Stars Are All Talk, Little Action

Dave Tippett could have chosen anywhere in the Arrowhead Pond to hold his post-practice news conference Sunday, but the Dallas Star coach stood outside the visitors’ locker room, his back against the wall.

He chose that spot for comfort, he said, not to symbolize the predicament his team faces tonight in trying to overcome the Mighty Ducks’ 2-0 lead in their second-round playoff series.

“It’s not a bad place to be,” Tippett said of having his back to cement. “It means you can only go forward.”

And forward they will go, refusing to look back at having scored merely twice against Duck goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere in the last 145 minutes 19 seconds, since Brenden Morrow scored with 2:47 left in the third period of the Ducks’ quintuple-overtime victory in the series opener.

Nor did they rehash Mike Modano’s accusation the officials favored the Ducks in Game 2, when the Stars had two power plays and three minutes one second of power-play time, compared to the Ducks’ six power plays and 11 minutes 28 seconds’ power-play time.

It’s over. Done. Frozen water under the bridge.

“We’ve got to move on and start playing more desperate,” forward Jason Arnott said. “We don’t want them to go up 3-0.

“You can’t go out and play overly anxious. We’ve got to play the way we normally play. It’s not over by a long shot.”

Nor is the barrage of cliches. Tippett said the Stars must “find cracks and see if we can burst the balloon.” Forward Bill Guerin, expected to play tonight after sitting out two months because of a thigh injury, said the first two games “could have gone either way. But by no means do I feel we’re out of it or we played poorly.”

Fine. They’ve proven they’re well-schooled verbally as the Ducks, who fall all over themselves after each victory to see who can be first to say they’ve put that triumph behind them and have switched their focus to the next game because that’s their most important game of the season.

But until the Stars rattle Giguere and score three or four goals, beat Duck defensemen one-on-one or pressure the forwards into turnovers, it’s all just talk. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. They haven’t done it yet. And until they do, it will undoubtedly prey on their minds and make them wonder if they’ll ever do it.

“We’ve scored on him. It’s not that we haven’t scored on him,” defenseman Derian Hatcher said of Giguere.

But they haven’t scored enough to win. That puts them at a crucial juncture of a season that until now was a rising story arc of a comeback from missing the playoffs a year ago to collecting a Western Conference-leading 111 points this season.

Do they continue to play as they did in the first two games at Dallas, banging bodies and risking penalties without intimidating the Ducks? Or do they try to rely on finesse -- a path that didn’t take the Detroit Red Wings anywhere but to a four-game loss in the first round?

“We’re at a point where we have to be ready to win games 1-0 and 2-1,” Hatcher said. “That’s our mind-set, that we’re only going to get one goal, two goals. If we’re lucky, three goals. That’s the way it is right now.”

Said Morrow: “I think we’ve gotten a little frustrated. Right now all we have is the next game.... All we have to do is go out and win the next three or four and we feel we have the team that can do it.”

Tippett, a former King assistant coach who coached the Houston Aeros to the 1999 International Hockey League championship, has been in situations before when the opposing goalie seemed as big as a house and the puck as small as a pea. There is no standard solution for it, he said, but to keep doing what the team does best.

“We’re pushing hard to find ways to win,” he said. “If we keep pushing the envelope a little, we’ll find it and our team will go on that kind of roll. They’ve played solid games but there have also been some fortunate calls....

“We’ve all along said we want to score hard goals and pretty goals. Hard goals are bounces, screens. We had some opportunities to score what you’d call nice goals, two-on-ones, breakaways. We’ve been a team all year that’s been able to capitalize on both.”

The Stars’ skill is undeniable, their size imposing and their work ethic strong. Yet, the Ducks, much maligned for their contrived name and their past failures, are matching the Stars’ stars stride for stride -- and trumping them in goal, the most important position in postseason play.

“I really believe that 99% of the time, the team that’s supposed to win, wins,” Duck Coach Mike Babcock said.

No matter what its name. “If you look at the playoffs, Colorado, Detroit and [the Stars] have done all the winning in the last 10 years. Is that not true?” Babcock said. “So they’ve earned the right to get the respect. We’re comfortable with that.”

Proving a 2-0 cushion is softer than having your back against the wall. Figuratively or literally.