The score and the film notwithstanding, the Stars didn’t play anywhere nearly as bad as things looked from the stands, according to coach Pete DeBoer.
Blame the psychology of playoff hockey, where everything from scoring streaks to momentum swings take on lives of their own.
DeBoer has seen enough playoff hockey to understand when bad things happen to good hockey teams. And for the moment, plenty of bad things are happening to his Stars, as evidenced by their 5-1 loss to the Minnesota Wild in Game 3 Friday. Something clearly has to change for Game 4 Sunday in St. Paul.
“That’s playoffs, right?” DeBoer said. “Game 1 goes the way it does. We respond in Game 2, they respond in Game 3.
“They were obviously the more desperate team [Friday] and coming off a big loss in Dallas. We’ve got to flip that script [Sunday].”
The Stars really have no choice. Teams up 2-1 in playoff series go on to win the series 69.4% of the time. At 3-1, the win percentage burgeons to 90.6%, via hockey-reference.com.
“It’s natural when you put up seven goals the night before,” DeBoer said. “It’s crazy but coaches can talk to players all they want. You know you’re not gonna have that room again. They’re gonna tighten up, they’re gonna respond. Yeah, it’s in one ear and out the other and then all of a sudden, you get smacked in the side of the head. I think that’s just what happened.
“We probably felt a little too good about ourselves after the way the second game went and how easy we scored and now they obviously corrected that and we’ve got to make sure we’re ready and find other ways next time.”
Case in point: The Stars scored those seven goals in Game 2 even with first-line center Joe Pavelski in concussion protocol from a hard hit in Game 1.
The Stars have scored only four 5-on-5 goals in three games, though, with the pressure mounting on Jason Robertson and friends to generate more of an attack.
Even though Robertson set a Dallas Stars scoring record this season, he has yet to break through in a big way.
“I would say we were kind of nonchalant in thinking that maybe we would get a lot of chances like we had in the last couple of games,” Robertson said. “We kind of took that for granted and we’ll be sharper for the next game.”
“It gets a lot tougher to create offense 5-on-5 in the playoffs,” DeBoer said, spreading the blame well beyond Robertson. “And you have to be willing to do some things that aren’t comfortable in order to do that and get to places on the ice that aren’t comfortable in order to do that.
“That’s a learning curve for young scorers coming into the league. He went through the playoffs last year and dealt with that. Every year, you hope you learn something and can be a little bit better. But he wasn’t alone on that boat. We had way too many passengers offensively up front.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Twitter: @ChuckCarltonDMN
