The Dallas Stars are headed back to the postseason.
After a 5-1 win over the Seattle Kraken on Saturday night and the Calgary Flames losing 3-2 in overtime at Edmonton, the organization punched its ticket to make another run at the Stanley Cup.
“It’s nice,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said. “I never take making the playoffs for granted. It’s a really hard league just to get one of those 16 spots. You always enjoy that, and you never take it for granted, because there’s a lot of work that goes into that.”
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Dallas has reached Game 6 of the Western Conference finals the past two seasons, but has been unable to return to the Stanley Cup Final since the COVID-19 bubble postseason.
The race for points in the regular season remains heated with the Winnipeg Jets still in striking distance atop the Central Division. Where the Stars and Jets finish will have a major impact on who they will face in the playoffs.
Eight teams qualify for the postseason in each conference, with the top three teams from each division (Central and Pacific in the West; Atlantic and Metropolitan in the East) making up the first six teams on either side of the bracket. The final two spots in each conference go to two wild-card teams who accumulated the most points in the regular season, regardless of division.
In the first round of the playoffs, the division winner with the best record in each conference will be matched against the wild-card team with the lesser record. The wild-card team with the better record will play the other division winner.
The teams finishing second and third in each division meet within the playoff bracket headed by their respective division winners.
So using the Stars and Jets as an example, finishing first would mean a first-round matchup against a wild-card opponent, while finishing second would possibly mean a divisional pairing against a dangerous Colorado Avalanche squad.
Find more Stars coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.