Now that their wild Stanley Cup Final ride has come to a close, what's next for the Dallas Stars? - The Dallas Morning News

In the ’90s we charted progress in the popularity of hockey in Texas initially by the number of StarsCenter rinks around town and then, finally, by the number of championship parades (1) and Stanley Cup Finals (2) that the Stars visited.

Twenty years later, as the Stars journeyed back to the strangest Cup Final of all time — one held entirely in Edmonton’s Rogers Place without fans — the local club paid a price for all that development when Plano’s Blake Coleman scored the biggest goal of the playoffs Wednesday. His shot fired just between Anton Khudobin’s outstretched leg and glove early in the second period gave Tampa Bay a two-goal lead, and the team that has been anointed the best in the league the last five years without actually finishing the job was on its way.

The Lightning’s 2-0 victory ended the Stars' season at the same point as the New Jersey Devils did 20 years ago. Only that Game 6 was played in Reunion Arena, went to overtime and no one at that time would have guessed that Bob Gainey and Ken Hitchcock would preside over just one more playoff series win before the team wandered off into years of irrelevance.

The bigger question today is what does this unexpected pleasure cruise Stars fans enjoyed, albeit from afar, really tell us?

The club was fading when the season was postponed in March and didn’t exactly come firing out of the gates when the operation moved to Edmonton months in July. But then they took care of business in the most surprising of ways as 24 teams traveled to Canada to reignite the game and the Stars outlasted 22 of them.

Pick the most unlikely scoring numbers from the following:

A series ending four-goal game from rookie Denis Gurianov.

A series ending hat trick from rookie Joel Kiviranta.

Six straight goals in the Stanley Cup Final from veteran free-agent pickups Corey Perry and Joe Pavelski.

Zero goals in the month of September from Tyler Seguin.

It was a wild ride, and if this was nothing more than a pleasant escape from the pandemic for Dallas sports fans, that’s not inconsequential on its own.

Three playoff series wins?

Neither the Mavericks nor the Rangers have won a round in the playoffs since their title trips (one successful, one not quite) in 2011. The Cowboys have won three playoff games this century.

The Stars' last two seasons have ended at the hands of the Cup winner — St. Louis in the second round more than 16 months ago and now the Lightning. That encourages a belief that something is being built here, that the Stars' turn is coming and possibly right around the corner. The play of the rookies mentioned above and of young defensemen Joel Klingberg and Miro Heiskanen are chief among the reasons that more can be expected from this team in whatever next season looks like.

Khudobin was enormous while filling in for the injured Ben Bishop, and the club is committed to the latter contractually but would love to keep the free-agent Khudobin around for another run as well. The goalie carousel will begin spinning much sooner than usual given that the season nearly ran into October (the draft is next Tuesday), and we will have some answers soon enough.

Stars Owner Tom Gaglardi made it clear recently that Rick Bowness will have the interim tag removed from his coaching title which settles that situation.

But there’s a lot of age on this roster, too, and while Seguin performed better in some areas as the Final went along, the fact he didn’t register a goal after Aug. 26, the poor penalties that veterans took to enable Tampa Bay’s devastating power play suggest that much work on the roster is to be done during a shortened offseason.

Consider that the Lightning has been very good for six years, often the best or close to it during the regular season and it took until now for this collection of players to capture the Cup. There’s time for Jamie Benn and Alexander Radulov and Perry and Pavelski and Seguin to hoist the Cup in Dallas but the window of opportunity is certainly shorter for some than others.

For now, it should be said that the Stars righted the ship against Calgary after beginning the “new season” on awkward footing, then knocked off two Western Conference rivals — Colorado and Las Vegas — that were superior during the regular season and favored to beat Dallas.

It took seven power play goals in the Lightning’s four wins over the Stars for Dallas to be eliminated. It was a heck of a ride that confirmed GM Jim Nill had a heck of an offseason in 2019. Now he needs one more.

Find more Stars stories from The Dallas Morning News here.

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Now that their wild Stanley Cup Final ride has come to a close, what's next for the Dallas Stars? - The Dallas Morning News
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