Dallas Stars goaltender Casey DeSmith (1) hugs starting goalie Dallas Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger (29) following their Game 6 loss to the Minnesota Wild in a first-round NHL hockey playoff series in St. Paul, Minnesota, April 30, 2026. The Stars lost the game. 5-2, and the series.
Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News
Stars general manager Jim Nill boiled down what went wrong in Dallas’ first-round series with the Minnesota Wild to a simple statement.
“Minnesota had to win,” Nill said last week. “We wanted to win.”
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The Stars, after making three consecutive runs to the Western Conference finals, fell in six games to the Wild — their earliest exit since 2022.
The Wild desperately needed to win a playoff series. Minnesota had spent big on Quinn Hughes without a guaranteed extension to help the team get over the first-round hump. Minnesota hadn’t won a playoff series since 2015 and had lost its last eight first-round series.
Meanwhile, the Stars felt the fatigue of three long playoff runs and a demanding season where seven of their players hadn’t had a break since the summer because of the Olympics — and the condensed schedule led to 18 players suffering injuries throughout the season, many of which were serious.
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Nill said while he was disappointed with the result in the playoffs, he wasn’t surprised based on how the last few weeks of the regular season went.
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“I got worried when we played Minnesota two weeks before the playoffs started,” he said. “They came in here, and I thought they sent a statement. They were showing that they could work. We didn’t really play that way. We won the game, so I think the guys said, ‘That’s OK. We got them.’
“I noticed three weeks [left in] the season. Is this a fatigue thing? We’re in the playoffs. We know who we’re playing. Are we just kind of going through it? We just never got it going again.”
The Stars were able to go through the motions and still secure home-ice advantage in the playoffs, but their play cost them that advantage quickly. They suffered a blowout loss in Game 1, a blown lead in Game 4 that could’ve put the Stars up 3-1 in the series and a lackluster performance at home in a critical Game 5.
“I think we came in very excited. I think you have to come in with hunger and conviction,” Stars coach Glen Gulutzan said. “It just seemed like we were excited, but we weren’t ready. We didn’t have that hunger and conviction right off the bat.”
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The Stars can hypothesize that injuries, the NHL’s playoff format and fatigue played a role in their lack of hunger in the playoffs, but it’s still concerning.
A team that has proven its ability to play into June didn’t even make it to May. Now, the Stars aren’t even guaranteed to have all of the pieces back next season, including their leading goal-scorer Jason Robertson, a restricted free agent this offseason.
If the Stars didn’t need to win this season, that need certainly builds for next season.
Nill said he believes this early exit will be “a one-off.” But the Stars are already drawing comparisons to the San Jose Sharks, who between 2009-16 made the conference finals three times without winning the Stanley Cup, or the Dallas Cowboys, known for collapsing once the playoffs begin.
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The Stars have reached the conference finals or farther four times since 2020 — even more appearances in a shorter time frame without a Cup than the Sharks.
The Stars will have plenty of time in a long offseason to recover and think about what went wrong. But the message within the team is clear: This season’s outcome can’t happen next spring.
“I used to sit next to [Joe Pavelski] on the plane,” Stars goalie Jake Oettinger said of his former teammate, who was on all of those Sharks teams and ended his 18-year career without winning the Stanley Cup. “He was like, ‘Dude, you only have a real chance to win the Cup so many times.’ We’ve got to realize that. The sense of urgency needs to be elevated.”