Dallas Stars Overcome Season Of Adversity, Earn Spot In 2019 Playoffs
By Josh Clark
Though two games still remain in the 2018-19 regular season, the Dallas Stars have already reached their goal. They qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs on Tuesday night and turned a year filled with drama and challenges into a success.
Whenever I think about the Dallas Stars and the Stanley Cup Playoffs, I cannot help but think back to their 2014 run.
The Stars had been stuck in a five-year postseason drought going into the 2013-14 season. With Jim Nill taking his spot as the new general manager and making a major offseason splash and Lindy Ruff being hired as the newest head coach, Dallas braced for a year of cautious excitement.
And though it took 81 games, the Stars got it done. Through a year of ups and downs that helped kickstart a new era of Dallas Stars hockey, the Stars clinched the second Western Conference wild card spot in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
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It was an exciting time for the entire franchise, spanning from the front office down to the fans. And even though the Stars dropped their first two games to the Anaheim Ducks (who finished the year in first place in the West) on the road, games three and four were truly a sight to behold.
I’ll always remember the primary hype video that played on the Jumbotron shortly before the two teams took the ice. Playing on the theme of “underdogs,” the video focused on the team never quitting and finding a way to battle adversity.
And though the entire video might still provide chills for Stars fans that have followed the team for the past decade, the first few words of the video always stick with me.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t painless.
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Those three phrases perfectly embodied the Stars’ 2013-14 stretch. Their roster lacked depth and superstar talent (besides Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin). They faced multiple losing skids that required a strong bounce back. Through the majority of the year, their odds of making the playoffs sat around the 50/50 mark and they never really broke free from the .500 mark until late in the season (they sat at 24-21-9 at the end of January). There were injuries to battle through, tragedies to overcome, and a tight wild card battle to endure. And yet, the Stars made it happen.
It’s crazy to think about how many parallels the 2013-14 Dallas Stars have with the 2018-19 Dallas Stars. Both battled adversity for much of their regular season campaigns, and both found a way to get it done just before the clock struck midnight on the regular season.
Let’s rewind to April 2018 for a moment. The Stars just wrapped up an impressive 4-2 win over the Los Angeles Kings. But the overarching focus isn’t on the win; instead, the focus is on the fact that the Stars will not play postseason hockey for a second consecutive year and the third time in Nill’s five years.
The entire franchise looked like a mess. The hiring of Ken Hitchcock in the 2017 offseason had backfired, the Stars had no depth scoring of any kind, their defense had taken a step forward but couldn’t keep the team churning forward, and badly-timed injuries and internal issues had put Dallas in a bind in the final month of the season. Nill’s five-year plan looked to be an ultimate failure and the dreams that had been created from a terrific 2015-16 campaign had all but faded away.
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With exit interviews wrapped up, the Stars entered another offseason of imminent change. Hitchcock “retired” from coaching, leaving the team in need and with the opportunity to go in a new direction for once. They did so by hiring Denver University head coach Jim Montgomery, a former NHL player with no coaching experience above the NCAA level.
When looking at the recent past, the Stars missing the playoffs usually signaled an aggressive and busy offseason for Nill. In the 2015 summer, he landed Antti Niemi, Patrick Sharp, and Johnny Oduya. In the 2017 offseason, Ben Bishop, Marc Methot, and Alexander Radulov joined up with the Stars.
So, the 2018 offseason should be the same way, right? After all, there were plenty of holes that needed filling in the Dallas lineup.
But Nill didn’t go in that direction. He took a quiet approach to the offseason, letting go of players like Antoine Roussel, Dan Hamhuis, Greg Pateryn, and Kari Lehtonen and bringing Blake Comeau, Valeri Nichushkin, Roman Polak, and Anton Khudobin into the fold as replacements.
It’s not like he didn’t try, though. The Dallas Stars were in the running to land both John Tavares and Erik Karlsson in the opening days of July, but neither endeavor panned out.
And so, the Stars stuck to their newly-adapted roster and braced for an intriguing 2018-19 year. Little did they know all of the adversity, challenges, and uphill battles they would face along the way.
The season started out on a bit of a rough note, though that was expected to an extent. With a new head coach that was new to professional hockey as a whole and incorporating new players into a new scheme, the growing pains were there. Through the first month of the season, the Stars were 6-5-0.
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Miro Heiskanen was off and running in his rookie campaign and was not only meeting, but surpassing the bar that NHL media and fans alike had set for him in his first season. Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin both got out to hot starts in the crease and gave the Stars a one-two punch between the pipes. The lack of depth scoring continued to grow and swell.
In November, the Stars were on the receiving end of what could have been a knockout blow. When John Klingberg exited the lineup for six weeks while recovering from a broken hand, the Dallas defense looked to be in peril. Stephen Johns hadn’t played all season, Marc Methot was in and out of the lineup with a nagging knee injury, and Connor Carrick was still on the IR with an ankle injury. That’s four of the Stars’ top six defenders.
But they found a way through. Taylor Fedun, Joel Hanley, Ben Gleason, Gavin Bayreuther, and Dillon Heatherington stepped up from the minors and lended a hand to keep the Stars afloat in a crisis. Esa Lindell stepped up his own play and has now established a year filled with career highs. Roman Polak, a summer signing that many Stars fans and media members didn’t think was necessary, became a regular staple in the lineup and added stability and a veteran presence to the blue line.
At the NHL Holiday Break, however, the Dallas Stars sat at 18-16-3 and were stuck on the outside of the playoff picture. And with two months of adversity somewhat battled, the Stars then sunk into a wave of drama.
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On Dec. 28, 2018, Dallas Stars CEO Jim Lites went on a public and expletive-filled rant about the “lacking” play of Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin. Although Benn and Seguin were behind pace with their usual season totals, the attack seemed incorrectly targeted.
That moment could very well have caused this team to collapse entirely. If Benn and Seguin hadn’t taken a level-headed approach to the verbal assault and had let it affect their mentality, the offense might have taken an even more severe drop-off. Heck, the entire team might have let it affect them and fall into a more significant wave of mediocrity. After all, that’s not an event that any player or team can prepare for and the Stars were unusually thrust into the middle of the hockey world spotlight at a critical point in the season.
But the Dallas Stars took it a different direction and used it as a call to action. They blew out the Detroit Red Wings in their first game post-rant and pieced together a 4-1-1 run as the 2019 calendar year began. Maybe that was the emotional jolt they needed to really get the ball rolling on their season.
"“We’re a team and we don’t leave the guys by themselves. That’s how we responded. They say whatever they want and they’re allowed. Basically, they aren’t happy with us, so that’s it. It’s time to change. I think we did a small step today, and there’s another big game coming up on the 31st. We just have to regroup and get better every day.” – Alexander Radulov on Dec. 29"
Or maybe it wasn’t. After the six-game surge, the Stars fell into another four-game skid. They scored just three goals in that span and lost to three of the bottom-five teams in the NHL standings (Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles). Jim Montgomery talked about his regrets of being unable to change the “culture of mediocrity” that had plagued the franchise for the better part of the past decade.
Then, they built the hype back up with a five-game win streak. But that was quickly negated by a 4-6-1 stretch to end the month of February. Bishop was in and out of the lineup with injuries, the offense continued to struggle with putting up support, and the defense was doing everything in its power to keep the team in games.
But then March rolled around, and the Dallas Stars hit the gas. With the playoff push in full swing and their 2019 NHL Trade Deadline endeavors not fully panning out (considering Mats Zuccarello broke his arm just 40 minutes into his debut), the Stars posted a 9-4-2 record in the most important month of the year. They won eight games in a row on the road, secured important wins against other teams in the playoff hunt, and raised their odds of qualifying for the playoffs to 99.9 percent by April 1.
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And on April 2, they secured a postseason berth in dominant fashion, trouncing the Philadelphia Flyers 6-2 and pushing their record to 42-31-7 with 91 points.
Just like that, the first part of the journey is over. The 2018-19 Dallas Stars are a playoff team.
They could have crumpled when their offense struggled out of the gate in the early portion of the year. The mass of injuries to their blue line in November could have buried them at the bottom of the Western Conference standings. Internal conflict and a disconnect between the front office and its superstars could have created a cloud of imminent destruction within the franchise. They also could have slipped when their playoff odds dropped below 50 percent at the midway point of the season. Or when they hit a 1-4-1 skid in February that moved them dangerously close to the wild card wall.
But they didn’t let the adversity catch up to them. They didn’t let any mountains get in their way. They took every obstacle with a grain of salt and came up with a plan to get around it.
And now, they’re playoff bound.
Jim Montgomery will coach in a Stanley Cup Playoffs game in his first season at the NHL level. Tyler Seguin could reach the 80-point mark for just his second time in a Dallas Stars uniform. Alexander Radulov is on pace to finish the year on more than a point-per-game pace. Miro Heiskanen, John Klingberg, and Esa Lindell became the first Dallas defensive trio in franchise history to each score 10 or more goals in a season. Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin could win the Jennings Trophy for the NHL’s lowest goals against average. And finally, the Stars will wrap up a 2018-19 year on Saturday with plenty of career-highs for various players in different statistical categories and an overall sense of motivation after a strong finish to the year.
In many instances, this was the most important season for the Dallas Stars in recent memory. There was an expectation for Montgomery to make an immediate impact, even though it was his first year in the NHL. Nill’s seat was getting hotter after missing the playoffs in back-to-back years for the first time in his tenure as GM. Benn, Seguin, Radulov, and Bishop had all gotten a year older with no chance at a Stanley Cup.
A lot hinged on the 2018-19 regular season. The Dallas Stars knew that. And even though they were dealt an incredibly challenging hand at different points of the year, they made it through.
It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t painless. But they never quit.
Now, they’ll play past game 82 and start a new journey towards the Stanley Cup Final. And with all that they have endured, they’ve earned that chance entirely.