Poor Mikael Granlund.
POV: You are a talented NHL forward who is traded mid-season from one of the worst teams in the league to a legitimate Stanley Cup contender in the Dallas Stars. The team has a whole contingent of players from your home country of Finland for you to bond with, and you are the big pickup for the team — they gave up a first round pick(!) for you after all, which this team almost never does. Plus, they traded for you a whole month before the trade deadline — that’s how badly they wanted you now!
Yes, life is great in Dallas. But what’s this? Deadline day rolls around, and suddenly the team acquires another forward! Not only that, but he has better stats than you, cost two(!) first round picks and a top prospect already playing in the NHL, and immediately signed an eight year extension with the team for more than twice the amount of money you’re making. Plus, he’s also Finnish, and he has better hair! Heck, forget the hair — he even looks good bald!
Still, it’s one thing to get all the hype — it’s one thing to actually deliver… right? Well about that: he ends up playing on the same line as you come postseason, where he goes off on a historic scoring binge in the first round that ends with him single-handedly win your team Game 7. Then he follows that up with another hat trick to start the next round, before posting another 3+ point game in Game 3. Oh, and what I said about you playing on the same line? Yeah, that doesn’t exactly mean you’re picking up points along with him, as he leaves you in the dust.
So yes, poor Mikael Granlund: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. He’s the other Finn, who doesn’t get the praise, the glory, and the moose hats — just a pat on the back and a “Thanks for being here, pal.”
Until last night, that is.
Clearly fed up with living in Mikko Rantanen’s shadow (or perhaps inspired by his fellow countryman), Granlund leveled up in Game 4 as he decided to score his own hat trick en route to a 3-1 win over the Winnipeg Jets, giving them an identical 3-1 series lead. And, much like he-who-must-be-named (Rantanen), Granlund scored most of his goals more or less by himself, just taking over the game because he felt like it.
Take his first goal, for instance, which came on the power play: Thomas Harley gives him the drop pass, and Granlund immediately sidesteps Brandon Tanev at center ice. He then just skates uncontested into the offensive zone, in the middle of the ice, and just wrists one at Connor Hellebuyck’s glove hand to score. Heck, he didn’t even have to aim above it (where Hellebuyck has been weak all postseason) — he did it below just for style points!
Of course, that’s exactly where he did aim for goal No. 2, which was eerily similar to one he made at 4 Nations: after receiving an offensive breakout from Rantanen, Granlund has a 2-on-1 with Roope Hintz (the other other Finn). Granlund looks focused on getting the pass over to Hintz, but Dylan Samberg hits the ice as the lone defender to stop the potential pass. Or maybe passing was never his intention, because Granlund doesn’t even look at the net until he’s following through on his shot, which beats Hellebuyck high glove.
As for the third… okay look, you can’t do everything all by yourself, now can you? That power play sequence was a complete team effort, from Matt Duchene nearly scoring himself when he rang the post, to Miro Heiskanen(!!!) corralling the rebound and finding the wide open Granlund, to the Star of the night unleashing a monster of a slap shot that beats Hellebuyck — wait for it — high glove.
Three Stars goals, all by Granlund, and the hats rained down in the American Airlines Center once more. Heck, it’s a good thing Game 1 was on the road, because otherwise I’m not sure there would have been any hats in the crowd left! There have been 13 playoff hat tricks in franchise history, nine since the team moved to Dallas, and three of them have taken place in the past five games. And oh, and in case you already forgot the preamble, neither of the two players who scored them were on this roster at the start of the season.
Two years ago, Jim Nill won the Jim Gregory General Manager of the Year award. Last year, he became only the second GM to ever win it twice. And let me tell you this: I can’t imagine a world where Nill doesn’t three-peat this year.
• Quick programming note: sorry for the lack of Afterwords for Games 2 and 3. I’ve been busy moving this past weekend plus didn’t have internet, so I wasn’t able to even watch the games beyond highlights. Heck, the only reason I saw this game (and thus could write about it) was because I attended in person. Things have calmed down and I plan on writing about Game 5, and hopefully that’s it for this series!
• For the first half of the game, I thought this might end up being the first Stars game of the postseason where Dallas would win despite not being the better team. They were getting massively outplayed by Winnipeg in shots, hits, puck possession… pretty much everything but the scoreboard. But starting sometime in the second half of the second period, that all changed as the Stars suddenly looked like themselves again, dictating the pace of the game all the way up until the final five minutes (which was only due to the penalty and subsequent extra attacker).
So what changed? To put it simply, the Stars finally began breaking out of the defensive zone. The first half of the contest was riddled with the Stars coughing the puck over or failing to transition properly, which minimized their ability to sustain any kind of offensive pressure while simultaneously ceding valuable offensive zone time to the Jets. And that wasn’t just Dallas floundering — Winnipeg did an excellent job of choking the Stars and preventing said breakouts, in what I imagine was a focal point heading into the game. But once Dallas was able to make adjustments and find a solution, I think the scales swung back the other way.
• Of course, that first half could have been disastrous for the Stars given the discrepancy in shots on net alone. But thankfully for them, they got yet another fantastic game from Jake Oettinger, who was pretty much perfect outside of a bad first goal he let in right after the Jets’ first power play expired.
As the main body of this piece clearly demonstrated, Mikko Rantanen has (deservedly) gotten all of the praise this postseason for the Stars. But Oettinger has been the Stars’ clear cut second best player, and that gap isn’t as wide as you might think. He’s yet to secure a shutout, but he’s been close plenty of times, and even the games where he’s allowed 3+ goals have been mostly due to defensive breakdowns or the teams playing bad. In other words, even when the Stars have lost, Oettinger has played well, and when they have won, he’s played really well. Dallas is one game away from a third consecutive Western Conference Final, and that’s thanks to both the Moose and the Otter.
• On the other side of the rink, Connor Hellebuyck once again lost on the road. But truth be told, I don’t think he even had a bad game — like Oettinger, that first goal was pretty bad to let in, and I think if the Stars had been able to break out properly (see above) and apply appropriate pressure, Hellebuyck might have collapsed (his expression after the goal screamed, “Oh no, here we go again.”). But they didn’t, and Hellebuyck was able to regain his composure and play well throughout the rest of the evening After all, 2-on-1s are always hard, and, can you really blame him for the defense letting Granlund wide open on Goal No. 3?
• Speaking of all these goals, special teams was a big win for the Stars last night. They went 2-for-4 on the power play, with the caveat that two of those were actually part of the same double minor infraction. I mentioned this to my dad after the call, but I think a double minor benefits Dallas more than the average team because of how they conduct their power play. Namely, they love to take their sweet time and find the perfect scoring opportunity, the problem being they often run out of time and end up with just a shot or two on net if even that. But having twice as much time mitigates that risk, and sure enough the Stars used the entire four minutes to find that perfect opportunity and, as a result, the goal.
Meanwhile the penalty kill was technically perfect, since Nikolaj Ehlers didn’t score two seconds earlier. The unit was fantastic against the Colorado Avalanche in Round 1, but then everyone and their mother was warning us that they wouldn’t be so fortunate in Round 2 facing off against the top power play unit in the league. Well, right now they’ve killed 15 out of 16 power plays successfully, which is a big reason why the Jets have only scored eight goals (excluding the Game 2 empty net) compared to the Stars’ 11. In fact, that three goal differential is the exact same as the power play goal differential between the two teams.
So kudos to the penalty killers for making Oettinger’s life easier, even if it doesn’t seem like he needs it these days.
• Finally, last night saw the return of Miro Heiskanen to the lineup, who played for the first time since January after a knee injury. Pete DeBoer eased him back into things, running a 11-7 lineup and playing him just under 15 minutes, which is roughly a fourth of the game and fourth among Dallas d-men. And honestly, he needs the slow ramp up — he’s clearly not at his full speed yet, and there were a couple times he seemed to lose his footing and fall down.
Still, we saw flashes of that Heiskanen brilliance all night long, from early in the first when he made one of his patented poke checks to stop a Winnipeg offensive transition all the way to the third where he set up Granlund for the hat trick goal. Even 50% of Heiskanen is better than most NHL defenders, and if Dallas is able to take care of business in Game 5 and end the series, that’ll give him all the more time to rest up and be ready for heavier minutes in Round 3.