Dallas Stars Need To Step Up Defense All Over

The Dallas Stars need things to step up on defense… from all the players on the ice

The Dallas Stars don’t have a terrible overall record.

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They sit with a 6-6-4 heading into the second half of November, making them somewhere between okay and mildly above average.

The majority of those losses, though, all came strung together — of the team’s ten losses in both regulation and overtime so far, seven came back to back. The team even lost their final contest during that losing streak with a hat trick from star forward Tyler Seguin; the offense has looked pretty sharp, but the defense has been more than lacking.

When asked to comment on it, though, general manager Jim Nill seemed unsurprised.

In an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Nill admitted that the lack of defense was a concern coming into the season. “When you start getting better you have to remember how you got there. It’s a little bit subconscious because sometimes you take more chances than you should. Not really surprised where we are – it comes with expectations.”

He and head coach Lindy Ruff are both in agreement that the team has lost its identity, and expect to see more out of their top six forwards — just not on scoring alone.

While Seguin has ten goals and twenty-two points in the team’s first sixteen games, both Jamie Benn and Ales Hemsky have struggled to find the back of the net. In addition, Nill insisted that the best way to ease the young Stars defensive core into a winning habit is to stop ‘leaving them high and dry’; in other words, the offense needs to help out on the blue line, too.

The Stars pulled themselves out of that losing slump with wins over both the Arizona Coyotes and the Los Angeles Kings, but falling 2-1 to the Minnesota Wild Saturday could suggest that things still aren’t getting better. They’ll need to, though, and fast… the season is no longer young.

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