Game 7 Stray Observations (First Round): Dallas advances to the second round, as Mikko Rantanen beats Colorado

Rantanen via ippon.

What a story.

Minus their top forward (ok maybe not anymore but still), and their top defender, against a former Cup champ at 100 percent, and the Stars close it out in seven. Contrary to my prediction.

We’ll get to Dallas in a minute. Maybe this exercise is boring and you’re tired of hearing it. But let’s try to imagine. What does Edmonton look like against LA without Connor McDavid and Evan Bouchard? Does Washington have more trouble versus Montreal without Jakub Chychrun and Dylan Strome? How many teams in this year’s playoffs can do what Dallas just did?

I feel like some fans still aren’t on board with this logic. “But Dallas’ depth is elite,” they’ll say. “Colorado is overrated,” they might add. Both of these miss the point. You win regular season games with depth. Sometimes they’re earned, sometimes they’re stolen, but to the second point, being overrated doesn’t mean being bad. To beat a quality playoff team — top 8 in the league when all was said and done with 102 points earned via a ton of injuries, and with the added boost of getting Gabriel Landeskog back — says a lot more than the usual soundboard of lazy soundbites.

This is the reason why I think Pete DeBoer deserves so much credit. Dallas’ roster was there to be exploited. And frankly it was. Dallas’ blueline was torn apart in terms of possession and shot quality. Forward lines struggled to maintain possession against Colorado’s speed. But for all of Dallas’ flaws, DeBoer leveraged their strengths over their weaknesses in a way the team hadn’t in the regular season, even with Miro Heiskanen and Jason Robertson in the lineup. When DeBoer had control of the matchups, Dallas won the share of shot quality, which was huge. On special teams, the Stars outscored the Avalanche 6-3. And in Game 7, as has been the case in the eight previous Game 7 contests under DeBoer’s watch, Dallas won.

This is normally the part where we can start previewing the next series, but the Central being the Central: Winnipeg is locked into mortal combat with St. Louis, and are also going to Game 7. Connor Hellebuyck, more human than human, has been carved like a cake, supporting everything anyone ever said about Hellebuyck not being “built for the playoffs.” The Blues, well…who knows. They’re the Blues. Nobody knows what to expect.

This all feels like good news for Dallas, no matter who wins. It’s NOT that it means Dallas has the road paved for them to another Western Conference Final. It just means Winnipeg is not superhuman, and neither is St. Louis: the ideal context for the Stars team that that still isn’t 100 percent.

Jamie Benn and the PK

That was a dumb penalty, and there are simply no two ways about it. Especially for Benn, who has been here before with these unnecessary violations (the Mark Stone being the obvious point of reference). Thankfully for Dallas, Benn’s crosscheck became a mere footnote, as the Stars once again ruined Colorado’s day on the man advantage. I’m not gonna rehash this we’ve already watched the tape together. What the Stars did in this series down a man was just obscene. Not only did the Avs fail to change it up. They kept doing the same thing.

Shorthanded

That shorthanded goal was a tough one to give up. In general, I feel like shorthanded goals are kind of silly from the perspective of analysis. They don’t happen often, and when they do, they don’t feel designed so much as incidental. To that end, I don’t think we need to go around blaming players for mistakes making offensive plays. That’s the nature of offense, Riks is baked into every calculus.

But this was different. This was Matt Duchene losing his man in a story that has been a little too familiar. Dallas needs more from Duchene, so while it was nice that he got a solid assist there on Wyatt Johnston’s critical goal there in the third, a performance like that can’t be the norm as long as Robertson remains out.

Oettinger

Jake Oettinger was once again very good. Not great, just very good. He was exactly as good as Dallas needed him to be in order to win the series. While it might sound like some criticism is baked into that comment, I don’t believe that’s the case. No position invokes more chaos than the netminder, and Oettinger was anything but chaotic in this series.

Third period push

It’s like I keep saying. Momentum isn’t some vague notion of a vague notion. It’s special teams. And Mikko Rantanen. If Dallas wins the Cup, Rantanen’s performance in the final period of this series will be the stuff of legend. It reminded me a lot of 2018, when Dallas was on the verge of losing eight straight, and against Minnesota, were on their way to the worst regular season start in franchise history. Then Alex Radulov said no. Not on my watch.

That’s the kind of grown man work you rarely see even in the context of elite players doing grown man work. A lot of credit goes to the rest of the team here but let’s face it: Rantanen deserves the bulk of the offensive credit.

The Colorado perspective

I’ll do my best to keep this civil. Keep in mind, I don’t hold any ill-will towards Colorado or their fans. I just don’t see how you’re not disappointed from a pure hockey perspective. Martin Necas, Brock Nelson, and Ryan Lindgren offered varying degrees of minimal value. They employ one of the brightest hockey minds when it comes to special teams (Arik Parnass) and yet their power play got dumpstered. The Avalanche will always be a very good team because they still have Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar leading the way at a good age.

But they’ve done nothing to address the decline of their blueline. Replacing Nazem Kadri with the dollar tree versions of him have also been big misses. At some point they need to find a Kadri instead of replacing him with a veteran stopgap version. And who knows: maybe that’s David Carle’s music. Would that be something?