Is the sky really falling for the Dallas Stars?

Let's take a look at what's happening in Dallas and what I think I know about the situation.

The sky is falling for the Dallas Stars.

Better yet, the Dallas Stars are falling out of the sky.

At least that’s the reaction I noticed on social media when checking in on what was happening with the Stars last night, where they suffered a 3-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild, largely because of their own doing in the third period.

Amongst the comments I saw, there were serious asks by Stars fans for a coaching change, questions about whether this team was a legit cup contender, and if they would ever score another goal, ever.

Here’s the thing about Dallas, and I have a unique perspective because I also cover a team where the sky actually is falling, they are flawed and frustrating, but they aren’t a bad team.

Here are some facts:

• The Stars rank fourth in the NHL in goals against average, allowing 2.59 per game.

• They rank 13th in the NHL in goals against average, scoring 3.12 goals per game.

• The Stars rank 7th in the NHL in goal differential, checking in at plus-19.

• The penalty kill ranks fifth in the league at 85.1 percent.

• The power play ranks 28th in the league at 15.5 percent.

• The Stars have only allowed two goals this season within two minutes of taking a lead, which is tied for second best in the league.

• On average the Stars have led games for 23 minutes, 26 seconds per game this season, which ranks eighth-best in the league.

• When it comes to points percentage, the Stars rank 12th in the league with a .603.

Those are fall facts, official stats from the NHL with some additional data pulled from MoreHockeyStats.com.

Calling the Stars a bad team, and calling for the head coach to be fired, or firing his top assistant, are recipes for potential disaster.

The Stars are also held to higher expectations, it really is a Stanley Cup or bust team, so everything comes through the lense of “will this team be able to win 16 games between May and June?”

So this morning I went back and watched the Stars loss to the Wild, where Dallas led 2-0 and “salvaged” a point in an overtime loss. I also recently re-watched part of the Stars games against the New York Rangers and Utah Hockey Club.

And here’s how I view everything when it comes to Dallas right now:

• The Stars are good enough at 5-on-5 to win the Stanley Cup. There are flaws here and there, but minor ones, and honestly I see those similar flaws when I watch other contending teams. Hockey is such a tribal sport, most fans only watch their own team closely, and if you really went under the hood with all 32 teams you’d realize how flawed of a game it really is.

• One thing that some other contenders have, which the Stars are lacking, are those superstar moments. I’m a believer that hockey is a weak-link sport in the regular season, but a strong link sport in the playoffs. Depth gets you to the postseason, but it’s the difference makers that have to get you over the top in the spring.
  
  The Stars haven’t had those superstar moments and I don’t know where of if they’ll come from. Miro Heiskanen is the NHL’s best pure defender in my view, but he’s also not a “seize-the-moment, game-on-his-stick” offensive force. Jason Robertson has proven that 109-point season was more of the outlier than the norm, Roope Hintz has struggled when he’s asked to play hero-ball, particularly since he lost Joe Pavelski as his on-ice director.
  
  The Stars will have to win the Stanley Cup like the St. Louis Blues in 2019, without a true superstar, which is doable but also a taller task than some people realize.

• This is most notable to me on the power play, where the Stars lack any creativity and seem to defer to robotic/boring tendencies. This is partially reflective of Heiskanen, who still needs to be more aggressive, and reflective of a lack of a true shooting threat across from Jason Robertson on the opposite flank. Hintz is a good down-hill threat, but the shoot-pass option that Robertson used to have from that flank has greatly disappeared since teams realized they could just give him that pass and not get burned.
  
  The Stars could change who runs the power play amongst assistant coaches, which in my view actually isn’t a bad thing, but unless the Stars find a true shooting threat to add to the opposite flank, I struggle to see how this roster is going to fix the half-court set.

• I don’t want to pick on Jamie Benn’s leadership style, but here’s the reality — his style is at it’s best when he has vocal lieutenants that allow his “do as I do, not as I say,” attitude to really shine. Pavelski is gone, so is Tyler Seguin until the end of the season, those two players played such a key vocal role in the locker room that really drove the Stars.
  
  I covered the Stanley Cup Final in-person last spring, and something that always stood out to me from the Florida Panthers was how Matthew Tkachuk’s vocal and yappy personality allowed Aleksander Barkov to be the captain that quietly sets the example. Without that yappy sidekick, lead-by-example leaders get asked to speak more, and that can often muddle the message.
  
  This can be particularly notable in games like the one against Minnesota, where Mason Marchment left due to injury, and the Stars lost a spark plug and couldn’t recover.

So how do you fix the Stars? And once again this is a question of how do you find that extra edge for the postseason?

In my view, it comes down to a couple things.

First, they need to make a move for a forward, an actual shooting threat that also threatens the roles and playing time of other past goal scorers — internal competition, has never been a bad thing.

Second, the Stars need to accept that Heiskanen isn’t enough of a power play threat to be a center piece, and while this is going to cost Heiskanen ever winning the Norris Trophy, the Stars will be better if they let Thomas Harley or Nils Lundkvist run the top unit with confidence and grow through some mistakes.

After that, the Stars need some internal voice, someone already in the room, to realize they can become Benn’s new yappy lieutenant after Seguin went on the shelf with injury.

The reality is the Stars will go deep in the playoffs this spring even if they don’t do those things. The team is good enough defensively and structurally for the slog of the postseason, which is really a tactical chess match on skates more than a hockey game.

But the Stars, by both their own internal and other expectations, want to be judged on whether they lift the Stanley Cup or not. Right now they have a legit punchers chance of that, even if they don’t change anything, with a couple tweaks those odds might go up slightly.