While the NHL playoffs are almost three months away, there’s no time like the present to dial in on a first-round opponent and the Stars’ brand new rivalry.
The folks in Minnesota have hated the Dallas Stars from the first drop of the puck in the fall of 1993. Stars’ fans have been about as indifferent to the Minnesota Wild as one can be. It’s a team that has rarely been on the radar, facing the Stars just twice in the playoffs. Both were fairly routine six-game wins for Dallas.
When it comes to enemies, Edmonton is the most frequent playoff opponent (Dallas is 5-3 against the Oilers), and having vanquished the Stars in the last two Western Conference finals, it’s a team that’s always on Dallas fans’ radar. Colorado is the division rival, past, present and future. The Avalanche refuse to lose at home this year, establishing themselves as the best regular season team by quite a bit.
That brings us back to the Wild. If you have checked the standings for the last two months, it has been Dallas No. 2 and Minnesota No. 3 in the Central Division. This has remained true even during a rather frightening slump in which, even with Tuesday’s 6-2 victory over Boston, the Stars are just 3-6-4 for the last month. The Stars and the Wild both have 65 points but Minnesota has played 51 games to Dallas’ 50.
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Those are the fourth and fifth best records in a 32-team league, but that won’t keep them from facing each other in mid-April. And, finally, there is reason for Stars fans to hate the Wild almost as much as its fans can’t stand the carpet-bagging Stars. (We’re talking “sports hate” here, naturally, nothing beyond a little passion from a fan base that is tired of losing Western Conference finals).
Beyond the fact that the Wild is in Dallas’ way, with the winner facing Colorado in the second round, Minnesota’s GM happens to be former Star Bill Guerin. If he was still a fan favorite for any of the locals, that went out the window when, as Team USA’s GM, Guerin, left Jason Robertson off the team that heads for Milan and the 2026 Olympics in two weeks. At the time of the selections, Robertson led all USA scorers with 48 points in 41 games. He wasn’t alone among top-10 USA scorers left off, he just happened to be at the top of the list, as Guerin prioritized toughness and grit in building his roster.
Now you could make a solid case for Wyatt Johnston deserving a spot on the Canadian team, too, but when the leading scorer gets short-changed, it’s something else entirely. For his part, Robertson has just kept doing his job, raising his team-leading goals total to 29 with a pair Tuesday against the Bruins.
Afterward, he talked more about trying to ignite a winning streak than anything else as the team heads to Columbus on Thursday. “Although we can duplicate this, I know it’s even harder going on the road. We’ve got to just stay disciplined throughout the game structure, just survive and advance,’’ he said.
That sounds more like a playoff recipe, and the Wild (assuming the Utah Mammoth don’t overtake either Minnesota or Dallas) will provide more of a test than has been seen in the past. Before Guerin became a public enemy in Dallas, he lost a few more friends around the league when he signed the Wild’s top player, forward Kirill Kaprizov, to an eight-year, $136 million deal in September. The contract starts next season, but Kaprizov’s $17 million average annual value beats the current leader, Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl, by $3 million. It beats Mikko Rantanen’s contract by $5 million per season. Kaprizov is good, but he’s not that good. You might call it a Dak-ian leap of faith, if you were prone to making up words and connecting everything to the Cowboys.
On top of that, Guerin jumped ahead of the curve on the trade deadline when he secured top defenseman Quinn Hughes from Vancouver for three players and a first-round pick. Hughes made the Wild a more formidable playoff opponent overnight, the rough equivalent of a team adding Miro Heiskanen for future considerations.
I realize there are 32 games left in the season, but there’s really about zero likelihood of the Stars (or Wild) catching Colorado. There might be a 10 percent-15 percent chance of Utah catching one or the other, but 11 points back, it still feels unlikely.
You don’t have to spend more than five minutes on any social media site where Stars fans might congregate to feel the animosity toward Guerin. It will only get worse in the Olympics if Team USA fails to win gold and goal-scoring feels like a missing ingredient.
It will only get magnified when Robertson scores his 30th goal, then his 40th and then his 50th (he’s on pace for 47.6 right now).
There aren’t a lot of other playoff possibilities to consider as the NFL wraps up and the NBA heads down the stretch with the Mavs mostly competing for a lottery spot.
So Stars-Wild is coming. Expect the fans’ intensity in Dallas to be rightfully turned up a notch.
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