Heika's Take: After players-only meeting, Stars say answers lie within

DALLAS --Wednesday's 4-2 loss to the Nashville Predators will be a key moment in the 2021-22 Stars season.
Either the team will rally from it and find their missing mojo, or they won't, and possibly face bigger challenges.

Players held a closed-door meeting for nearly 30 minutes after the game, and while they wouldn't share what happened, it was clear there was a real urgency in the dressing room.
Then, after Roope Hintz, Jason Robertson and Braden Holtby spoke to the media, head coach Rick Bowness came in and had a very brief statement.
"I know exactly what's wrong with this team and we're going to fix it," he said.
That's a very confident or very ominous statement from Bowness. If he's right, and they do fix it, he looks like a genius. If not…well, things could get a little sticky.
The Stars will have an off day on Thursday, one of the mandated days off required by the collective bargaining agreement, and then will practice Friday at American Airlines Center. Then they'll play host to the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday and the Detroit Red Wings on Tuesday, and the belief is that they need to find a way to win some games.

Strangely enough, the Stars did a lot of good things on Wednesday. They had a 28-22 advantage in shots on goal, a 58-35 advantage in shot attempts (on goal, missed and blocked) and a 33-19 advantage in the faceoff circle. They scored on one of their three power-play opportunities and killed the only power play they handed out.
In a lot of ways, they accomplished a lot of what they wanted to do after a rough 6-3 loss in Vancouver Sunday.
But they allowed the first goal again and they never had a lead in the game - something that has haunted them for much of the season. Holtby stopped 18 of 21 shots, and said he needed to be better.
"Every team goes through stretches like this," Holtby said. "Tonight, we played a pretty good game. There's a couple goals I could've played different, and then we're talking about a different conversation right now. Sometimes, you focus on the outcome a little too much. That's one where I felt like I could've been a bigger difference to help this team win this game. You know, you move forward and try to improve for tomorrow."

That was a big part of the players-only conversation that the players really didn't want to talk about.
"We had a talk with the group there, and that stays there," Hintz said.
While Robertson added: "We have a lot of leaders, a lot of veterans in there and I'm sure they've been in situations, so everyone's trusting each other right now and that's what we have to do."

Holtby, meanwhile, said: "We have a veteran group. We've got a lot of guys that have played a lot of years. Sometimes, it just takes a little bit to get going. We're confident and everyone's been through it before. The biggest thing going forward is making sure we're not getting too high and we're not getting too low. We're a little tense and that just happens. You go through that, you get stronger, you come together more, and you come out of it stronger if you put in the right work."
That seems to hit the nail on the head for the Stars right now. They've been chasing expectations since training camp, all the while trying to forge a new bond with new players. Robertson and John Klingberg have dealt with injuries and missed games. Newcomers like Holtby, Ryan Suter, Michael Raffl, Luke Glendening and Jani Hakanpää are dealing with adjusting to a new city and organization. And the coaching staff has been dealing with the tendency to make adjustments after every game and during many games.
So there hasn't been the right fit.
Will there be? Well, the players seem to think the meeting helped, and the coaches seem to think they had an epiphany of sorts.
Asked to clarify, Bowness simply repeated himself. "We'll fix it," he said. "I know exactly what's wrong. We'll fix it."
That seems a simple explanation to a problem that seems fairly complicated. For one, the Stars are 29th in the league in scoring at 2.17 goals per game. Two, they rarely are ahead in games, ranking 31st in time leading. Three, they've been talking about these same problems for 11 games before Wednesday.
"We're really chasing that first goal. I think that's so important right now, getting that first goal," Robertson said. "Every team plays better with a lead, right? And unfortunately, if you don't get that then we start to get a little desperate. Then unfortunately another mistake, it's two then three and that's just how the game went."
So now, there needs to be an answer. Robertson said the team felt urgency before the game, it knew coming home that a better performance was needed, it knew that a loss to the rival Predators would put them five points behind Nashville in the Central Division.
Now, it seems it knows even more just how urgent things are.
"Things just aren't going the way we planned. That happens," Holtby said. "It's a long season, it's tough to keep that consistency all year through, and some games are just a play here and there and that's the difference. Our job is to find a way to turn that around."
This story was not subject to the approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club.
Mike Heikais a Senior Staff Writer for DallasStars.com and has covered the Stars since 1994. Follow him on Twitter @MikeHeika.