STARS DOWN COLUMBUS, 5-1
You never would have known it from Dallas Stars head coach Lindy Ruff's postgame response to the game, but his team overcame a sluggish start to pull away from the Columbus Blue Jackets and skate off with a 5-1 victory at the American Airlines Center on Tuesday night.
Kari Lehtonen played a very strong game in goal, stopping a couple of breakaways among the the 34 saves he made on 35 shots. The big Finn was especially sharp in a first period that saw the Stars outshot by a 16-8 margin but take a 1-0 lead to intermission on a seeing-eye goal by Johnny Oduya at 17:53.
The Stars were the better team over the final 40 minutes -- and put a three-goal stranglehold on the game with a three-goal outburst in the latter portion of the second period -- but Ruff was not happy with the team's play with or without the puck early or how wide open (shots were 19-12 Dallas) the second period was at times.
After Columbus' Scott Hartnell tied the game with a power play goal at 4:32 of the middle frame, the Stars pulled away from the Blue Jackets later in the period in a span of less than three minutes.
First, Alex Goligoski passed a puck back the Ales Hemsky at the blueline, and the defenseman kept skating to the net to collect Hemsky's rebound and stash it home to restore a one goal lead. Shortly thereafter, Tyler Seguin scored goals spaced 30 seconds apart to turn the game into a 4-1 Dallas advantage. On a stretch pass from John Klingberg, Seguin received the puck in stride near the attacking blueline, got Columbus goalie Joonas Korpisalo (22 saves on 26 shots) to commit a little early and snapped a right circle shot past the goaltender. Thirty seconds later, Seguin used a Columbus defenseman as a screen and skittered a shot home from the slot.
In the third period, Korpisalo gave way to veteran backup Curtis McElhinney (six saves on seven shots). At the 1:47 mark, Mattias Janmark collected a turnover by David Savard (a minus-four on the night) on the walls and cut across in front of the Columbus net. McElhinney stopped Janmark's backhanded try but the Swede stuck with the rebound and scored on a second effort
Ruff, who serially juggles line combinations, made changes again in this game, including moving Seguin from top line center to the right wing spot. The coach pushed the right buttons, as the team remained the only club in the NHL to avoid losing back-to-back games.
Afterwards, Ruff channeled former Stars head coach Ken Hitchcock in his public statements about what turned into a blowout win: In order to send a message to his team that it cannot afford to be complacent after a multi-goal win, Ruff hammered away after the game about the things he didn't like about his team's performance rather than focusing on the end result.
"I'm frustrated," Ruff said in his televised news conference "We had a total lack of mental focus tonight. I know we won 5-1, but we'll [usually] lose games if we play like that."