Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Bringing in the New Year with the Dallas Stars

by Todd Maternowski

Happy new year, hockey fans! Hopefully your celebratory hangovers are subsiding enough for you to comprehend this hockey column --I know I, for one, will never mix qaaludes, eggnog and gorilla pheromones again-- but even if it took you two-dozen times to make it through this sentence, you'll be happy to know that it's Time for Some Real Hockey.

While over the past few weeks I've been writing fluffy holiday-infused columns of love and joy, it has not gone unnoticed that the Stars seem to be taking the whole Sean Avery divorce pretty well. Their record without him is 8-4-1, including a sterling 5-1-1 record in their last seven games, with the lone loss being to the NHL-leading San Jose Sharks, and even then not by much. The Stars are competing in all three areas of the ice, getting timely netminding and even timlier goal scoring.

What the hell is going on???

This is obviously not the same Stars team that dug themselves into an early-season hole with terrible October and a 4-6-2 November. Turco's GAA is down to a not-so-stratospheric 3.19, and despite the ever-mounting heap of injured players in the medical ward (Morrow, Brunnstrom, Ott, Zubov, Boucher, Lehtinen, Lundqvist, Janik...the list goes on. At times it was questionable whether the team would be able to dress the minimum number of players to avoid the forfeit), the team soldiers on.

The reason? The ever-elusive and impossible-to-predict Team Chemistry. With the look-at-me Avery distraction gone, the Stars finally seem to be able to get on the same page, work on their fundamentals and excel in areas where they previously had looked terrible. Since Tippett and the team's leaders took their stand, the Stars have been able to accomplish incredible feats of amazing hockey prowess, such as: backchecking in the defensive zone, bringing puck support along the boards, winning the occasional puck battle in the offensive zone, and playing the man when opposing forwards cross the blue line. You know, all the things that made the Stars the most professional, watchable sports team in DFW for over a decade.

But as I've harped on endlessly before, chemistry takes time. Many fans thought that with Sean gone, the team would instantly become the same old Stars team we were used to seeing before that ill-advised trade. These are probably also the same fans that honestly thought that the first time they got laid, they were the Greatest Lover of All Time. These things take time, practice, and repetition. If the Stars' recent record is any indication, it would appear that they're well on their way in the right direction.

So where do the Stars go from here? Despite two months of sheer suckage, the Stars are currently two points --two!!-- out of the final playoff spot, with a game in hand and 46 games to play. Catching San Jose is probably out of the question --these aren't the New York Mets we're talking about here-- as the Stars would have to win around 36-40 of their remaining games while the Sharks hovered around .500. Unless we were able to get Sharks GM Doug Wilson loaded on PCP, and convince him in his altered state to replace Todd McLellan with Wade Phillips... well, a man can dream.

But it's never really been about the regular season around these parts, anyways. Barring even more injuries, the Stars roll a pretty impressive four line juggernaut, and their most recent pick-ups (Andrew Hutchinson, Brian Sutherby, Landon Wilson) and fast-developing youngsters (James Neal, Loui Eriksson, Brunnstrom) make them a highly entertaining team to watch. The fourth line, in particular, of Barch-Sutherby-Wilson, is always a pleasant surprise on the ice, cycling the puck in the offensive zone, throwing hard checks, generating offense in the crease and just generally being the "pests" that opponents hate to play against.

Even better news for 2009: only 2 of the Stars' top 14 scorers are over the age of 30 (Modano and Robidas), meaning that this team will hopefully continue to compete at a high level long after the graybeards in Detroit, Anaheim and San Jose are putting in their dentures and spending their pension checks on Lawrence Welk's Greatest Hits.

Here's to a better 2009 for the DFW area's best professional sports team! (clink) Huzzah!