The best series of the Stanley Cup Playoffs thus far is in the books, and it ended exactly the way the NHL would have planned it. Down 2-0 early in the third period, Mikko Rantanen took the game over and tied it all by himself on the way to the Dallas Stars stunning the Colorado Avalanche with a 4-2 win in Game 7. Yes, in case you needed a reminder, that’s the same Mikko Rantanen that the Avalanche traded just a few months ago. More on that later.
Related: Rantanen Scores 3rd Period Hat Trick in Stars’ Epic Game 7 Comeback Over Avalanche
This game was a classic Game 7 chess match all the way through, until Josh Manson scored a shorthanded goal for the Avalanche in the second period. Thirty-one seconds into the third, Nathan MacKinnon pushed Colorado’s lead to 2-0, and Dallas’ fate seemed to be sealed. What happened next can be compared to very few moments in sports, and if this team goes on an epic Stanley Cup run, it will be remembered for a long, long time, and it might be anyway.
Let’s dive into three takeaways from the night that was at American Airlines Center.
Rantanen Takes Over Game 7 in Storybook Fashion
Let’s just start at the end and talk about what everyone else is talking about in the aftermath of Game 7. As stated earlier, this game was a very reserved chess match, and it was being played that way by both teams. After MacKinnon scored to push the Avalanche’s lead to 2-0, it felt like the Stars just kept on playing like that. There seemed to be no urgency in their game, and watching it, it didn’t really make sense. What was once a rowdy building, seemed to have the energy sucked out of it. Jake Oettinger was making key saves to keep his team in it, but beyond that, a comeback did not seem overly likely. Then, one shot changed everything.
At 7:49 of the third period, Rantanen put the Stars on the board with a wrist shot that went bar-down and put the AAC in a frenzy. At 12:02, Cale Makar was called for tripping, which gave the Stars a massive opportunity in the final eight minutes of the period, and Rantanen capitalized.
Rantanen’s second goal was the ultimate display of “We are not losing this game.” He picked up the puck on the Stars’ side of center and weaved his way through the neutral zone. When Rantanen crossed the Colorado blue line, he was the only Stars player in the zone and was facing a wall of three Avalanche players. He quite literally skated through them, went straight behind the net, and wrapped the puck around the goal for the game-tying marker. That goal, by the way, hit off a Colorado defender in the same fluky fashion that has been haunting Dallas all series. Just a remarkable sequence for the former Avalanche.
The game-winning goal was scored by Wyatt Johnston, who took a cross-crease pass from Matt Duchene, who took a pass from who else but Rantanen. Finally, in true Disney storybook fashion, Rantanen broke loose on a breakaway to seal Game 7 for good with an empty-net goal. That final goal was Rantanen’s fourth point of the period, which gave him his second 4-point period in the last three games. He finished the series with five goals and 12 points.
In watching back all three of his goals, his celebrations really stood out to me. After the first goal, his teammates went crazy and surrounded him, which happens after every goal. Rantanen gave everyone fist bumps and then got out of there as quickly as possible, as if to say, “The job’s not done.” After the second goal, he soaked it in for a little bit longer, but still was in no mood to go crazy about it. At the end of the celebration, Duchene tried to grab him, and Rantanen pushed through it, eager to get back to work. After the empty-net goal, that’s when he let his guard fully down, and the emotion poured out of him.
Make no mistake, whether you are a Stars fan or a hockey fan, that was a 12-minute stretch of hockey that will go down in history.
When Everyone Doubted, the Stars Believed
Sometimes you can feel a comeback in the making. The Stars played a solid game throughout, but just couldn’t create high-quality chances really at any point throughout the night. The Avalanche, on the other hand, capitalized on a bad zone entry by the Stars on the power play and scored a shorthanded goal to get the party started for Colorado. After MacKinnon scored at the beginning of the third, as mentioned previously, the Stars didn’t seem to play with the urgency that one would think they should play with as their season was less than a period away from ending. Turns out, the Stars didn’t feel that way at all.
“I think belief was there with the group the whole time,” Rantanen said. “I was able to make a play to get the first one, then the crowd started to roll, we got a couple of looks after that. The crowd really helped us there at the end.”
“I never felt like we were going to lose. Even when it was 2-0 and we didn’t have anything going,” Stars head coach Pete DeBoer said. “There’s a belief in that room that something was going to happen, and obviously, Rantanen put the team on his back in the last 10 minutes — it felt like something was going to happen, but I could not have predicted that.”
“You can’t write it up any better than that,” Oettinger said. “Guy comes over, knocks out his old team, puts the team on his back. One of the best individual performances I’ve seen in the playoffs in my life. So happy for him. This one was fun. I think that just shows us in here, it’s not over ’til it’s over. We’re never out of it. Down 2-0, would have been easy for us to say it just wasn’t our year. But we just wouldn’t be denied.”
No matter how it looked on the ice, that bench believed in what they were capable of, and they went out and did it.
Two Storylines Collide in Series Finale
There were two storylines that I was thinking about after the game, when my brain finally settled down from the madness that was the third period. The first is obvious, but the second one we have to dig a little deeper.
The Avalanche traded Rantanen to the Carolina Hurricanes a few months ago, and it came back to bite them in ways nobody could have imagined. At the time, it was justifiable on some level. They got back a couple of really good players, and freed up a bunch of money for other signings, plus the fact that it was out of conference, so the only way they would play against him would be in the Stanley Cup Final. Well, as fate would have it, the Hurricanes traded him to the team that played Colorado in the first round. Not only that, but with a cool 2-0 lead in the third period, the player who used to take over games for you took over the game for your opponent. If you’re an Avalanche fan, or worse yet, a part of management, this could not have ended in a worse way. Again, storybook stuff.
Secondly, I was thinking about the way the regular season ended for the Stars. They had an ugly seven-game losing streak to finish the season, plus they entered the playoffs without Jason Robertson and Miro Heiskanen. There was one game in particular that had bad vibes painted all over it.
The week before the season ended, in the middle of the losing streak, the Stars played the Vancouver Canucks at home. Mikael Granlund scored an empty-net goal at 17:39 of the third period to seal the game, we thought, for the Stars, and the hope of winning the Central Division was alive and well. Well, in the final minute of the game, the Canucks scored three goals to tie it and eventually won the game in overtime. It was a low point for the Stars. So much so that if they flamed out in the playoffs, this game would have been looked at as the beginning of the end.
This Game 7 victory is marked by resiliency and determination in ways we could go on about for hours. No time for that, though, as we prepare for Stars hockey in Round 2 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
