We only recently passed the 50th anniversary of a stunning upset of Muhammad Ali, a night when a former Joe Frazier sparring partner named Ken Norton broke the champion’s jaw — possibly as early as the second round — to score a major upset in a 12-round decision.
I bring this up not because the Minnesota Wild are a long shot against the Dallas Stars but because sometimes bad things can happen to you very quickly even when you feel ready to either win a championship or perform like a champ. In this case, in a 3-2 double overtime victory for the visitors in a game that ended early Tuesday, the Stars lost a game, home-ice advantage and Joe Pavelski.
That’s a big package. This Dallas team scored 108 points in the regular season, the most for the franchise since 2016 and with individuals setting records (or achieving 1,000-point milestones in the case of Pavelski), hopes were high for a deep postseason run.
They still are, of course, because one game is one game. But the loss of Pavelski from the top line on a hit that Minnesota fans saw as perfectly fine (and officials mostly agreed, following a replay review) and Dallas fans saw as outrageous was actually more mindful of a local piece of history.
Go back 25 years and you had another Dallas team poised to make a run, even after losing a heart-breaking seven-game first round to Edmonton the previous spring. In the first period of the first playoff game against San Jose, center Joe Nieuwendyk — one calendar year shy of winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as it turned out — was ridden into the corner and taken out of the playoffs with a knee injury by the late Bryan Marchment, father of Stars forward Mason. Marchment became Public Enemy No. 1 for years here while the No. 1-seeded Stars managed to battle to the Western Conference finals without one of their top two centers before succumbing to the Cup champion Red Wings.
Stars coach Peter DeBoer, who took no issues with Wild defenseman Matt Dumba’s hit on Pavelski after the puck had left the area, said only that his center was “OK” to walk out of the rink, but not OK for Game 2. After hitting his head on the ice — if Pavelski sustained a concussion — who knows how long Stars fans might have to wait for his return.
”It can go either way when those things happen,” DeBoer said. “It can rattle your group or you can rally. I think we rallied around it. We tried to win for Joe.”
They tried until deep into the night and, with an 8:50 puck drop scheduled for ESPN, they battled beyond midnight. The flow of the game was all Minnesota for two periods but then the third, fourth and fifth belonged mostly to Dallas, even if the Stars never scored after taking an early 2-1 lead with power-play goals in the second period. Dallas outshot Minnesota 38-19 over those last three periods, all scoreless until Ryan Hartman flipped the puck past Jake Oettinger after a bad bounce. And shot totals do not include hitting posts and crossbars as Dallas did.
It was just last Thursday after the end of the regular season that DeBoer spoke on the club’s good fortune with injuries this season and how that good fortune needed to keep smiling on the Stars. The top three scorers — Jason Robertson, captain Jamie Benn and Pavelski — along with rookie scoring forward Wyatt Johnston and Ty Dellandrea and defensemen Ryan Suter, Esa Lindell and Jani Hakanpaa all played 82 games. No load management in this league.
Now they have to battle on with Tyler Seguin plugging the center hole in the top line and hoping to turn back the clock as the Stars’ only player to hoist the Stanley Cup. It’s been a minute since that happened. Seguin won with Boston the same June that the Mavericks knocked off the Miami Heat.
The Stars’ issue going forward, beyond the significant loss of Pavelski, is that these teams are so evenly matched. Dallas pulled ahead for good in the final two weeks but Minnesota was hanging around the Stars’ position near the top of the Central Division late in the season. Fans got a glimpse of how electric Kirill Kaprizov, the Wild’s leading scorer, can be with just a little time and a little ice early in Game 1. He scored the Wild’s first goal on a deflection but he had the team’s best scoring chances before Dallas found its footing and started clamping down on the Wild’s top line.
So back and forth this series may go. The Stars now have to hope all the things they said about this being a long series hold true. A long night’s journey into day while losing a key player is a hell of a way to start the playoffs. But it’s the only start Dallas has.
That’s not to say Minnesota wasn’t tested frequently Monday night. Dumba and Jonas Brodin each logged more than 38 minutes in Game 1. The Stars’ Miro Heiskanen played more than 41.
It was about 1:30 a.m. local time as Wild coach Dean Evason spoke to the media.
“The guys gotta do what they need to do to recover,” he said. “And play tomorrow.”
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