Rarely in this National Hockey League season or any other have we seen a franchise have such an epic, controversial and in-the-public-eye week like the Dallas Stars are going through at the moment.
The hockey media world seems to be completely transfixed on Lindy Ruff’s team and their home, American Airlines Centre. And with good reason!
As far as emotions go, Dallas have run the gamut this week. Let’s take a look at a whirlwind five days, in which we’ve seen a little of everything: the good, the bad and the downright ugly.
Good – Thursday night
The beleaguered Vancouver Canucks were in town, and even if you’re just a casual hockey fan, you were bound to have heard of how the goalie soap opera in Vancouver came to a shuddering halt on the day of the NHL trade deadline.
That was when the Canucks managed to trade away their goalie, Roberto Luongo.
This is Luongo, the two-time Olympic gold medallist, who in the last two years had been the Canucks starter, then the backup, then a starter again this season, and has endured more than one goalie really should with grace, style and aplomb.
So Luongo is off, and the Canucks are an unhappy organisation. Star centre Ryan Kesler apparently wanted a trade, but it didn’t happen. There’s also anger that coach John Tortorella started his back-up rather than Luongo at the Heritage Classic outdoor game on the weekend, and speculation that that move might have been the last straw for Luongo.
What did the Stars do? Ease the Canucks’ pain? Absolutely not. They went onto the ice at American Airlines Centre and completely dismantled the besieged team to the tune of 6-1.
The way things were going in the first period and into the second, Dallas could’ve scored 16 times. It was chance after chance, a rare onslaught that saw the Stars up 5-0 before the Canucks woke up.
The chief destroyer was Tyler Seguin, the kid who was traded over from Boston and is flourishing in his new surroundings. Three goals and two assists made it a five-point night for the flashy forward, notching his third hat trick of the season to tie a Dallas Stars/Minnesota North Stars record held jointly by franchise legends Mike Modano (whose jersey was retired on Saturday night) and Bill Guerin.
Seguin leads all Dallas scorers with 29 in the season, and was in fabulous touch on Thursday night.
He was a genuine threat on every shift in one of those highlight-reel individual performances which writers and bloggers love to dissect.
Seguin gave us all plenty to discuss after two first-period goals and his third at 12:53 of the final period, leading to speculation that the Canucks had quit on their team and their coach.
Bad: Saturday night
Going into Saturday night, there was a lot to like about the Stars in a tightly-contested Western Conference.
They were on the cusp of a playoff berth, had spanked Vancouver two nights before, and in came the Minnesota Wild, a team with a comparable record, which gave Dallas a good chance to start a winning streak.
Then, in one incendiary moment, Minnesota rookie Eric Haula perhaps changed the complexion of the Stars’ season.
Surely, as Haula was sweeping up ice, out of his defensive zone and went in on Stars goalie Kari Lehtonen with the puck on his stick, his brain melted down?
At the very least, all common sense had retreated well out of reach. The former University of Minnesota stand-out barrelled head-on into Lehtonen, knocking the goalie backwards and his helmet off, with his head hitting the iron crossbar.
Vision suggests that Haula appeared to lose an edge on his skate at the last moment, dogged as he was by two Stars defencemen.
But that does little to save Haula, because the vision also shows that he did little, if anything, to avoid hitting Lehtonen. And hit Lehtonen he did. Viciously. Illegally.
Predictably, and rightfully, Haula’s actions drew a crowd of angry Dallas players, and he was given a five-minute major as well as a game misconduct.
If Haula hasn’t been handed supplementary suspension by the League’s Player Safety team by the time you’re reading this article, I’ll be very surprised.
It deserves three or four games on the sideline, and a sizeable fine, if only for the purposes of deterrence.
The upshot of one of the uglier moments we’ve seen during the 2013-14 season is that Lehtonen is out indefinitely with concussion symptoms.
We all know that concussions are an uncertain injury. Now that the Stars most need their starting goalie, who had impressed this year, they are without him, and no one knows for how long.
Ugly: Monday night
As bad as things were for the Stars, they only got worse on Monday night, with perhaps the scariest thing I’ve ever seen happen in a hockey game – and this one didn’t even occur on the ice.
Reeling from Lehtonen’s concussion, it was former Stanley Cup champion Tim Thomas making his first start as a Star, having been traded out of Florida to make room for Luongo.
If that sight was the worst Stars fans expected to see from their game against Columbus, they were in for a rude shock. The Blue Jackets scored an early goal, but events on the bench soon led to the game taking a frightening turn.
Forward Rich Peverley, acquired by the Stars as part of the trade that also delivered Thursday night’s hero Seguin to the team, suffered a cardiac incident as he watched his teammates take shifts on the ice.
One minute he was okay, and the next something was very wrong. Play continued momentarily, before Stars players streamed over the boards to get the officials to stop the game, which they did.
Everyone was stunned to watch trainers carrying Peverley, sans stretcher, out into the tunnel, before players returned to the locker room. The game would later be postponed, but hockey, on this night, was of small consequence. Peverley had missed some games earlier in the year due to an operation to correct an irregular heartbeat.
True to the form of a hockey player, Peverley, conscious when he was transferred from the American Airlines Centre to a nearby hospital, was most concerned with the score of the game and when he could get back into the action.
In the face of a terrible situation, it was refreshing to see the entire hockey community come together in their support for Peverley and for the Stars franchise as a whole.
I’ve often said that hockey people are the best sort, and the league-wide reaction to the Peverley injury confirms this. Get well soon, Rich. We all want to see you come back and play hockey!
Hopefully, for the Dallas Stars, the coming weeks and days with be filled with less drama than the last five days have been.
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