The western Canada road trip concluded tonight as the Dallas Stars traveled to Jamie Benn’s home province for tilt against the Vancouver Canucks. It’s early goings in the season still and on paper, the Stars look like they should be pretty evenly matched against the Canucks. They’ve both won seven games, lost one in overtime. The Canucks have one more regulation loss than the Stars but they also have a game in hand.
The Stars are coming off three wins in a row but the Canucks are coming off a 10-1 actual murder of the San Jose Sharks last night in California. Are they on a roll? Are the Sharks just bad this year? Could it be a little bit of both?
First Period
The theme of this entire game is going to be penalties. There were four in the first, and the first was called on the Canucks, a delayed penalty a little over five minutes into the game. On which Thatcher Demko had a ridiculous save on a shot from the doorstep by Wyatt Johnston.
The following calls, in list form, where against Jamie Benn, then Craig Smith (who was extremely angry about it) and Sam Lafferty. You may be asking yourself, were these all good and justified calls? You know the answer, and the answer is no.
And then not much else happened? It doesn’t help that the two teams are evenly matched and the game really will come down to who gets angrier about all of the penalty calls.
Shots: Stars 13 (8 on the power play), Canucks 8 (4 on the power play)
Goals: Stars 0, Canucks 0
Second Period
There were six penalties in this period, four of them against the Stars, starting with Esa Lindell for a very weak crosschecking call. Shortly after the return to 5 on 5, Pius Suter (no relation to Ryan), scored his second of the season on a puck that really just sort of dribbled its way through the defnese.
The Stars got another chance at a power play but couldn’t even enter the offensive zone until there were only about 30 seconds left with the man advantage. Needless to say, they did not score.
Johnston was called for holding and though the Canucks power play was much better than the Stars, Oettinger was able to keep the Canucks to only one goal.
Until it was back to 5 on 5, anyway, when Filip Hronek, who still doesn’t have a goal but is the top points holder on the Canucks, found Elias Pettersson in behind Oettinger.
Around the 18 minute mark, Ian Cole found Matt Duchene against the boards and knocked him down. Mason Marchment took umbrage and ended up with an additional unsportsmanlike conduct to his five for fighting, but the penalty kill remained on point.
Duchene did not come back to start the third.
Shots: Stars 18, Canucks 22
Goals: Stars 0, Canucks 2
Third Period
In the first ten minutes of the third, the Stars had four shots on goal to the Canucks 1, and there were zero penalties called. They tried, but they did not score.
And though they continued to take zero penalties and get shots on goal and pull their goalie earlier than usual, nothing helped. The Stars could not overcome Demko’s brick wall or their earlier penalty woes, though they did not give up any power play goals, they also didn’t have the puck much to shoot it themselves.
Shots: Stars , Canucks
Goals: Stars 0, Canucks 2
TL;DR
The Stars got shut out after giving it some effort but taking an unfortunate number of penalties and losing Matt Duchene for the better part of a period.