Dreams iced yet again: Where the Dallas Stars went astray

The Dallas Stars were officially eliminated from postseason participation with the Anaheim Ducks’ win over Colorado on Sunday night. Commence heads rolling in Texas. Today, we take a look at a few of the reasons why this promising year went off the rails.

To say that the Dallas Stars collapsed at the end of the regular season is like putting a bow on a knife wound. That would not begin to do this failure justice. The best way to describe it might be that for five months, they were surgeons — surgeons weaving their way skillfully toward the playoffs. Nice picture, huh?

Then March came around, and the Stars decided to lobotomize themselves.

We need not go into complete detail of their eight-game losing skid (it’s been covered extensively), though it’s certainly the biggest factor as to why they’ll be taking their anger out on the range picker at the golf course.

No, there are other issues at play here. Deep-seeded ones that came roaring to life at the worst time. We’re talking a Smaug-like awakening.

For masochistic Stars fans, read on. For all others, we’ve seen the laughter through tweets. Revel in this if you must.

Jason Spezza

Let’s keep the first one quick and to the point: Spezza was awful this season. He knows it. You know it. The numbers know it (8 goals, 18 assists). Those don’t bear out what you expect from your second line center.

The blame can’t be placed squarely on his shoulders; that’s beyond unfair. But in a system where new hire (or old hire, if you will) Ken Hitchcock demands defensive responsibility, it simply means your best players have to be their best. There can be no scoring letdowns from top guys in a defensive system bound to shave away offensive production. Simply put, management went into the year relying on Spezza to produce and create depth (along with Martin Hanzal). They were burned for it.

Depth

Speaking of depth, the Stars had none. Outside of their top line (Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn and Alexander Radulov) and defenseman John Klingberg, no one eclipsed more than 40 points. Aside from the first three mentioned, Mattias Janmark is the only likely candidate to score 20 goals. That’s a recipe for disaster.

What might be most intriguing is how Dallas got away with it for five months. The Stars won plenty of contests 2-1, 2-0 or 1-0 early in the season, mostly backed by performances from Ben Bishop and road warrior Kari Lehtonen. But numbers tend to average out. And they did.

Out of 16 games in March, the Stars scored more than two goals only six times. They lost 12 of those 16. Boom, toasted.

Injuries

This is a tough one. Every team deals with key injuries, sometimes at the wrong point in the season (see: the Minnesota Wild and Ryan Suter). There’s also no way of knowing what would’ve happened had players like Hanzal, Methot and Ben Bishop not gone down for long stretches of the year.

They could just as well be chalked up into the depth category. Hanzal’s injury, along with Spezza going Casper for the season, forced many players like Remi Elie, Brett Ritchie and Devin Shore to try and carry a larger load. It didn’t work out. They combined for 23 goals, with Devin Shore at a (avert your eyes) ridiculous minus-31.

The Vancouver game

You’re probably asking, well, which one? In this case, we’ll look at the game from February as opposed to March, though both will make this final argument.

This game, above all others, was the turning point in the Dallas Stars’ season. If you want to lay blame to any singular thing that caused their demise, look no further.

Going into their matchup with the Canucks, the Stars were flying. They had just won five in a row, they were 11-4 in the previous month-plus and they’d stunned the Penguins with an emotional overtime victory.

Then lottery-hopeful Vancouver came to town. And the Canucks punched the Stars squarely in the teeth in a 6-0 blowout. It was a game obvious to anyone observant: the Stars thought they could steamroll a lower squad and got smacked back into reality. Afterwards, Dallas seemed to lose all confidence.

They muddled with a win, a loss, a win, a loss etc. until they eventually began imploding in mid-March. It’s here also where they lost twice to Ottawa, once to Montreal and again to Vancouver 4-1 after a soul-destroying loss to Boston. These are games they might/should have won, had their psyche not been as fragile as eggshells.

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All told, there were many more reasons for this debacle. It would take until next season, though, to list them all. Suffice it to say that Stars fans and players get to enjoy a few extra cold ones on the lake this year while they contemplate what could have been a much better ending to a promising start.