A goalie short of contending
Stars GM has shot this season to add key missing piece.
The goaltending was great in Game 1. The goaltending was lousy in Game 2. When the goaltending identity changes sometime this season — and that has a very legit- imate chance of happening — that’s when the Stars will fully establish themselves as the team more prepared to raise a championship ban- ner than the Cowboys, Rang- ers or Mavericks.
(Dak Prescott has a chance to change this perception.)
What really mattered in both a 4-2 win over Anaheim and a 6-5 loss at Colorado was that Tyler Seguin was back. Seguin, who missed the entire second round against St. Louis when the Stars were elimi- nated, had two goals and an assist against the Avalanche, announcing that all injury concerns can be dismissed.
This team has to be led by Jamie Benn and Seguin as it has been for three years. They are still almost shockingly young (27 and 24, respectively) to be the veteran leaders and deco- rated All-Stars that they are.
Give those two a reasonable amount of health, and Dallas competes with the best.
But while Antti Niemi was the first star Thursday and was awful Saturday, it was sim- ply a reminder that the Stars will ride a goaltending roller coaster as long as the highly average Niemi and Kari Lehtonen are involved.
Both will have their moments, and on a good team they will collect regular-season wins. But Niemi could not hold up his end when he got spot starts in last year’s playoff run, and Lehtonen faltered badly in a 6-1 Game 7 loss to St. Louis.
So how do the Stars fix this problem after general man- ager Jim Nill failed to address it during the summer? The secret lies in Las Vegas. Every NHL team is doing two things this season. Trying to win games is first and foremost. Evaluating the roster and figuring out which seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender to protect before next summer’s expan- sion draft comes next.
There are at least a handful of teams with two good goal- ies willing to trade one for a protectable asset. The Stars will continue to believe or at least hope that Tampa Bay GM Steve Yzerman, a long- time friend of Nill’s, is the leader of that club.
Ben Bishop, who helped Tampa Bay to the Stanley Cup Finals two years ago, is going to be on the trade block at some point because the Lightning already have signed young Russian goaltender Andrei Vasilevvskiy to an extension.
The Stars’ road map to a second Stanley Cup has to include landing Bishop or a similar goalie who can change the belief around a team that has few other weaknesses.
The core of six defensemen will be a work in progress this season , but the talent is there. It’s time for this team’s young defensemen with size (Patrick Nemeth and Jamie Oleksiak) to step up. The Stars have given up on wading into battle with the undersized likes of Alex Goligoski against a team like Ken Hitchcock’s massive Blues.
The scoring will be there. Dallas led the NHL in goals last season, scoring 26 more than any other team in the West- ern Conference. They also surrendered more than any of the other 15 playoff teams.
Style of play has more than a little to do with those numbers, but no one watching the Stars’ 2014 and 2016 playoff appearances ever concluded, “The goaltending is fine.”
It isn’t, not in the long run. But Nill has both time and opportunity to fix it this season.
— The best thing young players can do for their basketball careers is not play too much basketball.
They should participate in other sports and delay special- izing in just basketball until they are at least 14 years old. They should also take at least one day off from organized competition each week and extended time off at least once a year for proper physical and mental recovery.
Those were among the guidelines announced Monday by the NBA and USA Bas- ketball to begin Jr. NBA Week. The Jr. NBA is the league’s youth basketball participation program for boys and girls ages 6-14.
The research and recommendations come from panels of medical experts, former players, and coaches and administrators throughout basketball.
They found that athletes who have the most success played multiple sports at a young age and didn’t focus on a specific one until late adolescence.
“The idea of sampling and participating in other sports does not mean you’re getting behind,” said Dr. John DiFiori, NBA director of sports medicine and UCLA team physician.
“They actually provide a strong foundation for success in your sport.”
LeBron James, perhaps the NBA’s best player, played foot- ball through his junior year of high school.
But those who focus on bas- ketball too soon face some risks that can last well beyond their teen years.
“There’s a concern that sin- gle-sport specialization may contribute to injuries and may also contribute to basically loss of interest in the sport from sort of the repetition of incessant participation in one activity,” DiFiori said, adding there are cases of young athletes developing overuse inju- ries specific to a certain sport.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has made player health one of his biggest concerns, working to create a schedule that allows more time for rest and recovery. The league went further this year by looking into the youth levels.
Working groups were created in the areas of health and wellness, playing standards, and curriculum and instruction. Their guidelines stressed the importance of time away from the court, with recom- mendations on amount of practice and game time, and even amount of sleep.
“I think sometimes parents and coaches can forget that there are only so many hours in the day and that when you have someone who’s going to high school and they’re at school from 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock, or to 3 o’clock and then they’re at practice for a couple of hours and they need time to study, they need time to eat, they need time to commute back and forth to school and practices, they need time to sleep,” DiFiori said.
“They need time to recover and it’s important that people actually look at that and realize that you can’t pack everything into one day and still necessarily have a healthy situation.”
The guidelines suggest limiting “high-density competition,” such as tournaments that feature multiple games in a short period of time.
DiFiori noted the guidelines apply only to organized competition, saying that individual practice time or pickup games are beneficial.
They have been endorsed by numerous youth organizations, athletic apparel companies and supported by the NCAA.