Jake Oettinger’s tall task: Being the Dallas Stars’ future in goal
JAKE OETTINGER FELT INVINCIBLE.
The Dallas Stars were in a Game 7 overtime against the Calgary Flames in the first round of last season’s playoffs. They were there because of Oettinger, the second-year goaltender who had stopped 208 of the 218 shots he had faced in the previous six games.
The finale against the Flames was the thrilling capper on a brilliant series: stopping 64 of 66 shots on goal into the first overtime to become the second goalie to make 60 or more saves in a Game 7 since 1995, when the stat was first tracked.
“You’re so immersed in what you’re doing,” Oettinger recalled. “You feel like you’re never going to get scored on.”
Johnny Gaudreau took the 67th shot that Oettinger faced, hurling the puck at the net from an odd angle to the goalie’s right. It flew over Oettinger’s shoulder and behind him at 15:09 of overtime. Horns blared. Red lights flashed. The Calgary bench emptied. The Stars had been eliminated.
Oettinger couldn’t bring himself to watch his historic effort again during the offseason, given the outcome. “I’ve seen the highlights but I haven’t watched the full thing yet,” he said. “If we would have won that game? Yeah, I would have watched it.”
Looking back at the playoffs, Dallas general manager Jim Nill still chuckles at the irony: What some considered to be the Stars’ biggest playoff liability turned into their greatest asset.
“When we started the series, probably one of the biggest question marks we had was that we had a young goalie getting his first Stanley Cup playoff action,” Nill said. “This résumé isn’t very long. How is he going to handle it? Now we look back on it, and I’ve never seen a young man enjoy the moment as much as he did. He cherished being in the net.”
Oettinger remained in the net after Gaudreau’s overtime goal. Stars captain Jamie Benn skated over to his goalie, still on one knee, to console him.
“If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t even have been close to overtime or having a chance to win,” Benn said. “He’s a phenomenal young goalie. He’s going to be great for this organization for a long time.”
The future is now for Oettinger and Dallas. With a new three-year contract in hand, the 23-year-old goalie entered the 2022-23 season at the top of the Stars’ depth chart for the first time.
“He’s our No. 1 goalie,” Nill said. “He’s grabbed that opportunity. It’s not like you come into a season and say, ‘we’re just going to give it to you.’ No, he’s earned it.”
NILL FIRST SAW Oettinger with the U.S. national development team in Detroit.
“We’ve known him since he was 16,” Nill said. “When you’re playing for the U.S. in these tournaments, you’re a pretty good player. So we got to know him and that’s why we moved a little higher to select him.”
Dallas had the third overall pick in the 2017 NHL draft, selecting Miro Heiskanen. But when Nill saw Oettinger was still on the board late in the first round — no goalies had been drafted yet — he sent the 29th overall pick (from Anaheim) and a third-rounder to Chicago for the 26th overall pick and selected Oettinger.
They respected his character. They loved his size. Oettinger is listed at 6-foot-5, and nothing about that is generous.
“It’s weird. Some guys look tall and they’re lanky. You get next to him, and he’s tall and has size,” Nill said.
After Oettinger and Ben Bishop, who is listed at 6-foot-7, do the Stars officially have a “type” when it comes to their goaltending?
Nill laughed. “We’ve been fortunate that way,” he said. “But that’s also why Bishop has been a great mentor for him.”
Oettinger joined the Stars in 2019 after three seasons with Boston University. His development track had its twists and turns.
He played 38 games with the AHL Texas Stars in 2019-20 before the COVID pandemic shuttered sports. His NHL debut was in the Western Conference “bubble” playoffs. Oettinger was the Stars’ third-string insurance goaltender. Then Bishop was injured and Oettinger found himself backing up Anton Khudobin. His NHL debut came in 17 minutes of relief against the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference finals. He also saw 19 minutes of action in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning. In total, Oettinger faced eight shots and made eight saves.
Bishop’s status for the 2020-21 season impacted Oettinger. The Stars hoped the former Vezina Trophy winner could make a comeback, but Bishop missed the entire season. Oettinger ended up playing 29 games in back of Khudobin, going 11-8-7 with a .911 save percentage. Analytically, he was superior to Khudobin, who played below replacement level. Oettinger saved 2.97 goals above average.
But at the start of the 2021-22 season, Oettinger was shocked to find himself back in the AHL, as the Stars went with free agent signing Braden Holtby and Khudobin as their netminders. (Bishop, who hadn’t seen the ice since August 2020, officially retired in December 2021.)
Nill said it was a call they made based on trying to get Oettinger more reps. “We knew we had to get him down in the minors. He wasn’t happy about it. But if he looks back, it was probably the best thing for him,” the GM said.
Oettinger returned to the NHL club on Nov. 16, 2021. He gradually took over the crease, starting 46 games, winning 30 of them and posting a .914 save percentage. He closed out the season winning five of seven starts before his masterful series against the Flames.
The Calgary series changed things for Oettinger, who could sense his stock rising considerably with peers around the NHL after that performance.
“I could feel it a little bit,” he said. “Everyone’s watching the playoffs.”
HOCKEY NICKNAMES AREN’T exactly complex, so it should come as no surprise that Oettinger’s is “Otter.” What is surprising: That the goalie has his own mascot.
“My guy does a little otter cartoon guy,” Oettinger said. “Last year I threw a little cowboy hat on him.”
Goalie mask designer David Gunnarsson created an animated otter that has adorned several of Oettinger’s masks.
“I was like, this could be like my thing,” Oettinger said.
Last season, it was a cowboy otter. This season, it’s a golfing otter, complete with gloves and a club.
The otter meme goes beyond the mask for Oettinger. Cartoon otters have appeared on T-shirts. Otters have become a way for fans to celebrate him on social media. “When I have a good game, people tweet out a GIF with otters,” he said.
I did a thing ? #TexasHockey #jakeoettinger #otter @DallasStars pic.twitter.com/oUDb67Ozm4
— Is it opening night yet? (@StarsCountdown) May 20, 2022
How many otters Oettinger receives this season will depend on how he handles being the No. 1 guy. Stopping 60-plus pucks in a single game takes a different mental fortitude than backstopping a team to the postseason in 60-plus games. One made him feel invincible. The other makes him feel indispensable.
“I think for me, it’s going to be a lot of the mental side this season,” he said. “I’ve never come in as a No. 1. I’m just going to have to deal with … not ‘pressure,’ but more responsibility, obviously.”
The Stars are a team with a veteran core — Benn, Tyler Seguin, Joe Pavelski — augmented by a collection of young stars under 24, like Heiskanen, Jason Robertson and Oettinger. The goalie believes it’s on him to create the foundation for that roster to thrive.
“It’s going to be up to me to get this team back into the playoffs,” he said. “It’s a lot of responsibility. But it’s what I signed up for.”
Oettinger signed something else during the offseason: a three-year contract worth $4 million against the salary cap annually.
Nill said the Calgary series didn’t necessarily complicate those negotiations. For all the confidence he has in Oettinger, this was still a 23-year-old goalie with two seasons and 77 games to his credit.
“He did a good job for us during the year, but the body of work was a short time frame,” Nill said.
Their contract talks stretched through the late summer. Could Dallas go higher than the $3.979 million AAV that the Flyers gave Carter Hart in August 2021 after 101 NHL games?
On Sept. 1, the Stars landed on the $4 million AAV deal with Oettinger, who is a restricted free agent when it expires in 2025.
“We got something done. Maybe a lot for a player that played that number of games. But he deserved it,” Nill said. “He’s already earned it based on who he is and knowing how his teammates want to play for him — that tells you something.
“He’s a player with high-end character. And he’s our future, going forward.”
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
The committee has released its second crack at the top 25, and it’s (almost) all Big Ten at the top.
That might seem a bit strange to the conference that boasts the most playoff-caliber teams and the most nonconference wins against other Power 4 leagues, and also has Paul Finebaum there to remind everyone just how angry they should be at this affront to good judgment.
With that, we’ll handle much of Finebaum’s homework for him. Here’s this week’s Anger Index.
1. The SEC
Eleven weeks into the 2024 season, and one thing seems abundantly clear: The SEC is the best conference in college football. Take a look at Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, for example, where nine of the top 17 teams are from the SEC. Or use ESPN’s FPI metric, where the SEC has spots 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9. Consider that the team currently ninth in the SEC standings, South Carolina, has three wins over SP+ top-40 teams and losses to the committee’s No. 10 and 22 teams by a combined total of five points.
Yes, the SEC’s dominance and depth seem obvious.
So, of course, four of the top five teams in the committee’s rankings this week are from the SEC.
Wait, no, sorry about that. We’re getting late word here that, in fact, it’s the Big Ten with teams No. 1, 2, 4 and 5 in this week’s rankings.
It’s not that those four Big Ten teams aren’t any good. Oregon (No. 1) has chewed up and spit out nearly all comers this season. Ohio State (No. 2) is the best squad the gross domestic product of Estonia can buy. Penn State (No. 4), well, the Nittany Lions still haven’t beaten Ohio State, but we assume the rest of the résumé is OK. Indiana (No. 5) is blowing the doors off people.
But that’s it. The rest of the Big Ten is a mess. You need a magnifying glass to find Michigan‘s QB production. Iowa finally learned how to score and somehow has gotten worse. Minnesota looked like the next-best team in the conference, and the Gophers have losses to North Carolina and Rutgers.
A lack of depth does not inherently mean the teams at the top are not elite. Indeed, the other teams in any conference remain independent variables when addressing the ceiling for any one team. If the Kansas City Chiefs joined the Sun Belt, Patrick Mahomes would still be a magician and Andy Reid would still be saying “Bundle-a-rooskie-doo” in your nightmares.
But the cold, hard facts are these: Indiana’s best win came last week against Michigan (No. 40 in SP+) by 3. Penn State’s best win (by SP+) came by 3 against a below-.500 USC team that just benched its QB. Ohio State is absolutely elite on paper, but on the field, the Buckeyes’ success is entirely buoyed by a 20-13 win at Penn State, a team we also know very little about.
The SEC gets flack for boasting of its greatness routinely, and to be sure, that narrative has often bolstered less-than-elite teams. But this year, every reasonable metric suggests the SEC’s production actually matches its ego, and when Ole Miss (No. 11), Georgia (No. 12), Alabama (No. 10) and Texas A&M (No. 15) — all with two losses — are dogged as a result of playing in a league where every other team warrants a spot in the top 25, it undermines the entire point of having a committee that can use its judgment rather than simply look at the standings.
Let’s compare two teams with blind résumés.
Team A: 8-1 record, No. 14 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 20, loss came to a top-10 team by 3. Has four wins vs. Power 4 teams with a winning record, by an average of 14 points.
Team B: 8-1 record, No. 11 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 28, loss came to a top-15 team by 15. Has one win vs. a Power 4 team with a winning record, by 3.
So, which team has the better résumé?
This shouldn’t take too long to figure out. Team A looks better by almost every metric, right?
Well, Team A is SMU, who checks in at No. 14 in this week’s ranking.
Team B, though? That’d be the Mustangs’ old friends from the Southwest Conference, the Texas Longhorns. Texas checks in at No. 3.
Perhaps you’ve watched enough of both Texas and SMU to think the eye test favors the Longhorns. That’s fair. But should the eye test account for 11 spots in the rankings? At some point, the results have to matter more.
Or, perhaps it’s the brand that matters to the committee. If that same résumé belonged to a school that hadn’t just bought its way into the Power 4 this year, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be in the top 10 with ease.
Let’s dig into three different teams still hoping for a playoff bid, even if the odds are against them at this point.
Team A: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 28 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 18 points.
Team B: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 25 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 13 points.
Team C: 7-2, no wins over SP+ top 40. No. 24 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 21 points.
You could split hairs here, but the bottom line is none has a particularly compelling résumé, and they’re all pretty similar.
So, who are they?
Team B is Iowa State, which plummeted from the rankings after losing two straight. But the committee isn’t supposed to care when you lost your games. Losing in September is not better than losing in November. At least that’s what they say.
Team A is Arizona State. Its 10-point loss to Cincinnati came without starting QB Sam Leavitt and was due, at least in part, to a kicking game so traumatic head coach Kenny Dillingham held an open tryout afterward. The Sun Devils and Cyclones are two of three two-loss Power 4 teams unranked this week (alongside Pitt), but unlike Iowa State and Pitt, Arizona State isn’t coming off back-to-back losses. The Sun Devils’ absence seems entirely correlated to the fact that no one believed this team would be any good entering the season, and so few people have looked closely enough to change their minds that the committee feels comfortable ignoring them.
The team the committee can’t ignore, however, is Team C. That would be Colorado. Coach Prime has convinced the world the Buffaloes are for real, even if nothing on their résumé — a No. 77 strength of schedule, worse than 7-2 Western Kentucky‘s — suggests that’s anything close to a certainty.
The Big 12 remains wide open, but it’s to the committee’s detriment that it has so eagerly dismissed two of the better teams just because they’re not as fun to talk about.
Has Missouri played with fire this year? You betcha. Just last week, the Tigers were on the verge of falling to Oklahoma before the Sooners’ woeful QB situation reared its ugly head again and the game ended in a 30-23 Tigers win.
But here’s the thing about playing with fire: So long as you don’t turn your living room into an inferno, it’s actually pretty impressive.
Missouri is 7-2 with wins against SP+ Nos. 26 and 28, and its only losses are to the committee’s No. 10 and No. 15 teams. SP+ has Missouri at No. 17, though we can chalk that up to Connelly’s hometown bias. But No. 23? After a top-10 season in 2023, don’t the Tigers deserve a little benefit of the doubt? They currently trail three three-loss teams (Louisville, South Carolina and LSU) and are behind Boise State, Colorado, Washington State and Clemson, who, combined, have exactly one win over SP+ top-40 teams.
There’s a good chance that, should Brady Cook not return to the lineup, Missouri will get waxed at South Carolina on Saturday, and then the argument is moot. But the committee isn’t supposed to look ahead and take guesses at what it believes might happen (Florida State’s snub last year notwithstanding). It’s supposed to judge based on what’s on the books so far, and putting Missouri this far down the rankings seems more than a tad harsh.
The committee threw a nice bone to the non-Power 4 schools this week, with four teams ranked, including No. 25 Tulane Green Wave. That seems deserved, given Tulane’s recent run. But what is it, exactly, that puts the Green Wave ahead of UNLV?
UNLV has the No. 31 strength of record. Tulane is No. 32.
UNLV has the No. 98 strength of schedule played. Tulane is No. 96.
Tulane has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team. UNLV has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team.
The key difference between the two is UNLV has wins against two Power 4 opponents — Houston and Kansas. Houston, by the way, just knocked off Kansas State, a team that beat Tulane.
So perhaps the committee should spread a bit more love outside the Power 4.
Also Angry: Pittsburgh Panthers (7-2, unranked), Duke Blue Devils (7-3, unranked), Georgia Bulldogs (7-2, No. 12), Utah Utes AD Mark Harlan (the Utes would be ranked if Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark hadn’t rigged the system!) and UConn Huskies (7-3, unranked and thus prohibiting us from Jim Mora Jr. giving a “You wanna talk about playoffs?!?” rant).
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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
Oregon remained No. 1 in the second rankings released by the College Football Playoff selection committee on Tuesday night.
The Ducks, who cruised past Maryland 39-18 last week to improve to 10-0, were followed by No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Texas, No. 4 Penn State and No. 5 Indiana.
BYU, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Miami, Alabama, Ole Miss and Georgia round out the committee’s top 12.
Miami’s first loss of the season, 28-23 at Georgia Tech, and Georgia’s second defeat, 28-10 at Ole Miss, shook up the committee’s rankings. The Hurricanes fell five spots to No. 9, while the Bulldogs dropped nine spots to No. 12.
Using the current rankings, Oregon (Big Ten), Texas (SEC), BYU (Big 12) and Miami (ACC) would be the four highest-rated conference champions and would receive first-round byes in the 12-team playoff.
Boise State is No. 13 in the committee’s rankings, but the Broncos would be included in the 12-team playoff as the fifth-highest-rated conference champion from the Mountain West.
The first-round matchups would look like this: No. 12 Boise State at No. 5 Ohio State; No. 11 Ole Miss at No. 6 Penn State, No. 10 Alabama at No. 7 Indiana; and No. 9 Notre Dame at No. 8 Tennessee.
Although Georgia, which captured two of the past three CFP national championships, is ranked No. 12 in the committee’s rankings, the Bulldogs would be the first team left out of the 12-team playoff.
SMU is No. 14, followed by Texas A&M, Kansas State, Colorado, Washington State, Louisville and Clemson.
South Carolina, LSU, Missouri, Army and Tulane close out the top 25.
The updated College Football Playoff Top 25 rankings 🏆 pic.twitter.com/ymA9wlI1dB
— ESPN (@espn) November 13, 2024
The Gamecocks and Green Wave made their CFP rankings debuts this season, replacing Iowa State and Pittsburgh, who were Nos. 17 and 18 last week, respectively.
There were nine SEC teams included in the committee’s rankings, four each from the ACC and Big Ten and three from the Big 12.
Georgia, which also fell 41-34 at Alabama on Sept. 28, plays what might be a CFP elimination game against Tennessee at Sanford Stadium on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET/ABC, ESPN+). Georgia is 14-3 after a loss under coach Kirby Smart, bouncing back after each of its previous eight defeats. The Bulldogs haven’t lost back-to-back games in the regular season since 2016, Smart’s first season coaching his alma mater.
Georgia has defeated Tennessee in seven of its past eight contests, including a 38-10 win on the road last season.
Asked about the CFP implications of the game on Monday, Smart said his team had to solely focus on beating the Volunteers.
“I don’t ever take those approaches,” Smart said. “I don’t think they’re the right way to go about things. I think you’re trying to win your conference all the time, and to do that you’ve got to win your games at home. You’ve got to play well on the road, which we have and haven’t. We’ve done both, but I like making it about who we play and how we play, and less about just outcomes.”
BYU survived a 22-21 scare at Utah last week. With Miami’s loss, the Cougars jumped the Hurricane as the third-highest-rated conference champion. BYU hosts Kansas on Saturday, followed by a road game at Arizona State on Nov. 23 and home game against Houston the next week. According to ESPN Analytics, BYU is the heavy favorite (92%) to earn a spot in the Big 12 title game and also win it (40%).
Army would be the next-highest-rated conference champion behind Boise State, one spot ahead of fellow AAC program Tulane. The Black Knights improved to 9-0 with last week’s 14-3 victory at North Texas. They’ll have their best chance to make a statement to the selection committee in their next game, against Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium in New York on Nov. 23.
The four first-round games will be played at the home campus of the higher-seeded teams on Dec. 20 and 21. The four quarterfinal games will be staged at the VRBO Fiesta Bowl, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl presented by Prudential and Allstate Sugar Bowl on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
The two semifinal games will take place at the Capital One Orange Bowl and Goodyear Cotton Bowl on Jan. 9 and 10.
The CFP National Championship presented by AT&T is scheduled for Jan. 20 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
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