There is something curiously wrong with the Dallas Stars

Despite everything that’s gone right this season for the Dallas Stars, they are currently mired in a five-game losing skid at the worst time.

This is it. This is what your typical fan of the Dallas Stars braces for most every year. If you’re hearing a sickening thud across the Dallas-Fort Worth sports landscape, that’s the other shoe dropping for the local hockey team. Of course, it’s never as bad as it seems at the time, but the timing of this losing streak is awful. They’re supposed to be getting their scene together.

But the opposite is currently true. The Stars have been stuck on thirty-seven regulation or overtime wins for twelve days. Worse yet, since they don’t play again until tomorrow night, it’ll be two full weeks before they have a chance to start turning the ship around. In fact, the last time they won a game, they were on a very impressive 104-point pace. Now? That pace has cooled to roughly 99 points.

But before I go all Chicken Little here, let me present a little perspective. That pace will likely still get them into the playoffs, provided they start winning a few games here and there. The current eight seed in the West, the Nashville Predators, are on about a 92-point pace. It’s not really time to start panicking–yet.

That’s not to say there aren’t red flags flying like crazy. One can look at the most recent two games against the aforementioned Predators. The Stars played their worst game of the streak last Thursday in a 2-0 loss in Nashville. They then promptly backed that up with another shutout loss–this time 1-0–on the back end of the home-and-home. To be fair, the Stars played well in the second half of the matinee on Saturday, but some familiar problems have nastily manifested themselves yet again.

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Namely, the dearth of scoring is what’s haunting the Victory Green. Back-to-back shutouts will lay that bare. The Stars have never been known to score in bushels. They rank 26th in goals-for this season, after all. But even then, despite all of this, they’ve mostly been able to score enough. The goal drought over the last three games, really, is most concerning. They generate chances. They’re not getting their doors blown off. But the anxiety-inducing element here is that they’re not converting those opportunities into goals. With the trade deadline come and gone, the improvement will have to come from within.

That will be difficult to overcome. They’ve scored all of one goal in their last three games combined. Furthermore, the Stars haven’t scored an even-strength goal since their February 29th loss in St. Louis. The power play has gone MIA. The penalty kill is giving up goals at a pretty alarming rate. There simply isn’t a whole lot going right for this bunch. To top it all off, the playoffs are almost in sight, so it’s perturbing to watch them struggle. This isn’t the time or place for a soul-searching existential hockey crisis, yet here we are.

Even then, during this wobble, there’s been a bit of a silver lining. The first three games of the skid were frustrating in that the Dallas Stars played well enough to win. It was hard to argue with their effort. And aside from the bad game on Thursday, they probably deserved at least a point on Saturday. But that’s the loser’s lament at this particular moment. They need a win soon, and in the worst way.