EDMONTON — One road game.
That’s all the Dallas Stars are focused on winning right now.
And for a team with the NHL’s best road record this season (26-10-5), and this spring (6-2), there’s plenty of belief in their ability to stave off elimination in Game 6 of the Western Conference Final Sunday at Rogers Place.
If they can, the pressure would shift squarely onto the Edmonton Oilers to pull off a road win in Game 7.
First things first — stay alive.
Otherwise, this could be the last chance for 39-year-old Ryan Suter to continue his pursuit of his first Stanley Cup in 1,444 games
Ditto for 39-year-old Joe Pavelski, whose struggles throughout these playoffs suggest this could be his last chance to chase the Cup following a 1,332-game career.
In fact, four of the five longest-tenured players left in the NHL’s spring tourney without a Cup are Stars, including Jamie Benn (1,112 games played) and Matt Duchene (1,056 games played).
They have plenty of big game experience on a team that played in pressure cookers throughout last year’s run to the Conference Final, not to mention the team’s Cup Final appearance in 2019-20.
As an organization, the club has the third-best winning percentage in NHL lore when facing elimination (21-17), but all that matters is winning the next one.
To do so they’ll have to flip the script on a narrative that has seen the Oilers grab hold of the once topsy-turvy series with two dominant performances to go up 3-2 in the Western Conference Final.
The Stars need to find a way to dictate play as they did in lengthy spurts the first three games of this series.
They did just that on the road against Vegas, winning Games 3 and 4 there to get back into their first round series, before sweeping all three games in Denver against the Avalanche.
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“We’ve done a really good job with that but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what’s happened all season, we’ve got to win Game 6,” said Wyatt Johnston, the lone Stars goal scorer in Friday’s 3-1 loss at American Airlines Centre.
“It’s focusing on the next game, the next shift no matter what that may be. We’ve done a good job at that.”
The Stars know they have the goaltending, the goal scorers, the defence and the coaching to get it done.
They finished one point short of the Rangers for the regular season crown and have enough youthful exuberance and veteran leadership in the room to ensure they’re undaunted by the moment.
That said, the noise and energy of a crowd hoping to will their team into its first Cup Final since 2006 will be off the charts.
An early deficit, like the one they faced Friday in Dallas, could see things get away from the Stars quickly.
The Stars entered the playoffs as the league’s deepest team, prompting head coach Peter DeBoer to say just the other day that his club is unquestionably a better team than it was a year ago in this position.
“I felt last year in the Western Conference Finals, when we got to this point, we were kind of hoping that everything lined up and we could win,” he said.
“I feel like this year we feel like we should win.”
Given their brilliant surge in this series, you can bet the Oilers feel the same way about their destiny as champs.
Sunday at 6 p.m. MT, we’ll find out who is right.
“Excited,” said Tyler Seguin, a Cup-winner as a rookie with Boston in 2011.
“I mean, this is the fun part. What have you got to lose here? Heck of a challenge in front of you the whole season, going to that rink we’ve taken pride in how we’ve been on the road all year, so let’s do it.”
