First Shift 🏒
The Stars have had plenty of ups and downs this season, and that could help them at a time like this.
Dallas won the first three games of the season and then lost the next three. They were flying at 25-7-5 heading into Christmas and then lost four straight. They went on one of the best runs in franchise history at 14-0-1, but now are 1-3-1 in their past five and looking bad in the process.
“We’ve got to work our way out of a little dip here,” Stars coach Glen Gulutzan said. “Two months, three months ago, we were talking about the same ebbs and dips in a season that we’re talking about now. We’ve got a little adverse condition that we have to work our way out of, and it might come at the right time.”
The Stars start a four-game road trip Thursday against the Islanders and follow that up with games at Pittsburgh on Saturday, at Philadelphia on Sunday and at Boston on Tuesday. That’s a pretty good testing ground for a team that still is trying to find the right playoff gear with 11 games remaining in the regular season.
“I think we have a really good understanding of what we need to do and what it looks like when we’re at our best,” said forward Wyatt Johnston, who scored his 40th goal of the season on Tuesday. “We just haven’t done that enough these past few games. Every team in this league can beat you and make you sting if you don’t play your A-game. We know our A-game is as good as anyone when we do it. It’s just a matter of making sure we’re dialed in and doing it as long as we can every night.”
The Stars’ A-game has been polished and buffed over a new season under Gulutzan and his coaching staff. Pete DeBoer led the Stars to three Western Conference Final appearances and had the best regular season record in the NHL during his three-year run in Dallas. However, GM Jim Nill decided he needed a change and selected Gulutzan to do the job.
Gulutzan has twice been a head coach in the league – with the Stars and Calgary – but he has mixed in a lot of years as an assistant coach, including the previous seven seasons in Edmonton. He helped the Oilers to two trips to the Stanley Cup Final and gained some great experience in the process.
Now, he is mixing that experience with the ideas of assistant coaches Alain Nasreddine, Neil Graham and David Pelletier, and the results have been great. When there has been hardship, the group has found a way to push the right buttons. Right now, with Mikko Rantanen, Roope Hintz and Radek Faksa sidelined by injuries, the challenge is real.
But even after a tough 6-4 loss to New Jersey on Tuesday, all in the dressing room seem confident in the response.
“There is always something different,” Gulutzan said when asked to compare this to the January swoon. “I don’t think this is a lack of effort, I think it’s a lack of execution. Before, we weren’t playing hard enough in hard areas. I think we are now, but we’re not playing as good defensively as we were before. A lot of it is coming down to puck management, and that’s something we’re going to look at, our puck management in critical areas.”
And, quite honestly, it doesn’t have to be that complicated.
“Usually what gets us out of this is to play a stingy road game,” Gulutzan said. “We’re going to have to find one of those pretty quickly.”
