Dallas Stars: Finding Lasting Success on the Road

Since winning the Central Division in 2015-16, the Dallas Stars have regressed, missing the playoffs each of the last two seasons. A significant part of their misfortune has been their inability to win on the road. For them to return to the playoffs in 2019, they’ll have to avoid the deep chasm of March that has annually torpedoed their playoff hopes.

In warfare, there’s a term known as a flanking maneuver, or just “flanking.” In it’s purest form, a flanking maneuver involves an attack from the sides, often to surprise an enemy or to expose a weakness in its setup. The theory of flanking is that military forces often strengthen the front, leaving the sides vulnerable to attack.

The Dallas Stars have been flanked over the past couple of seasons, not by a specific team or specific strategy, but by their road schedule. Since having a top-five road record in the NHL in 2015-16 (22-12-7), Dallas has fallen into the bottom third of the NHL away from American Airlines Center.

In 2015-16, when Dallas won the Central, the Stars had the fifth best road record in the NHL. That success translated to the playoffs, where the Stars went 4-2, a lifeline which prolonged an otherwise forgettable series against the St. Louis Blues in the Conference Semifinals.

Since then, Dallas has stumbled. In 2016-17, the Stars fell all the way to 27th on the road, posting a horrific 12-24-5 record, putting them ahead of only the Vancouver Canucks and Colorado Avalanche.

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This past season wasn’t much better. The Stars’ 16-20-5 road record came in at 22nd in the league.

The Overtime Point

The importance of winning on the road can at times be overemphasized or overlooked. Only seven teams finished with a winning percentage above .500 last year. In a league in which overtime creates a three-point game, the importance of the “overtime point” is crucial.

The Stars had 20 regulation road losses and five OT/shootout road losses last season. This amounted to a .390 winning percentage and a .451 point percentage, meaning that the Stars only earned 45.1 percent of their available road points. This number is right at hockey’s “Mendoza Line,” which means that bottom tier playoff teams will need to earn at least 45 percent of their road points to make the playoffs.

As an unwritten rule, a playoff team will earn at least 58 percent of their available points in a given year — 95 points — which can vary slightly from season-to-season.

This data seems to indicate that the Stars played passably on the road to eek their way into the playoffs; therefore, the culprit must be Dallas home record. This assumption would be incorrect. Dallas finished 14th in the NHL with a 26-12-3 home record, undoubtedly good enough to make the playoffs.

So, what gives?

The Road Trip

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, author Cormac McCarthy tells a father-son story that moves through a vast wasteland of sickness, death, and starvation. It’s a grueling novel, and McCarthy’s writing style is not easy on the eyes.

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I imagine McCarthy would see the sports parallel in the Dallas Stars late-season road implosion. This was no ordinary collapse. The Stars became the first team in NHL history to have at least 80 points with at least 16 games remaining to miss the playoffs, a stunning achievement in futility.

The subsidence can be pinpointed from March 11-20. During this period, the Stars went 0-4-2 on a six-game road swing, mostly through the Eastern Conference. Of those six losses, two came against the Montreal Canadiens (71 points) and the Ottawa Senators (67 points). Another loss came after Dallas yielded a goal in the final 20 seconds to the Toronto Maple Leafs to send the game into overtime.

While the six road losses torpedoed the Stars playoff hopes, it was part of a more substantial eight-game losing streak that included a 4-1 home loss to the Vancouver Canucks (73 points). So, again, the blame can’t be put entirely on ineptitude away from American Airlines Center.

The real worry seems to be the month of March. In the last two seasons, Dallas is 4-11-3 on the road and 10-15-5 overall during March. This equates to an atrocious 30.6 point percentage, 15 percent lower than the “Mendoza Line” (This needs a unique name of its own).

This speaks to consistency. Sometimes the best teams don’t string together wins, but rather avoid stringing together losses. The Nashville Predators and Winnipeg Jets each lost three games in a row twice, with one of those losses being in OT/shootout.

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Losing can have a snowball effect on a team. The more you lose, the easier losing becomes. The Dallas Stars aren’t far off. If they can improve marginally on the road, mostly by avoiding a devastating March, they can be a middle-tier Western Conference playoff team.