It had been a weird season all around. In fact, the Stars had endured a rather eventful time before the pandemic shut all of professional sports down for months. In December 2019, the team shocked the league by firing head coach Jim Montgomery “due to unprofessional conduct,” the Stars announced at the time. On Jan. 1, 2020, more than 80,000 fans packed the Cotton Bowl in Fair Park to watch the team power past the Nashville Predators in the southernmost outdoor Winter Classic game in league history.
By the time Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin and interim coach Rick Bowness made it to their fan-free, tightly controlled “COVID bubble” in Canada to start the playoffs, the team was lagging and not looking like a contender for the title that year. Instead, they won three playoff series against teams that many said were better than the Stars and reignited a local fanbase in the process.
Looking back on that playoff run three years ago, it’s hard to not think good things about the Stars team that enters the playoffs this year on Monday night against the Minnesota Wild.
“That team in 2020 got hot and got confident at the right time,” says Bob Sturm of the Hardline on 1310 the Ticket. “I will say this, and this makes the Stars front office people mad at me, but that team wasn’t that good. That team came out of nowhere, got hot for about a month, and it was weird because there were no fans in the stadium. But it clicked, and it was fun, but it might have misled people about how good the Stars were that year because they were very mediocre for most of that season.”
The 2023 Stars team, on the other hand, will not have the luxury of coming out of nowhere to surprise teams. Led by first-year head coach Pete DeBoer, the second-seed Stars have been at or extremely near the top of the Western Conference since the season began last October.
With the Dallas Mavericks tanking their way into a playoffs-less offseason, Sturm thinks the local hockey team has a chance to win over some fans, but he watches enough NHL to know that the road ahead won’t be easy.
“You want to be a team that’s playing well and getting 100-plus points and really be in the mix and hopefully things break right for you,” he says. “There’s no reason that can’t be this year, except that there are five or six other extremely powerful hockey teams in the league now, with a couple of them in the same division as the Stars.”
Sturm, the Ticket’s resident hockey expert, has spent time as a studio analyst for the team’s locally televised games in the past. He does see a difference in this year’s squad versus ones from the past.
“The last several years the Stars have felt like a fringe playoff team,” he says. "But this year, they do not. They seem to be a team with some real quality about them. It’s an ensemble cast, and the bones of a really good team are evident all over.”
The youth of this year’s team is a particular strength. The team’s best scorer (Jason Robertson), the team’s best defenseman (Miro Heiskanen) and the team’s starting goalie (Jake Oettinger) are each in their early 20s. But even younger than that is rookie center Wyatt Johnston. The 19-year-old from Toronto impressed pretty much everyone this season, playing in all 82 regular season games and tying the all-time Stars rookie goal scoring record with 24. Sturm likes the way the team has been developing its farm system and integrating its talent into the big club.
“When you have a roster like the Stars do, you can bring up talented kids and not ask them to do all the heavy lifting,” he says. “A guy like Wyatt Johnston can just plug in down the lineup a little bit and comfortably acclimate to being a teenager in the NHL. He’s the second-youngest player in the league. In the rare event in which the Stars had a talented kid like him in the past, they would often ask too much of him and put too much pressure on him beyond simply trying to get used to the toughest league in the world.”“You want to be a team that’s playing well and getting 100-plus points and really be in the mix and hopefully things break right for you.” — Bob Sturm, 1310 The Ticket
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Speaking of the young guns not being expected to do all the work, an undeniable key to the Stars strong season is how healthy the team’s oldest players have remained. Even more helpful than a low amount of injury time for veteran players is their high amount of production. Team captain Jamie Benn, now 33, and 38-year-old Joe Pavelski were the second- and third-highest scorers on the team this season. In Sturm’s view, Pavelski is part of the key to any hopes for an extended Stars playoff run.
“The easy answer to success in the playoffs is goaltending and special teams,” he says. “It’s a hockey cliche, and it applies to any team, really. Specifically for the Stars, I would say the entire thing hinges on the fact that the Stars have arguably the best line in the National Hockey League. On some level, the Stars have a line that appears flat-out unstoppable. When you have [Roope] Hintz, Robertson and Pavelski, who can score 2 or 3 goals on their own every game, you have a trio that absolutely terrifies opponents.”
Defending Big D, the Dallas Stars-intensive, former SB Nation site that now operates independently, is predicting the home team to bring the Stanley Cup back to North Texas. DBD writer Tyler Mair states, “And with all credit due to the rest of the league's juggernauts, I almost feel like Dallas should be considered one of the favorites.”
Mair notes that the Stars have strong players filling the most vital roles necessary for playoff success. Top-notch goaltending, stingy defense, veteran players with post-season experience and a fearsome scoring attack all make this team an attractive contender pick. But Sturm isn’t budging from his guarded mix of hopefulness and pragmatism when it comes to the Dallas Stars of 2023.
“There are a lot of signs that things are coming together as an organization,” he says. “Not that I think they’re going to win the Stanley Cup, because let’s be honest, they’re probably not going to win the Stanley Cup. There are a lot of good hockey teams, but they’re one of them, and that is an exciting thing.”
