DALLAS _ After 13 years in one place, an adjustment period was needed Joe Pavelski.
The Stars forward, signed in the offseason to a three-year contract that carries a $7 million cap hit, spent his entire career with the Sharks prior to joining Dallas. He was San Jose's captain and played more than 900 games in teal, scoring 38 goals last season and hoping to provide another scoring option for the Stars.
The start of the season didn't go as planned for Pavelski, or for many Stars really. Pavelski didn't score until the eighth game of the season. Through 13 games, he had two goals and one assist, even bumped temporarily to a bottom six role.
But Pavelski entered Tuesday's 4-1 win over Colorado with a three-game point streak, with five points in wins over the Wild, Avalanche and Canadiens. Tuesday's victory was the team's seventh in the last eight games and the Stars improved to 8-8-1 after a 1-7-1 start to the season.
"Confidence is really good," Stars coach Jim Montgomery said. "We still have some guys that are still not at their level of their individual games, so it's exciting about how much room of growth we have just within our team."
Radek Faksa scored twice as Jason Dickinson and Corey Perry added goals for the Stars' second win over Colorado in the last four days. Goaltender Ben Bishop made 36 saves.
But the Stars will now be without defenseman John Klingberg for at least the next two weeks because of a lower-body injury suffered after he was hit in the head or neck area with a puck in the second period. Klingberg did not play the third period.
Pavelski, meanwhile, played a season-high 21:54 on Tuesday night, including 7:19 on the power play and 6:04 on the penalty kill. He had four shots on goal and his nine total shot attempts were second among Stars.
"Obviously, everyone wants to look to the scoresheet and to the production, which at the end of the day, that's what you need," Pavelski said. "Regardless of how you get there, you need some production. Just overall, I think my game in a lot of areas is cleaner. The puck, making better plays with it. The line was going pretty good. The power play settled down a little bit with puck movement."
For the first time in a long time, Pavelski had to learn new systems (from Montgomery), new teammates (among current Stars, only Taylor Fedun and Roman Polak had played in San Jose previously) and a new way of playing hockey.
"I think the reads throughout the game where I don't have to process them, they're just happening," Pavelski said. "That takes a little bit of time with a new system, and not just with that, but with new teammates, new linemates at certain times.
"Starting to be a certain comfort level of seeing guys' tendencies, when they're getting rid of pucks, how fast they're shooting, just different plays. It all kind of blends together, allows you to be a split-second faster and hopefully create some of that production you talked about."
On Tuesday, Pavelski had five shot attempts in the first period alone and was on the ice for Jason Dickinson's game-opening tally just 19 seconds into the game.
The advanced statistics agree that Pavelski's game has taken a step forward recently. In the last two games, he has 0.85 expected goals, according to Natural Stat Trick. It took Pavelski the first 10 games to reach that figure that he hit in the last two.
Expected goals is a metric that assigns a likelihood of a goal for every shot as a way to try separate a player's performance from lucky bounces.
"You're always trying to figure things out," Pavelski said. "On a bigger scale, every year you've got to figure it out, you've got to get up to speed, got new teammates. Obviously being in San Jose for 13 years, I knew what to expect in a lot of areas, so there was a whole lot of new coming into here. I'm sure it might've played a little bit of a part. Regardless, the team is playing good hockey right now, too, and that needs to keep happening for us to get where we want to get to."
Pavelski is an integral part of the Stars having a successful season. If he can produce between 20-30 goals, added with typical production from Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn and Alexander Radulov and continued emergences from Roope Hintz and Denis Gurianov, the Stars can pair an acceptable offense with their already elite defense and goaltending.
