record of 32-36-11. That’s 75 points in 79 games. Even if the Stars win out the remainder of the season, they will not reach the .500 mark of 82 points.
These numbers will help this season go down as the second worst in franchise history. The confusing part is that a team that has Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, Jason Spezza, and John Klingberg cannot get above the average mark. It’s baffling.
But nonetheless, it is what it is. And now the Stars are on the brink of being able to erase this season from memory entirely and start anew. The 2017 offseason will pose a lot of challenging questions and situations and it will be interesting to see which route the Dallas Stars take considering the delicate state that the team is currently in.
Basically, there’s no time for a rebuild considering where the team is. You have two of the 15 best forwards in the league and one of the best young defenders around. Now is not the time to waste their prime and try to build everything up again. A quick fix must be made in order to get the Dallas Stars rolling and headed in the right direction yet again.
The offseason is not entirely here yet, though. The Dallas Stars still have three games to go in their regular season schedule, and it is essential that they win all three of them.
After wrapping up a five-game road trip in Tampa Bay on Sunday, the Stars traveled back to Dallas to close out their year. They will welcome the Arizona Coyotes tonight, the Nashville Predators on Thursday, and close out the year on Saturday night against the Colorado Avalanche.
So why do they need to win all three games? Why not intentionally lose all three and get a better chance at a top-five draft pick? After all, the Dallas Stars sit 26th in the NHL at the moment. Three more losses could really help their chances of getting possibly the third or fourth overall pick in the 2017 NHL Entry Draft.
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At this point, “tanking” is a worthless cause that would only cause the Stars’ further pain and distress. On top of that, the Stars have proven that they are a team that is good at rebounding.
After the disappointing 2014-15 season that saw Dallas fall seven points short of the final playoff spot, the Stars bounced back in a big way in the following season and finished atop the Western Conference.
At the end of that 14-15 season, the Stars finished with a record of 4-0-0 and outscored their opponents 17-5 in the span. This streak of dominance helped them enter the offseason on a confident note and prepare to start with a quicker pace in the season to follow.
While they aren’t in the same situation as they were that year in terms of the standings, it’s still a smart idea to build up some confidence and team spirit (considering the last three games are all at home) while heading into the offseason.
Even though it seems as though results couldn’t carry across six months, every game matters while building towards the future. After all, think about how the Stars’ playoff run ended last year and how that translated into their start this year.
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These games still matter for multiple reasons, and it would be in the Stars’ best interest to win them all. It might be a bit of an uphill battle for this team, but it will show a lot about where they are headed if they can pull it off. Let’s see what they have in store tonight at 7:30.