In order to qualify for the playoffs, the Stars will have to conquer the road.
The team’s final seven games of the regular season are all on the road, beginning with Thursday’s game at Tampa Bay. The Stars enter Thursday two points behind fourth-place Nashville for the final playoff spot in the Central Division with two games in hand on the Predators.
This isn’t any ordinary road trip, though. It’s one of the toughest in the league.
Only two teams have had longer road trips this season: San Jose began the season with 12 straight on the road while Nashville had an eight-game trip. The Stars go to five different cities, and the next five games are all against teams currently in a playoff position, including Saturday’s showdown with the Predators.
“We have to make the best of it,” Stars coach Rick Bowness said. “We know what’s coming. We know we’re going to spend a lot of time next week in our hotel rooms. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
Despite schedules that typically feature some of the toughest travel in the league due to Dallas’ location, the Stars have not had a seven-game road trip in nearly 20 years. The last seven-game trip was in 2002-03, when captain Derian Hatcher played for coach Dave Tippett, and the gold-tinted Stars won the Pacific Division with a record that had 15 ties.
So it’s been a while.
The Stars did flourish last season away from home, completing their run to the Stanley Cup Final in the Edmonton bubble. But even the sanitized abode of the JW Marriott offered the Stars more freedom than they currently have on the road.
Due to the league’s COVID-19 restrictions, players and staff spend most of their time in their hotel rooms, unable to go to restaurants outside the hotel and barred from going to the arena too early before a game.
“It’s been tough, to be honest,” Blake Comeau said. “I think every team is probably feeling it. You get to the hotel and you’re basically just stuck in the hotel until you play. There’s some long days, some long trips. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of adapting to it.
“It’s kind of become the new norm, but that being said, it’s a grind physically and also mentally just being stuck in a hotel while you’re out on the road.”
Beginning on Wednesday night, the Stars will spend the next 13 days in hotels.
The season-ending road trip was originally supposed to be a four-game one with two games in Nashville and two games in Chicago. But the schedule was scrambled twice this season, first after Dallas’ coronavirus outbreak during training camp postponed four games and again in February when the winter storm postponed four more games.
The result was a road-heavy, condensed schedule down the stretch.
“It’s just the world we’re in now,” Jamie Oleksiak said. “You have to be able to adjust. Our schedule is so condensed, you really don’t focus on it too much. You’re kind of just going city to city, playing the game and then flying out again. We’re just focusing on hockey right now.”
The Stars remain very much in the postseason hunt despite a 5-1 loss to Carolina on Tuesday night, but Thursday’s game looms large since it is one of the games in hand Dallas has on Nashville. While the Predators rest at home for three days, the Stars will take on the defending champions.
“We’re just going to have to grind it out and get points,” John Klingberg said.
