First Shift 🏒
The Stars get a double-whammy of a rivalry game on Tuesday night.
Not only are they facing an Edmonton Oilers team that has knocked them out of the past two playoffs, but they also will be going against a squad that new head coach Glen Gulutzan coached for the past seven seasons.
“It’s going to be a fun game,” Gulutzan said. “You spend seven years in a place, you’ve got good connections with people. I’m a people person, so you’ve got good friends there, and you always want to beat your friends.”
Gulutzan was an assistant coach with the Oilers, but took the head coaching job with the Stars in the summer. He is off to a 6-3-3 start this season and is patching up an injury-ravaged lineup pretty much every day.
Edmonton, who Gulutzan helped lead to the past two Stanley Cup Finals, enters at 6-5-3 after losing to the Blues on Monday night. The Oilers beat the Stars in six games in 2024 and in five games last season. Both series were intense and helped brew a heated rivalry between the two clubs.
“The last two years coming up short in the Western Conference Finals, it just reminds us that we need to come in and play hard if we want to beat these guys,” said defenseman Alexander Petrovic, a native of Edmonton.
As for Gulutzan, Petrovic said the players know what this game means.
“It’s going to be a big night,” Petrovic said. “We’re going to definitely battle hard for him.”
The Stars have been battling hard, but they have definitely been undermanned. Dallas has been without captain Benn (collapsed lung) since early in the preseason, and have missed Duchene and Roope Hintz in the past few weeks. Neither is expected to play against Edmonton. Jake Oettinger and his wife welcomed a baby on Sunday, so he didn’t practice Monday and is not expected to start against the Oilers.
The Stars have had to play a simplified brand of hockey in recent games, but they were able to scratch two points out of losses in Tampa Bay (overtime) and Florida (shootout) and are getting good play from several depth forwards.
Gulutzan said this is a good test to see if they can build on their defensive play and hopefully create more goals.
“That’s the theory – is that you dig in defensively and then when you are able to make more plays and have more fluidity in your game and you still have that defensive backbone that you have developed out of necessity, then you can springboard a little bit,” he said. “This could help us in the long run, because we’re scratching and clawing for everything we can get right now, and when you start to bring people back who can help you offensively, you might be better for it.”
And taking that test against the Oilers is a good thing.
“It’s a good test,” said forward Adam Erne. “We’re building in the right direction, getting points out of games that are tough to get on the road, but we have to find a way to get two.”
