The Dallas Stars winning streak has reached four games.
After a 2-1 win the Stars are tied atop the Central Division at 10 points with the St. Louis Blues, but with one less loss let’s just call the Stars as the top dog in the Central through six games. It’s more fun than “tied”.
After a sluggish first ten minutes the Stars laid the wood to the Philadelphia Flyers. From the 14 minute mark until the 24 minute mark the Flyers didn’t even attempt a shot. During that same stretch both Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn scored to give the Stars a 2-0 lead.
Speaking of those two, their line with Patrick Sharp was utterly dominant tonight. The top pairing of John Klingberg and Alex Goligoski gave them a great deal of support. At one point in the middle of the 2nd period all five players were at least +10 Corsis. You can’t ask much more out of that group.
The star of the game was undoubtedly goaltender Antti Niemi. In his last start against the Colorado Avalanche the final 30 minutes were rough. Arguably these were the roughest 30 minutes of the season for the Stars, Niemi clearly wasn’t letting that bother him tonight. He made some outstanding saves that kept the Stars ahead. Philadelphia didn’t get many shots, and of those not many were prime chances. But, some of the prime chances they did get were prime to the highest order.
Without Niemi playing as well as he did this game would have turned out much differently, but I suppose that’s kind of obvious eh? If the goalie is bad a team isn’t going to win. Breaking news, yeah, but it’s still so early in the season that it’s worth remembering how lucky the Stars are to have competent goaltending.
That was fun to watch.
The Stars ended up out-attempting the Flyers by four or five, but the Flyers fired a ton of pucks at net trying to get back into the game early in the third period. When the game was close the Stars were clearly the top team on the ice.
Jamie Benn leads the league in goals with six.
Benn and Seguin are both on long point streaks.
Hockey is fun again, you guys.
All in all this was a quality win on the road. It wasn’t perfect, but this is the type of game the 2015 Stars would have lost. All hail our new goaltending and defensive overlords.