In Dallas, the Stars withstood a rally from the Calgary Flames, and won Game 6 on Friday, 4-2, to push the series back to Calgary for a Game 7.
Dallas grabbed a 2-0 lead and then watched as the Flames rallied to tie the game in the middle frame.
“We have a confident group,” the Stars’ Joe Pavelski said. “You know what? It’s been a tight series. All the games have been tight, competitive, fun to play in, so yeah, I mean, we’re a group, we expect to go in and win, and I’m sure they do, too. We expect the game to be similar as the first six.”
Roope Hintz scored in the first period for Dallas for the 1-0 lead, and then Michael Raffl pushed the advantage to 2-0 in the middle frame.
“I know we’re not supposed to still be playing, we’re supposed to be on a golf vacation right now, but that wasn’t our intention going in,” Dallas coach Rick Bowness said. “As I said right off the bat, we didn’t get into the playoffs to be somebody else’s steppingstone in the second round. Here we are going into a Game 7, and our guys deserve a lot of credit.”
Jake Oettinger made 36 saves in the Stars win.
Calgary’s Michael Stone and Mikael Backlund scored to get the game even in the second period.
“I think we need to do a better job of taking the middle away and limiting their speed through the neutral zone,” Stone said. “We gave up too many chances against. They capitalized, and we didn’t capitalize on ours.”
Miro Heiskanen scored late in the second to restore the Dallas lead at 3-2.
Heiskanen atoned for the Backlund which deflected off his skate.
“We stayed aggressive,” Pavelski said. “We still forechecked, we still wanted to get two guys in on the puck, and at the end of the day, the compete level was there. That’s what was better. The compete and the urgency and those type of things.”
The third period was a scoreless back and forth effort by both teams until Tyler Seguin added an empty net strike for the 4-2 final.
“It was a [heck] of a game, we just couldn’t get the equalizer,” Calgary coach Darryl Sutter said. “It takes a lot (to close out a series), guys are still learning how much it takes.”
Jacob Markstrom made 36 saves in the Flames loss.
“It’s hard to win the last one,” Calgary’s Elias Lindholm said. “A lot of us haven’t been past the first round, and it’s something we’ve got to hopefully get done on Sunday. We’ve been a good team all year. We’ve got a lot of talent, a lot of character, and one of the best goalies in the league, and we have home ice.”
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