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Ryan S. Clark, NHL reporterJun 3, 2024, 01:19 AM ET
CloseRyan S. Clark is an NHL reporter for ESPN.
When it came to what the Dallas Stars did in Game 6, it was the sort of performance that captain Jamie Benn said was his team’s best of the Western Conference final.
It was also the one that saw the Stars get eliminated in Game 6 of a Western Conference final for the second year in a row.
From having three times the shots to owning the puck 75 percent of the time, the Stars still fell short in a 2-1 loss Sunday to the Edmonton Oilers, which saw the Oilers reach the Stanley Cup final for the first time since 1990.
“You could probably argue that was our best game of the series,” Benn said. “It just didn’t go our way.”
Entering Game 6, the goal for the Stars was to replicate what they did in the first round when they fell into a two-game deficit against the then-defending Stanley Cup champion Vegas Golden Knights before winning the series in seven games.
The Stars had a 2-1 series lead before the Oilers scored eight goals between Games 4 and 5 with a chance to clinch the series in six games. Otherwise, a Stars’ victory would have forced a Game 7 in Dallas which would have given Stars’ coach Peter DeBoer a chance to go undefeated in eight Game 7s in his career.
Instead? The Stars’ flight back to Dallas will be to start an offseason that will be powered by the reality they’re still in a championship window.
“We went through a gauntlet and beat some really good teams and knew we had something special,” Stars forward Tyler Seguin said. “We lost to a team that we thought we could beat and sometimes, that’s playoffs. Sometimes, it’s that one bounce, that one goal, that one save. That’s why we all love it. That’s why it’s the hardest damn trophy in the world to win.”
Edmonton had a 2-0 lead by the end of the first after Connor McDavid deked his way to the net before firing a point-blank shot to beat Jake Oettinger before Zach Hyman scored a power-play goal with a little more than…
Source link : https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/40267395/dallas-stars-ousted-have-our-best-game
Author : Ryan S. Clark
Publish date : 2024-06-03 06:24:12
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