So what doomed the Stars?

The Stars season is over, my prediction was wrong.

The Dallas Stars season came to an end last night, falling 2-1 in Game 6 to the Edmonton Oilers in the Western Conference Final.

A different opponent and path then 2023, the but the same result and final destination.

We didn’t have a 20/20 after the game last night because I was covering the Memorial Cup for one of my other jobs, and thankfully readers here have been accepting and understanding of this new-age, job-juggling world I live in.

And as I sat down to watch the game on delay, at roughly 2 am, I thought about a text that a friend sent me soon after the Oilers had officially clinched a trip to the Stanley Cup final.

“So what doomed the Stars?”

It’s a great question, because it’s not something I expected. I was famously, or infamously, confident Dallas would win this series, I predicted the Stars would win in five game and stood by that prediction throughout the series.

From a business perspective, I was so confident Dallas would win this series that I started working on the logistics to write another Stars book based off this playoff run, whether they’d won the Stanley Cup Final or not.

So if you are a Stars fans looking for someone to blame, which I’ve seen on Twitter, you can take your shots at me. I’m cool with it, fan is short for fanatic and without that passion for a sport, no one subscribes or reads a niche hockey site like this.

Understanding that fanaticism is also important, because I know that this story won’t be read nearly as much. No one likes to read “Where do they go from here?” stories after a playoff loss and any many fans after a loss, simply want to forget the loss ever happened.

So I’m not going to wax poetically about how this run could help Dallas take the next step next season, because I have no idea if it did. That’s a storyline and point we really can’t quantify for another 12 months.

It’s also not the right time to make a list of deficiencies. The Stars were one of the top-four teams in the NHL this season, the best regular season team in the Western Conference, and have become one of the NHL’s power brokers.

Ripping them apart feels like champagne problems, just look at some other NHL franchises. But at the same time without the champagne, everyone will find time for problems.

Hockey is a weird, wonderful game.

We love the Stanley Cup playoffs, the randomness of it and the heroes that emerge. But it’s not truly a reflection of the best team, more so an acknowledgment of the team that got hottest and clicked the best at the very end — small, tournament sample size making a much larger data pool irrelevant an the annals of history.

One of the things I think that’s most impressive about the Florida Panthers is that they learned the right lessons from the Stanley Cup Final run in 2023 and eventual beatdown at the hand of the Vegas Golden Knights.

Florida took the positives from the unexpected run in 2023, which only really happened because of Alex Lyon late in the regular season, but didn’t let the false confidence of results stop them from improving.

Now Florida is four wins from getting its name on the Stanley Cup later this month.

So what doomed Dallas? And how can they take the Floridan type step into 2025?

A playoff gauntlet took its chunks, the Vegas Golden Knights and Colorado Avalanche did some major damage. The Edmonton Oilers were better than I wanted to give them credit for, and defensively speaking they played a strong enough series to bide their time and wait for top players to do top player things.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. I always expected to Connor McDavid and Leon Draisitl to get there points, but I also expected someone other than Wyatt Johnston and Logan Stankoven to have an offensive impact in Dallas.

Depth is great, and the Stars have it, but when Roope Hintz, Jason Robertson, and Joe Pavelski are effectively silent for all but one game of the series, it’s hard to win. When Thomas Harley goes from an offensive force in the regular season to struggling in the playoffs, the degree of difficulty ratchets up for everyone.

Matt Duchene wasn’t a supportive difference maker in the Western Conference Final, neither was Evgenii Dadonov.

All of the things I had accepted as truths about the Stars, the reasons I picked them to win the Stanley Cup, evaporated as the one thing we know to be true about the Oilers remained — they have hard-working defensive depth and two of the best players on the planet, who are willing to accept rockstar responsibility.

That’s what doomed the Stars, and while they’ll be watching Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final from home.