Stars Pucks: Rookies Are Lifting The Roster

Nill is winning on draft day and Stankoven/Bourque duo are making a nice difference.

Tuesday was an excellent night for the Dallas Stars as they ended a tremendous march through the East with their fourth win in five tries on the trip.

Wins against the New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers, Montreal Canadiens, and now the Toronto Maple Leafs give the Stars eight out of ten points on the trip. Even more impressively, they are 9-1-1 in the last eleven games, pulling 19 of a potential 22 points since December 23rd.

This is a wagon rolling down a hill again.

But there is no doubt that the object of highest interest since we last chatted is the way Logan Stankoven and Mavrik Bourque are really starting to show up on a regular basis as guys who are making a significant difference.

Recently, they have been playing together and have been joined by the fantastic Sam Steel in creating a line that has really turned in shifts that tilt the ice in the Stars' favor with relentless forechecking and scrappiness that you want down your lineup.

There was a moment late in the game last week at Madison Square Garden that demonstrated this pretty well, as Steel just got in there and took the puck away from New York on a one-man press, and before the Rangers could recover, the Stars tied things up.

On this occasion, it wasn’t all three of them, but Bourque and Stankoven going to the net certainly made the job difficult for the goaltender and also freed up some real estate for Thomas Harley to tie the game behind them. This is just tremendous work from a line that has been getting it done on a regular basis recently.