Dallas go for one

Well, that was rude.

On Friday night, the Dallas Stars returned from their COVID19 protocol and hosted the Nashville Predators.

In the rudest way possible, the Stars erupted for seven goals and sent their guests to a 7-0 loss.

Anton Khudobin had a 34-save in the shutout.

“We have to understand that things went our way,” Dallas  head coach Rick Bowness said. “We took five penalties and we weren’t happy with that, but we’re not going to nitpick here. Honestly, we just needed to get this first game. Win or lose, we had to get a game, we had to play. Fortunately, we got some breaks tonight and that’s going to happen. Over the next 55 games you’re going to have breaks going your way and you’re going to have breaks going against you. When you have breaks going your way you have to take advantage of them, and we did tonight.”

Dallas took the first period to get their legs and then used a 13:56 stretch in the middle frame to hang five goals on the board, three power plays, a short handed and rather mundane even strength marker.

“We knew they were going to come hard,” Khudobin said. “We didn’t play any games, so they probably tried to take advantage of it. Yeah, we want to play better than that, but at the same time there’s going to be games like this that you have to be able to survive, talk to the team, talk to each other in intermission, change your game and play better, which we did.”

Joe Pavelski struck twice and had four points for Dallas, Alexander Radulov potted two goals and three points in the rout.

“Going into a game like that, no preseason, a broken training camp, we did a lot of skating with the attempt to have our legs and be ready for tonight,” Pavelski said. “We wanted to come into this game with no excuses and we wanted to be able to match their work ethic or even try to outwork it. It turned into a special teams game, but overall you feel good.”

There was very push back from the Preds.

“It hasn’t been good enough,” the Predators’ Roman Josi said. “We’ve got to make a difference on the power play. That was the difference today.”

Denis Gurianov, Esa Lindell *shorthanded) and Joel Kiviranta had single markers for the Stars.

Dallas scored twice in the third period, both were power play strikes.

Juuse Saros got the start for Nashville and yielded five goals and made 15 saves.

Pekka Rinne played a mop role similar to a crime scene in the third period and made six saves, giving up the power play goals.

“Special teams was a big negative for our team,” the Predators’ Filip Forsberg said. “Five-on-five, I thought we were playing pretty good. We were creating chances, we were drawing penalties. … Obviously, 7-0 looks bad and special teams was bad, but 5-on-5 I thought we played pretty good.”