Casey DeSmith and Arttu Hyry handled entirely different problems Wednesday night, and Dallas needed both solutions. DeSmith stopped 25 of 27 shots, Hyry scored shorthanded, and the Stars beat the Colorado Avalanche 3-2 in a shootout at Ball Arena.
The night also carried a personnel complication. Oskar Bäck departed after an upper-body issue in the first period and did not return, according to The Associated Press. Dallas had to distribute responsibility while losing a forward before the game settled, which makes the contributions from Heiskanen, Hyry and Hintz more consequential without turning one result into a sweeping roster verdict.
The Stars collected two points with a contribution from each of several jobs: a starting goaltender, a defenseman, a penalty killer and two successful shootout attempts. Dallas took 22 shots to Colorado’s 27 and scored on neither of its two power plays. It needed that range of useful work.
DeSmith provided the first one. Colorado put five more shots on goal than Dallas and gave DeSmith repeated work with the score close. DeSmith stopped 25 of the 27 attempts he faced, then denied three of Colorado’s four shootout tries. Those saves did not erase the shot imbalance, but they preserved the margin Dallas’s skaters managed to create.
That margin first appeared through Miro Heiskanen. Gabriel Landeskog put Colorado ahead at 4:55 of the second period, but Heiskanen tied the game at 15:03 with a wrist shot assisted by Mikko Rantanen and Thomas Harley. Dallas had not generated a flood of offense, so the defenseman’s finish mattered beyond its place in the scoring summary.
Heiskanen’s attacking contribution prevented the Avalanche from carrying a lead into the second intermission and kept Dallas level before the second intermission.
Hyry then supplied the strangest goal of the night and perhaps the most useful one. Dallas was called for tripping 21 seconds into the third period. At 1:20, while the Stars were killing that penalty, Hyry scored an unassisted backhand after taking the puck from Cale Makar. The sequence turned a defensive obligation into a 2-1 lead.
It was Hyry’s first goal of the season, but the larger point is about function. Dallas did not need him to imitate a top-line scorer. It needed one penalty-kill shift to produce something unexpected, and he did exactly that.
Colorado’s power play finished 0-for-4, while Dallas’s man advantage also went quiet. In a game without a conventional power-play goal, the shorthanded finish became the special-teams separator.
Colorado made the lead precarious before it erased it. Gavin Brindley hit the left post at 2:47 of the third, and Nazem Kadri struck the same post at 3:58. Either puck going in would have tied the score.
