Mikko Rantanen<\/a> with 22 points (nine goals, 13 assists), provided more offense for Dallas in the playoffs.<\/p>\n\u201cThomas is mature beyond his years, which I think makes him unique,\u201d Nill said. \u201cThat situation with 4 Nations, that was a tough situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe threw him into that (Canada-United States) game and never looked back, but that\u2019s Thomas. He handles those situations. He\u2019s mature beyond his years. He doesn\u2019t get too high, doesn\u2019t get too low and to be able to do that, it\u2019s not easy to do on that stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coming back to the NHL after the tournament, Harley felt like a different player. He looked like a different player, too, taking on a bigger role with Dallas, which has carried into this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really didn\u2019t change that much of how I thought about myself, but it did give me a big confidence boost,\u201d Harley said. \u201cJust the speed of it, it was the fastest hockey I\u2019ve ever seen played, and on the ice, it seemed faster.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo to go from that back to the NHL, it felt slow, it was easy. I know that\u2019s kind of laughable to say, but I remembered we played New Jersey in the first game after the break and I had (Nico) Hischier and (Jesper) Bratt coming down on 1-on-1s, and I go take puck away and skate back down the ice, wondering why it can\u2019t always feel like this? It did speed up after a period and got back to normal, but it was a big confidence boost.\u201d<\/p>\n
That confidence can only be a good thing for Dallas and Harley\u2019s Olympic chances.<\/p>\n
NHL.com staff writer Tracey Myers contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harley finished the season as the Stars\u2019 top-scoring defenseman with 50 points (16 goals, 34 assists) in 78…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-211808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}