3 Thoughts - Stars Close Out Knights, Gm 7
Stars and Vegas gave us seven games of awesome hockey, but only Dallas moves on.
If you would have told any of us that Dallas was going to Round 2 after the way that they started the 2024 playoffs, most everyone would have looked at the deliverer of the news with an awkward glance.
How?
How could you lose Games 1 and 2 at home and live to tell about it?
But, as a man once said, it is the first team to four.
It doesn’t matter how you get to four, but if you can get there, you will advance. Don’t give up if you get beat in Game 1. Apparently Game 2 is not actually a “must win.”
I don’t recommend you try it very often, but the 2024 Dallas Stars have taught us a valuable lesson. As ridiculous as it seems, apparently, you can beat the Stanley Cup Champions – with full health regained and trading for Noah Hanifan and Tomas Hertl at the deadline – four games out of the final five to advance by the skin of your teeth.
The Dallas Stars won Game 7 in Dallas on Sunday Night by the final score of 2-1. This gives them the series and they now advance to Round 2 for a date with the Colorado Avalanche that begins Tuesday Night at the AAC.
These are My Three Thoughts:
– I have never seen a first-round Series that was this good and we can only wonder what the victor has left in the tank after the battle with the conquered.
This was an absolute classic.
Sixteen goals for the Dallas Stars and 16 goals for the Vegas Golden Knights. Both teams averaged 2.29 goals per game and there was not much left when it was over. The Dallas Stars survived this series, but the exhaustion levels and the maximum efforts required to get this done makes you wonder about the gas reserves this early in the playoffs.
That is what I cannot stop thinking about and it is very likely not the proper approach for this kind of conquest. The Stars won a great series – I might suggest the best series win since 2008 against the San Jose Sharks, but we could debate that – and now they must try to win again…and again….and finally again. The quality of the foes this year feels oppressively difficult, but if you want to be the best, I guess you really do have to beat the best. And apparently all of them.
I know I am supposed to hate Vegas, but I can’t.
They play hockey the right way and they play it with high intensity at all times. They were as worthy an opponent as you might ever find and it is a delight to battle them, provided you are on the right side of the handshakes. I would much prefer a Western Conference Final, but I also think you could argue that playing a patsy in Round 1 might not have you fully up to snuff for Colorado. It is a good theory, anyway. I assume Colorado will have very little in common with Vegas, but we will know soon enough. It might be even easier this series if you can establish some home ice versus the Avalanche, but there will be no rest for the weary.
This series was on a razor’s edge. One slight movement in the universe and it could have swung it in the other direction. You have a caromed goal in Game 6 for Vegas and a caromed goal in Game 7 for Dallas. You have a missed open net in both directions in Game 6 and a missed open net in both directions in Game 7. We can go on and on, but in the end, you just had to make one more play. That play? Well, I suppose that play was a very hopeful backhander from Radek Faksa to open the 3rd period.
How did it go in? Well, it appeared it had a seeing eye dog guide to the far corner under the bar which was a theme in this series that goes back to Wyatt Johnston’s stunner to end Game 3.