The Dallas Stars came into Wednesday’s Game 4 matchup with the Wild 1-for-13 on power plays in the playoffs, so it’s pretty encouraging that in the 3-2 victory, the team went 2-for-2 on the advantage.
What changed, according to Stars captain Jamie Benn, was that the Stars stopped trying to be fancy and started just putting pucks on goal again.
"We finally started shooting pucks,” Benn said, per Mike Heika of the Dallas Morning News. “We were just trying to keep it simple out there. There's a lot of power plays, it seems like, in these playoffs. You watch other teams and they're just shooting the puck, and good things happen. We figured that's what they were doing, and it turned out to be pretty good."
Stars coach Lindy Ruff echoed Benn’s sentiment when asked about the revived power play.
"I thought we shot the puck. They had been really good, they took some of our seams away, they took their goal plays away,” Ruff said. “We went back to just trying to shoot the puck, get a net-front presence, I think that's the biggest difference. We got one off a broken play. They really weren't really in a killing formation and on the second one, one of our players was right on top of the goaltender and took his eyes away. It was a real good shot by Hemsky."
And now the Stars are a win away from advancing.
