Packing up: Stars reflect on successes and shortcomings of 2024-25 season

The Stars are close…and sometimes that can be really tough.

Dallas lost in the Western Conference Final for the third season in a row this year, and as they packed up for the summer in Frisco on Saturday, the message was clear that they are hungry for more.

“I think everyone will go home pretty damn motivated this summer and know how close we are,” center Matt Duchene said.

Dallas finished 50-28-6, good for 106 points. That was fifth in the league, and that included losing the last seven games of the regular season. The Stars lost Tyler Seguin and Miro Heiskanen for large chunks of the season because of injuries and started the playoffs without Heiskanen and Jason Robertson. Yet, they were able to battle past Colorado and Winnipeg before losing to Edmonton in the third round.

That only made the feeling of disappointment worse.

“It’s tough,” said coach Pete DeBoer. “It’s raw right now. We’re singularly focused on winning the Stanley Cup, so it’s hard to balance anything less than that. The reality of this game is there are 32 teams and only one of them gets to be the team that is happy at the end of the year. Everybody else feels like they came up short.”

The process of losing to Edmonton in five games revealed some holes in the Stars’ game, and DeBoer addressed some of those Saturday. The head coach pulled goalie Jake Oettinger seven minutes into Game 5 after the goalie allowed two goals on his first two shots faced, and both sides said it was a difficult moment.

“It sucks. It’s embarrassing,” Oettinger said. “Any time you get pulled, it doesn’t matter if it’s the playoffs or the regular season, you just want to go right off the ice and crawl in your bed and not talk to anyone.”

But he added, “The way I’m looking at it is how can I get better from that? How can I make those saves I’ve made all playoffs?”

DeBoer said he made a decision that he felt was best for the team at that point in the game. Asked if he thought the decision might “ruin” his relationship with Oettinger, DeBoer said, “I moved Jamie Benn to the fourth line. Does that ruin our relationship? When I healthy scratched Evgenii\] [Dadonov, who I’ve had since he was 20 years old, does that ruin our relationship?”

“These aren’t easy conversations,” he said. “As a player, you don’t like that. I’m sure there’s always some hard feelings. Those are the decisions we make, and we try to keep it as professional as we can, and it’s all with one goal, and that’s to try and keep the group moving forward.”

Both DeBoer and Oettinger said the best option is to use the disappointment to fuel the drive for next season.

“You do have to have perspective,” DeBoer said. “This group faced a lot of adversity this year and they found a way to have a really good regular season and found a way to get through two excellent hockey teams in Colorado and Winnipeg. There’s a lot of pride in the work we did there, but it’s hard when you’re singularly focused on winning the Stanley Cup to get past the disappointment of not getting there.”

DeBoer said another problem the team faced against Edmonton was lack of scoring. Dallas had just 11 goals in five games, and several of its best scorers tallied just one goal in 18 playoff games. Those same players helped the Stars rank third in goals per game during the regular season. The third year Stars coach said there definitely is a difference between scoring during the regular season and scoring during the playoffs.

“There’s always things you look at,” DeBoer said. “In general, we didn’t score enough in the playoffs like we did in the regular season. When you look at scouting reports from other teams on us, they consider us a rush team. And the reality in the playoffs is that the rush dries up. You’ve got to find other ways. You’ve got to find other offense, and that’s the hard offense. We’ve got to get more of that in our game.”

“I think we probably need to be more of a hybrid,” he added when asked about bringing more cycling into the game during the regular season. “I think we relied too much on that piece and when it became tough because of the circumstances, we had trouble getting to that secondary way of creating offense.”

A big part of the problem was the fact Dallas scored first in just three of 18 games. Because of that, the opposition was able to play a harder defensive game and protect a lead.

“I think a big thing was we weren’t able to score first enough to make a team press a little more,” Duchene said. “Teams were defending leads against us and now they were playing defense even better than they did to start the game, so now it’s even harder to score. We were chasing it a lot. What’s the solution? Score first. I mean, we were trying and it just wasn’t meant to be this year.”

The Stars actually had some great starts in games and were stopped by an opposing goalie or just plain bad luck. But that’s another lesson they have to learn.

“The playoffs don’t care about fair,” Seguin said.

So now, the focus starts on next year. Stars GM Jim Nill was not available Saturday and will speak at a future date, but he has some work to do. Yes, he has wrapped up a large core of the team that includes Mikko Rantanen, Roope Hintz, Heiskanen, Esa Lindell, Seguin, Wyatt Johnston and Oettinger. He has a couple of key players on the last year of their deals like Thomas Harley, Robertson, and Mason Marchment. And he has unrestricted free agents in Benn, Duchene, Dadonov, Mikael Granlund, Colin Blackwell, Brendan Smith and Cody Ceci.

Benn is the team’s captain and has played 1,192 regular-season games with the Stars. He made $9.5 million last season, and now will likely take much less to help the Stars sign others. He said he wants to be back for another year.

“I’m going into the summer planning on playing next year,” he said, adding, “I don’t see myself going anywhere else. This is all I know, so hopefully we can get something figured out.”

Duchene was the team’s leading scorer with 82 points in 82 games. After getting bought out by Nashville two summers ago, he used his financial flexibility to sign separate one-year deals in Dallas for $3 million a season. He said he has some things to think about in terms of longer-term contracts that would give stability to his family.

Duchene has been an important part of the leadership group, in large part because his earlier teams struggled to get deep in the playoffs and he logged 32 total postseason contests in his first 14 seasons. In his past two years with the Stars, he has been in 37 playoff games.

“As you get older, it hurts more…it hurts a lot more,” Duchene said. “But having said that, I think there is a lot to be proud of as a group. There’s only one winner, there’s only one team that goes home happy in the summer. I think we lose sight of that. It’s harder to lose when we did than in the first round. I believe in this group. It’s a young core of guys and I think our older guys are still playing well and contributing things. There are a lot of good pieces here and hopefully, our group can stay together and have another crack at it.”

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 X @MikeHeika.