When it rains, it pours, for the Dallas Stars.
The team was plodding along the home stretch of the season last week, still not statistically eliminated from playoff contention, but looking like a team who was, months ago.
The most optimistic of us probably still harbored hope, in the recesses of our minds, that Dallas would turn it around and put it all together just in the nick of time; maybe get into that eight spot, and maybe shock a top-seeded team in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Not likely, but possible.
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But the Stars kept losing, Marty Turco looked increasingly, and understandably exhausted, and, somehow, the team suffered even more crucial injuries.
Between last Thursday and Monday, Dallas lost Trevor Daly, Stephane Robidas and Mark Fistric, all of whom are expected to miss the team’s two-game road trip that begins on Monday night in Phoenix.
This for a team who has lost a league high 322-player games to injury, a team whose goalie, despite flashes of brilliance this season, looks to be feeling the effects of a league high 4,143 minutes played.
If the universe hadn’t made this painfully clear before this weekend, its message is certainly audible, now: 2009 is not the Stars’ season.
The weekend injuries led to the Stars’ recalling defensemen Dan Jancevski from Hamilton and Garrett Stafford from Grand Rapids, of the AHL.
Dallas head coach Dave Tippett said, "We have a bit of a patchwork team right now, but we're going to forge ahead and put in the players who give us the best chance to win."
Dallas is still 12th in the Western Conference standings, and eight points behind eighth-place St. Louis. However, the Stars are currently on a 0-5-1 stretch, an ugly harbinger for a team with playoff aspirations and only seven games remaining.
Fortune has seemingly worked against Dallas all season, and at this point, time becomes a dangerous and perhaps insurmountable foe, as well.
2009 has been an exhibition in “whatever could go wrong, did,” for a team who made it all the way to the Western Conference Finals last season, before being outclassed by the eventual Stanley Cup champion Red Wings.
With less than two weeks left in the regular season, it looks as though the team will get an early start on nursing their numerous, and pervasive wounds in preparation for a new and, hopefully, brighter year.
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