Defense crumbles, Oettinger pulled. The Stars' losing streak deepens with glaring errors, leaving questions about their playoff readiness.
The Dallas Stars are on a season-long six game tailspin with Tuesday's 6-3 loss against Carolina, and their defensive effort has to get better to pull out of this funk.
Tuesday marked the eighth game of their last nine that the Stars have allowed there or more goals, and the sixth in a row. Goaltender Jake Oettinger was pulled for the first time all season, and the Hurricanes were able to get any and every shot they wanted for most of the game.
Carolina Hurricanes left wing William Carrier (28) is congratulated by left wing Nikolaj Ehlers (27) defenseman K'andre Miller (19) and defenseman Sean Walker (26) after his goal against the Dallas Stars during the third period at Lenovo Center. Mandatory Credit: James Guillory-Imagn ImagesCarolina thrives on putting pucks to the net, but Dallas made it easy for them by giving them high danger scoring chance, one after the other. Oettinger had no shot on some of his five goals allowed, but did nothing to erase the massive defensive issues that were on display. Make no mistake, the Canes outclassed Dallas until the Stars made some headway in the third period.
After the loss to Montreal on Sunday, the talk was on the defensive performance as well as the amount of penalties taken. Both went unsolved Tuesday. Once again, Dallas paraded skaters to the box and gave up two power play goals.
The Stars power play also scored twice, but the second one was more of a consolation than a boost to try and get back in the game.
The loss will be short lived until Dallas takes the ice again, a mere 24 hours later in Washington to take on another menacing Eastern Conference team. It will be the Stars last regular season tussle with Alex Ovechkin before he retires from the NHL at the end of the season, but that will be the last thing the team is focusing on.
Fixing the mistakes that keep happening over and over again on this long losing streak will be at the forefront of everyone's mind, but that does not guarantee a solution. If it did, the result against Carolina would have looked much different. It may still have been a loss, but the mistakes were a carbon copy of all of the bad losses recently.
Lucky for the Stars, the lull in their game is coming at a decent time. They have cushion on everyone chasing them by a fairly significant margin, and they have time to get through this and flush it completely from the system by the time the playoffs start in a few months. In fact, the team will have almost the entire month of February to distance themselves from this stretch of play as the Olympic break happens.
The last time a losing streak like this happened was at the end of last season when the Stars limped into the playoffs. The team never looked like they did earlier in the season, but were still able to win two rounds.
This time, there is plenty of time for Dallas to figure it out and continue to build towards Game 1 of the opening round of the playoffs, which is exactly what head coach Glen Gulutzan preached when he was hired. But for now, surely everyone knows that the type of play during their long losing streak simply won't cut it when the stakes are higher.
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