Heika’s Take: Stars have “no excuse” in flat loss to Golden Knights

Pete DeBoer was asked after a 6-1 home loss to Vegas Saturday whether it would be a good idea to just forget it and move on, and he pondered the question for a second.

“That’s definitely something . . . the old `burn the tape,’ DeBoer said. “But I think there’s too much there for us to learn to do that. I think we’ve got to take a hard look at it and learn from it.”

There were a lot of moving parts to the defeat. Dallas had a tough travel schedule, playing three road games in four nights and getting back at 3 a.m. Friday before a 3 p.m. start on Saturday. Vegas took advantage of a glitch in the schedule and had two days in Dallas after a 6-3 win in St. Louis on Wednesday. The Stars were fired up for a rematch with the defending Stanley Cup champions after two losses past regulation to Vegas earlier in the season. And top center Roope Hintz missed the game with illness, forcing a little afternoon shuffling of the line.

Both DeBoer and forward Joe Pavelski said the team didn’t want to lean on any “excuses,” but both said the team could improve by digging into exactly what happened.

“It’s a humbling loss,” DeBoer said. “It’s a tough scheduled game and knowing that you have to do a few things. You have to be a smarter team. You have to defend well and get the lead. We didn’t do any of those things.”

Dallas got down 1-0 two minutes into the game on a defensive breakdown, and then saw that balloon to 2-0 when goalie Jake Oettinger let a shot slip past him five minutes in. While the Stars cut that deficit to 2-1 on an Evgenii Dadonov goal, it fell to 3-1 before the first period was over. They never really recovered after that.

“We were soft around our net and didn’t help Jake out,” DeBoer said. “We obviously didn’t score enough. You look at the schedule, and they’re waiting for you. We were a little fatigued. It’s no excuse, but you’ve got to accomplish some of those things, and those were some of those things we talked about prior to the game. We didn’t do enough of them for long enough.”

Pavelski said the players were fired up for a meeting with the team that beat them in the Western Conference Final last season, but then the intent never materialized on the ice.

“We’re in here, went through our meetings, and at the beginning of the game it felt like everyone was ready,” Pavelski said “Then, we go and do that. To a guy, it wasn’t good enough, wasn’t anywhere near it. Time to regroup a little bit.”

Dallas will take the day off on Sunday and then play host to Detroit on Monday. That will end a stretch of eight games in 14 days against mostly playoff teams. The Stars will then get three days off before starting a much more favorable schedule sandwiched around the Christmas Break. While that should allow time for a breath or two, this team does need some introspection.

The Stars are 4-5-2 in their past 11 games and have started leaking goals, allowing 19 in just their past four games. Oettinger was among the goaltending league leaders in mid-November with an 8-2-1 record, a 2.26 GAA and a .926 save percentage. Since then, he is 2-5-1 with a 3.75 GAA and an .869 save percentage.

Oettinger said he is battling right now, but is confident he will get through this slump.

“That’s the job description and that’s how it goes in this league,” Oettinger said. “It’s the most humbling position. You can’t hide out there at all. When you’re struggling, there’s 18,000 people watching you. So I’m just going to keep working and it will come.”

Pavelski said Oettinger’s teammates share the burden and share the confidence that this will pass.

“There’s a ton of belief coming from guys in this room,” Pavelski said. “We’re not looking at him like he’s letting us down by any means. It’s probably the other way around. It’s not one guy feeling this is on him. This is on all of us to fix.”

Dallas falls to 15-8-3, still good for fifth in the West. Vegas moves to 18-5-5 and 41 points, the most in the NHL.

“They’re the Stanley Cup champion,” DeBoer said. “They’re a good team. They were more than opportunistic tonight. They created a bunch of stuff. They don’t need a lot of room to create some stuff with some of the guys they have there. But we helped them, too.”

And now, they have to find a way to take a very serious look at what happened and see if they can fix it. Hintz might be back on Monday, but even if he isn’t, the Stars need to be a different team.

“We know what Roope can do, and things get shifted around a little bit, but it’s a long season,” Pavelski said. “There are going to be nights like tonight where you don’t have everyone in the lineup. Guys can step in. We’re more than capable, deep enough, so we’re not going to use that as an excuse. But he’s a big piece of this team. You miss the size up the middle, you miss the way lines slot up and down, the way the units are. He’s a great player, so we definitely miss him, but what we did today – there’s no excuse there.”

This story was not subject to the approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club.

Mike Heika is a Senior Staff Writer for DallasStars.com and has covered the Stars since 1994. Follow him on Twitter @MikeHeika.