Stars-Red Wings thoughts
/Andrew's Dallas Stars Page
Well, if you get good goaltending and you win the special teams battle you are going to win most nights. Alex Auld was excellent, the penalty kill was 4-4 and is now 17-17 over the last five games and the power play scored twice. I thought all those areas were a big part of the Stars 3-1 win over Detroit tonight, but I think they simply played an excellent game all the way around.
They skated well, pursued the puck well, defended well and they created more chances than the Red Wings and when you create more chances are you’ll score more. They simply outplayed the Red Wings. I didn’t think Detroit had that many great chances and Auld closed the door on all but one (actually, two but more on that later).
That’s the best game Mike Ribeiro’s had in a while and not just because he scored a goal. He seemed to have some jump to his game and pushed the pace a little more. No goals for James Neal, but he was key on helping set up the Matt Niskanen goal and made a great pass on Loui Eriksson’s power play goal to make it a 3-1 game.
I really liked the way Marc Crawford rolled the lines. The fourth line guys - Krys Barch, Tom Wandell and Toby Petersen played well and got close to 10 minutes in a tight game. It might not seem like a big deal, but when you can use everybody like that it can save some fuel in a back-to-back situation like they face with the game Thursday against Columbus, and in this stretch where they are playing eight games in 13 days.
On the Brad May no goal in the third period - that was just a bad call. I can understand the initial confusion, but I thought after someone looked at the replay they would have figured out that the puck was in the net before the official was really thinking about blowing the whistle. That is unless the ref was thinking about blowing the whistle when May was shooting the puck.
It would have been a different game after that. But the simple fact is that the team that played better in the game won.
Columbus is next tomorrow night at the AAC. We’ll see if we can follow up this win with another one over Hitch and the Blue Jackets.
I’ll end it with his quote from Crawford following the game:
“We’re very comfortable with how we’re playing. We’re still working on the consistency part of it as our record has shown. We’ve played two games in a row very well, but we’ve had trouble winning two games in a row. That’s the challenge for us.” /blockquote>Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
