Dallas Stars: Seesaw Season Needs Serious Balance
If everything in life is a balance, then the Dallas Stars are slip-sliding all over the place. To get their footing, they need to put a few extremes in order.
When you stop to think about it, opposite extremes dictate much of our lives. At home and out and about, we’re forever searching for the perfect middle between hot and cold (cue the knock-down, drag-out family thermostat wars), quiet and noise (those of you with large families will feel me on this), and even busy and laid-back.
Looking back fondly at Thanksgiving time, you all can probably agree that in between two polar extremes, there is usually a thinly-drawn line of perfection. The middle ground between hungry and satisfied is often so microscopic that we dash across it fist over fork and faceplant firmly on the gluttony side before we even realize what’s happened.
In many ways, this is what’s been eating at the Dallas Stars so far this season. It explains why we’ve seen games that thrilled us and gave us hope, only to be followed by games that drained our will to live and made us wonder how we could fall so far. For the Stars, it’s all about finding balance, and it’s not an issue they developed recently.
Many of the exciting moves made by the organization over the summer were done to combat such problems. Too many young players? They added in some veterans. Too many players perceived as tired and played-out? They called up some younger guys. A system that flip-flopped too much? They brought in a coach with a more definitive and consistent approach.
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But no matter how hard we all can try to add stabilizing factors to our lives, there is a lot more dictating whether or not we find balance than pinpointing areas with uneven scales and simply evening them out. Things have a way of returning to whatever previous condition has been learned and, well, conditioned.
The Stars of seasons past had to learn to be shifty. And by shifty, I don’t mean creepy or sneaky, although at times we wish the Stars’ offense could be a little more of those things. By shifty, I mean that the Stars were subjected to a lot of different environments and tests that they could not approach the same way.
For instance, remember with me for a second how much the Dallas Stars have grown in the last several seasons. While they’re still not really a household name, the Stars have come a long way in terms of recognition within the NHL. They’e proved what they’e capable of.
And they’ve also been in situations where they were lacking and were scraping the bottom of the barrel all season long. In their times of triumph, the Stars become a victorious team and carry that mentality. In times of failure, they carry that mentality, too.
But the Dallas Stars have not yet found a way to carry a winning mentality when they are losing. Or how to stay alert and defensive when they are winning in order to continue doing so. They need that balance.
Recently, there have been tons of other balance issues that have been knocking the Stars down. Their energetic young guys taking penalties for their enthusiasm, the scoring droughts of some of their most notable forwards (not to name names, but I’m sure we’ve all BENN a little disappointed), and of course a five-game win streak and an untouchable attitude dashed and almost completely scribbled over by some very ugly and insecure losses.
This season, we don’t really have a terrible injury bug to blame it on, but dissecting a mentality and successfully balancing it out is easier said than done, both for us as individuals and for the Dallas Stars. It often feels like blind poking around for anything that may be offending, and pulling out potential issues one by one until you’re left with no more offending roots.
One thing we can be sure of and thankful for is that the Dallas Stars are certainly still poking around for the problems under the hood, and they’re just as frustrated by the inconsistencies and the unknowns as we are.
Next: Losses Proving That Stars Are Good, But Not Great
It’s as simple as Jason Spezza said in regards to their loss to Vegas: “…there’s lots of plays out there to be made, we just didn’t make them.”
Between making the plays and not, there’s bound to be a happy medium. A place between these emotionally charged and epic wins, and the soul-crushing and multiple-deficit losses. If the Stars can find that place, where they keep their head in the game and just keep making the plays whether it’s a good night or not, they’ll be just fine.