Breakfast Salvos: Dallas shows Minnesota who's boss, why Jennifer Botterill should be running the DoPS, and the road ahead

It was a good weekend, folks.

I was impressed.

All year the Stars have been chugging along, somewhere between cruise control and driving without a license. They picked up wins against inferior opponents with somewhat listless performances, while the losses to the superior teams were emphatic. However, there was nothing listless about their performance against Boston. It was dominant, and the score reflected that. If the Stars were truly developing a rhythm, it should have carried over into Minnesota, as good as they’ve been this year. And it did.

Not only did Dallas play with a lead for most of the game, but they locked it down when desperation kicked in for the Wild, even tilting the ice further in the shot quality battle.

Data and visual courtesy of HockeyViz.

The game itself was pretty fun, and it started out with a few UFC matches. Listen. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m a man of contradictions. I struggle with things. I’m about to rant about hockey’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids approach to toughness, and yet here I am, enjoying Brendan Smith vs. Jacob Middleton (decision Middleton; he was landing clean rights in the pocket early), and Matt Dumba vs. Zach Bogosion (decision Dumba; that early flurry of uppercuts earned him the judge’s decision).

Of course, the most charitable interpretation to those two is that nothing proves you’re wanting like being willing to bleed for your roster spot. At the same time, it’s worth wondering how much of these decisions were informed by added desperation. Smith and Dumba have already been healthy-scratched. The player eager to take their spot, Lian Bichsel, is bigger, stronger, and faster. He’s also 20 years old and showing more than just toughness as a leveraging talent, as he’s on pace for over 40 points (more on him tomorrow).

I don’t want to oversell Bichsel or Nils Lundkvist (who I think is firmly back so square one, same as square two in the pecking order), nor is this to hammer Smith and Dumba for being who we knew they were when they came in. In point of fact, Smith has been pretty solid, all things considered. Dumba is obviously struggling, but I thought he was okay, and maybe the most promising sign of all is that together, they could be equally sheltered. The effect was defensively positive.

In some ways, the blueline stabilizing amidst a little turmoil is the perfect microcosm for Dallas as a team. It doesn’t always look pretty, but it’s all part of the plan, and the plan is working. But forget about all that. Who wants to watch that Logan Stankoven self-pass one more time?

The whole sequence is just fantastic. Not only does Stankoven have to process that he’s dealing with a rolling puck and that this play is therefore an option, but he has to anticipate Jared Spurgeon’s—an elite defenseman—angle. From there he keeps the play alive as something more than just sorcery in a lab, protecting the puck with his back turned and eventually getting the puck on net. The Ovenmaster gets a lot of credit for his hustle, and dawg, but it’s his craftsmanship that will define a long and prosperous career.

Looking back at my analysis, he’s not just on track for score the amount of points we can expect out of a very talented, very special cohort that includes names like Matthew Tkachuk…

…but he’s on track to score more than your average forward Calder winner.

There’s no asterisk either. Stankoven is doing something truly special against a special class of players. The real insanity is that it may not be enough. Matvei Michkov has taken the lead in forward points, although Tortorella scratched him two games, which puts him in a hole. Meanwhile Lane Hutson is on a 50-point pace. The only rookie defenders to hit a point total that high over the last 20-plus years are Quinn Hughes (53), Cale Makar (50), and Moritz Seider (50). He’s not some sheltered puck mover either. He’s playing 23 minutes a night, just below Mike Matheson, and a minute less than Miro Heiskanen.

Along with Matt Duchene and Cheek-Scarred Mason Marchment, Stankoven is operating at such a high level, you almost forget the season Wyatt Johnston is having.¹ Dallas is well behind Winnipeg and Minnesota in the standings. But for once, they don’t look like a team behind Winnipeg and Minnesota in the standings.

Here we go again: Ryan Reaves cheapshots Darnell Nurse

Once again, head shots are in the news, this time thanks to a Ryan Reaves on Darnell Nurse. There’s no ambiguity here. The head is the principle point of contact, and the end result was Nurse in a bloody heap on the ice. Reaves was thankfully suspended five games.

Jennifer Botterill, was, as always, the voice of reason on a panel that was, in fact, quite reasonable. No surprises there when it comes to her. Last year when she was on a panel with Jamal Mayers and Sam Cosentino, Mayers started arguing out of the blue that Ryan Hartman was justified in high-sticking Cole Perfetti in the face because — well who really knows why. Mayers thinks it’s okay to send a message by breaking rules and threatening a hockey player’s health. Botterill, unlike Cosentino, thankfully called out this obnoxious take for what it was: archaic.

However, it was Topher Scott’s take that drew the most attention from me. I follow as many hockey tactics people I can find: Darryl Belfry, Jack Han, Kyle MacLennan, Michael Coldham, Greg Revak, etc. Scott is another. As a former hockey college coach, I appreciate his insights. But he made a lengthy argument not so much justifying the hit, so much as arguing against the “onus is on the player making the hit” piece of the debate. I’d recommend reading it in full for your own interpretation. While I appreciate the nuance, nuance alone does not an argument make; nor is nuance synonymous with reason. De Niro’s crew in Heat put together a pretty nuanced bank robbery, but that doesn’t make what they did any less illegal.

And that’s my issue. We’re not at the point where we need to talk about the intricate ways in which youth-level coaching is to blame. Right now players themselves don’t know what the line is, and when that line does get crossed — like when Sam Bennett sucker punched Brad Marchand — even the worst offenses get lost in the fog of Well, Hockey’s A Physical Sport². Marchand himself chalked Bennett’s cheapshot to “shit happens.” It’s playoff hockey. But if things change, it needs to start with a clear message to violators about what won’t be tolerated. Even the argument that players “should have their head up” gets muddled by this logic. Players should have their head up for incoming forecheckers? I’m with you. Players should have their head up for illegal contact? No. [Broken record]It’s like asking a boxer to keep their hands lower than usual in case their opponent hits them below the belt. Why should any legal tactic have to accommodate illegal movement?

Maybe it’s hockey culture that’s too soft. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s so afraid of change that it’s unwilling to present a good argument, or a tough ruling on what defines a violation, and the punishment that should accompany it. Part of the allure of hockey is, of course, it’s physicality; the allure that we are watching a game, sure, but sometimes it’s kind of a battleground too, which the Dallas vs. Minnesota game was a great example of. As someone who got into hockey to begin with for that reason, I get it, totally, completely, and without shame (ok some). But what should not be a battleground is figuring out the simplest ways to make hockey safer for its players in order to preserve its best talents. Five games may seem like a lot for Reaves. But how many games is this hit likely to affect Nurse?

TL;DR. Jennifer Botterill for President.

Where to find me: plus programming notes

Hockey Twitter is starting to migrate to Blue Sky, and I’m slowly making the move. I don’t expect anyone to be as extremely online as me, so I’ll be everywhere, Twitter included. Nonetheless, here’s a linktree if the social media world finally swallows itself, and here’s my Discord channel, linked here. I’ve been posting a bit more on Discord lately, and it helps that high-ranking Stars people like Sean, Robert, and Stephen are there. To make this easier, here’s the breakdown:

• Find me on Twitter for generic observations and analysis.

• Find me on Blue Sky for hockey gifs and generic observations and analysis.

• Find me on Discord for more in-the-wild analysis.

• Find me on Mastodon—just kidding.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a prospect rundown. Lots and lots of Antonio Stranges clips for the sickos. Plus some stuff about Lian Bichsel, and Emil Hemming.

1. Johnston has been more quiet on the scoresheet than bad or anything, so don’t take this as criticism. Johnston will be fine.

2. An argument Steve Dangle perfectly skewered.