Dallas Stars Season Retrospective, Part 1

For the first time in General Manager ODeezy’s 9 year tenure, the Dallas Stars have failed to make the playoffs. Despite reaching the 90 point mark, the Stars finished 7 points behind their bitter rivals the Winnipeg Jets for the final Wild Card spot in the Western Conference. 90 points would have been good enough for the last spot in the weaker Eastern Conference, but for Dallas it meant a distant 13th place in the conference.

To make matters worse, the team owns none of its own picks in the first 6 rounds of the draft. ODeezy has been decidedly all-in for most of his reign as Stars GM and looked to have a stacked roster that could compete for the RHL championship this year. But the likes of Kirill Kaprizov, Nikita Kucherov, Jack Eichel and other offensive superstars failed to live up to their reputation. The team struggled to score, finishing in the bottom 10 league-wide, and had no players reach the 30 goal or 70 point plateaus.

Somewhat surprisingly, ODeezy opted to ship out offense near the trade deadline by sending winger Alex DeBrincat to Anaheim in return for defenseman Mackenzie Weegar. At the time, the GM mentioned he thought the team’s lack of offense stemmed from an inconsistent blueline which is why he added a physical two-way presence in Weegar. DeBrincat’s departure also opened up more minutes for talented offensive players Jesper Bratt and Jeff Skinner, although each only got to 33 points by the end of the season.

The teams’ goaltenders played well statistically, although as we’ll cover later in the retrospective they did not always show up when expected. Ilya Sorokin put up a solid 91.9% save percentage and won 36 of 65 starts for the club as their number 1 option. He was one of the top 3 stars in the game a team-leading 19 times, including 7 as the first star and 8 as the second. Backup Craig Anderson played better than his 41 years of age, putting up a 90.9% save percentage, but had a record of just 5-10-2.

The biggest pain point was the team’s power play output. They received the 3rd highest number of attempts with the man advantage in the league at 182 but scored on just 26 of them, 6th fewest in the league. Had they converted on a league average 20% of power plays rather than 15%, they would have netted 9 additional crucial goals. As of now, ODeezy has not made any mention of Coach Gerard Gallant’s job being in jeopardy despite squandering such a strong roster. However, Stars fans can expect the heat to be turned up on Gallant next season, and will likely see changes to strategic and personnel decisions on special teams.

While Dallas wasn’t one lucky bounce away from qualifying for the playoffs this year, there were some tough losses that defined the trying season. For this retrospective, we'll take a look back at some of the team’s 10 worst losses during the 2022-2023 season in parts 2 and 3.