Blowouts have not been the Dallas Stars’ friend in these playoffs. Close games? Sure, Dallas is 6-0 in games decided by one or two goals but just 1-5 when the margin is three or more. And with Edmonton sitting on a 3-1 lead after 40 minutes, the Stars looked to be on the brink of another bad ending.
“If you’re going to lose a game at this point, you want to make sure the other team has to earn it,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said. “For 40 minutes, I didn’t feel we had played our best yet.”
Their best — better than anyone at the AAC could have anticipated — was yet to come. The Stars scored three times with power play goals in the first six minutes of the third period, making it the close game they so dearly love. Two goals later, Dallas had a 6-3 win and Edmonton was trying to figure out just how their magical play of the last three weeks had vanished.
The Oilers, who beat the Stars in six games in last year’s conference finals, had won eight of nine playoff games with their only loss coming on a goal in the final second of regulation against Vegas. Suddenly, Dallas had pinned on them the kind of loss they suffered in the first two games at Los Angeles a month ago, and now Edmonton has to dig its way back into this series.
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“Did we think we were going to come in here and win four in a row against this team?” Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said. “Absolutely not. We knew it was going to be a long, hard series. For us to have a 3-1 lead, things were going our way. And in the third period, things didn’t go our way. We’ll just have to recover and have a good start for the next game.”
Related:Five thoughts from Stars-Oilers Game 1: Power-play surge propels Dallas to victory
It’s strange when a team wins 6-3 and talks about getting a bit lucky, as Tyler Seguin (two goals, one assist) did. But it was a night where the Oilers’ big boys, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, put on a show for 40 minutes and not only built a two-goal lead but caught the Stars’ Mikko Rantanen for the Stanley Cup playoff scoring lead.
Then the roof fell in on Edmonton, and the AAC crowd — loud and crazy as always — had to be at least a little stunned by the overdose of good fortune in the final 20 minutes. Edmonton had outscored opponents 19-9 in the third period in the first two rounds. To go 5-0 the other direction was a complete turnabout for the visitors.
Draisaitl had scored the first goal for Edmonton in the opening period as Dallas continued another long-running trend in this postseason. The Stars’ opponent has scored first 11 times but, as it turned out, Dallas would raise its record to 6-5 in those contests. First, the Stars had to tie the score and Seguin did that on a breakaway — yes, he can still manage something approaching breakaway speed 14 years after winning the Stanley Cup in Boston — to make it 1-1.
The second period belonged completely to Edmonton, but the two-goal lead the Oilers took to the dressing room meant the deficit was still manageable for Dallas. This was especially true when a penalty on defenseman Brett Kulak about a minute before the end of the second period meant Dallas would get a power play look on a clean sheet of ice to start the third.
The power plays overwhelmed the Oilers and when Seguin got his second goal of the night on an assist from Sam Steel, Dallas had a 5-3 cushion. Somehow Seguin has more goals and points the last four games than Rantanen, but the Stars won’t complain about that. They have seen Mikko on fire and they know what their top player is capable of doing. The fact Dallas didn’t need any scoring punch from him on a night when McDavid and Draisaitl were blowing and going early bodes well for what lies ahead.
An empty net goal from Esa Lindell technically put this into the blowout category by the end, but who’s counting. It’s a 1-0 Stars lead on the road to the Stanley Cup Final, and the Oilers have 48 hours to figure out how they gave up five goals in one period of a game they thought they already had in hand.
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