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adminSeeing is believing? — What I learned from the Apple Stores 30-minute Vision Pro demo Despite some awe-inspiring moments, the $3,500 headset is a big lift for retail.
Kyle Orland – Feb 7, 2024 9:46 pm UTC Enlarge / These mounted displays near the entrance let visitors touch, but not use, a Vision Pro.Kyle Orland reader comments 310
For decades now, potential Apple customers have been able to wander in to any Apple Store and get some instant eyes-on and hands-on experience with most of the company’s products. The Apple Vision Pro is an exception to this simple process; the “mixed-reality curious” need to book aheadfor a guided, half-hour Vision Pro experience led by an Apple Store employee.
Further ReadingVirtual realitys time to shine: Hands-on with the Oculus RiftAs a long-time veteran of both trade show and retail virtual-reality demos, I was interested to see how Apple would sell the concept of “spatial computing” to members of the public, many of whom have minimal experience with existing VR systems. And as someone who’s been following news and hands-on reports of the Vision Pro’s unique features for months now, I was eager to get a brief glimpse into what all the fuss was about without plunking down at least $3,499 for a unit of my own.
After going through the guided Vision Pro demo at a nearby Apple Store this week, I came away with mixed feelings about how Apple is positioning its new computer interface to the public. While the short demo contained some definite “oh, wow” moments, the device didn’t come with a cohesive story pitching it as Apple’s next big general-use computing platform.
Editor’s Note: This article precedes a series of of in-depth looks at the Apple Vision Pro. We started with the Apple Store experience because that’s where most people will experience it first. Over the coming days, Samuel Axon will be covering long term usage and experience with the device, as he has spent more than a week living and working in the Vision Pro. Stay tuned. Setup snafus
After arriving a few minutes early for my morning appointment in a sparsely attended Apple Store, I was told to wait by a display of Vision Pro units set on a table near the front. These headsets were secured tightly to their stands, meaning I couldn’t try a unit on or even hold it in my hands while I waited. But I could fondle the Vision Pro’s various buttons and straps while getting a closer look at the hardware (and at a few promotional videos running on nearby iPads). Two Vision Pro headsets let you see it from multiple angles at once. Kyle Orland Nearby iPads let you scroll through videos and information about the Vision Pro. Kyle Orland The outward-facing display is very subtle in person. Kyle Orland Without an appointment you can feel the headstrap with your hands but not with your skull. Kyle Orland To Apple’s credit, it did not even try to hide the external battery in these store displays. Kyle Orland
After a few minutes, an Apple Store employee, who we’ll call Craig, walked over and said with genuine enthusiasm that he was “super excited” to show off the Vision Pro. He guided me to another table, where I sat in a low-backed swivel chair across from another customer who looked a little zoned out as he ran through his own Vision Pro demo. Advertisement
Craig told me that the Vision Pro was the first time Apple Store employees like him had gotten early hands-on access to a new Apple device well before the public, in order to facilitate the training needed to guide these in-store demos. He said that interest had been steady for the first few days of demos and that, after some initial problems, the store now mostly managed to stay on schedule.
Unfortunately, some of those demo kinks were still present. First, Craig had trouble tracking down the dedicated iPhone used to scan my face and determine the precise Vision Pro light seal fit for my head. After consulting with a fellow employee, they decided to have me download the Apple Store app and use a QR code to reach the face-scanning tool on my own iPhone. (I was a bit surprised this fit scanning hadn’t been offered as part of the process when I signed up for my appointment days earlier.)
It took three full attempts, scanning my face from four angles, before the app managed to spit out the code that Craig needed to send my fit information to the back room. Craig told me that the store had 38 different light seals and 900 corrective lens options sitting back there, ready to be swapped in to ensure maximum comfort for each specific demo. Sorry, I think I ordered the edamame… Kyle Orland Shhh… the Vision Pro is napping.
After a short wait, another employee brought my demo unit out on a round wooden platter that made me feel like I was at a Japanese restaurant. The platter was artistically arranged, from the Solo Knit Band and fuzzy front cover to the gently coiled cord leading to the battery pack sitting in the center. (I never even touched or really noticed the battery pack for the rest of the demo.)
At this point, Craig told me that he would be able to see everything I saw in the Vision Pro, which would stream directly to his iPad. Unfortunately, getting that wireless connection to work took a good five minutes of tapping and tinkering, including removing the Vision Pro’s external battery cord several times.
Once everything was set, Craig gave me a brief primer on the glances and thumb/forefinger taps I would use to select, move, and zoom in on things in the VisionOS interface. “You’re gonna pretend like you’re pulling on a piece of string and then releasing,” he said by way of analogy. “The faster you go, the faster it will scroll, so be mindfl of that. Nice and gentle, nice and easy, and things will go smoothly for you.” Advertisement
Fifteen minutes after my appointed start time, I was finally ready to don the Vision Pro. A scripted experience
After putting the headset on, my first impression was how heavy and pinchy the Vision Pro was on the bridge of my nose. Thankfully, Craig quickly explained how to tighten the fit with a dial behind my right ear, which helped immediately and immensely. After that, it only took a minute or two to run through some quick calibration of the impressively snappy eye and hand tracking. (“Keep your head nice and still as you do this,” Craig warned me during the process.) Enlarge / Imagine this but with an Apple Store in the background.Kyle Orland
As we dove into the demo proper, it quickly became clear that Craig was reading from a prepared script on his iPhone. This was a bit disappointing, as the genuine enthusiasm he had shown in our earlier, informal chat gave way to a dry monotone when delivering obvious marketing lines. “With Apple Vision Pro, you can experience your entire photo library in a brand new way,” he droned. “Right here, we have some beautiful shots, right from iPhone.”
Craig soldiered through the script as I glanced at a few prepared photos and panoramas. “Here we have a beautiful panorama, but we’re going to experience it in a whole new way… as if you were in the exact spot in which it was taken,” Craig said. Then we switched to some spatial photos and videos of a happy family celebrating a birthday and blowing bubbles in the backyard. The actors in the video felt a little stilted, but the sense of three-dimensional “presence” in the high-fidelity video was impressive.
After that, Craig informed me that “with spatial computing, your apps can exist anywhere in your space.” He asked me to turn the digital crown to replace my view of the store around me with a virtual environment of mountains bathed in cool blue twilight. Craig’s script seemed tuned for newcomers who might be freaked out by not seeing the “real world” anymore. “Remember, you’re always in control,” Craig assured me. “You can change it at any time.”
From inside the environment, Craig’s disembodied voice guided me as I opened a few flat app windows, placing them around my space and resizing them as I liked. Rather than letting these sell themselves, though, Craig pointed out how webpages are “super beautiful [and] easy to navigate” on Vision Pro. “As you can also see… text is super sharp, super easy to read. The pictures on the website look stunning.” Craig also really wanted me to know that “over one million iPhone/iPad apps” will work like this on the Vision Pro on day one. Page: 1 2 Next → reader comments 310 Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. Advertisement Promoted Comments rmohns And this is why you shouldn’t expect non-actors to work from a script. No matter how enthusiastic someone is, put a script in front of them and they lose all spontaneity and joy.
I’m a little disappointed in Apple that they expect their employees to read a script. Checklist of features to show, sure, why not but dialogue? For a company that prides itself on the user experience and human factors, that’s a big thing to miss. February 7, 2024 at 10:07 pm lithven My one thought on this is the demos, per design, are always better than reality. Specifically I’m saying this with regard to the 180 deg 8k video that you indicated was the highlight for you. When such things are generated for a demo like this they are designed to show capability of the device not necessarily be a realistic representation of what other media will look like in the same device. If you’re demoing a piece of equipment you can tune everything from the motion to avoid blur, to the color of the video for the displays used, to the amount of contrast in the scene.
Not to tear the company or device down, everyone with any sort of demo does the same thing, I just find it interesting that the one thing you spoke most highly of would be the thing I would take with the largest grain of salt. February 7, 2024 at 10:11 pm TimeWinder I’m left finished the article still not sure what the Apple Vision actually brings.Having been using one fairly regularly now for a few days — software.
I DO NOT mean apps; if you asked me "Why shouldn’t I buy a Vision Pro right now?", my first answer would be "Apple and Unity managed to catastrophically bungle the availability of software at launch." There may actually be "more than 600 apps available at launch," but it sure doesn’t look that way while browsing the single-page (and sometimes single-item) App Store categories. A lot of it’s repetitive: every sport/entertainment company/niche apparently feels the need to have its own custom cinema app even though they’re all basically the same. And a lot of it’s just dumb; there’s a "game" in there that’s just a ball bouncing in AR space. So lack of software would come first on my list of negatives right now; ahead of cost, comfort, the possibility it might mess up your hair or eyebrows, and apparently the lack of porn.
That software selection will improve, but Apple’s tools are new, a little buggy, and abstracted to the point of being extremely hard to learn, even for existing iOS devs. Unity’s are new, a lot buggy, and inaccessible to most of the hobby/indie devs that make up the bulk of Apple platform developers because of the $2000/person/year barrier of entry. So I think it’s going to be slow, and "I’ll wait until there are actually a decent amount of apps to buy" seems a quite reasonable position for someone to take.
But it’s hard to complain about visionOS itself. A lot of the hyperbolic statements in the demo aren’t actually all that hyperbolic. Things are clearer, sharper, and easier to read than any AR/VR system I’ve ever used–even ones with "on paper" better specs–and I’ve used many of them. Most of the extensive set of "flat" iPad apps actually work well, and can "cover" a bit for not having a decent software selection; being able to scatter them around you in space makes for an upgraded experience even though they’re not actually any better than their on-tablet forms.
A lot of folks (including me) complained about the eye tracking and gestures being uncomfortable. That lasts about two days; at this point interating with this thing is completely natural, fast, and easy. As with the iPhone and the Apple Watch, there are some new metaphors that you need to learn, and some old ones that you can’t do. Your eyes aren’t a mouse, and a lot of that early adjustment is learning that. It does some things better and some things worse, but on the balance, it’s an Apple product: it’s designed for what it is, and it’s good at it. I’m flinging things about with wild abandon at this point; I look like one of those Hollywood hackers with a half dozen windows appearing and disappearing in a flash onscreen.
[Edit: Hint to new users: Move your eyes, NOT your head. It feels wrong at first, but not actually moving your neck muscles (or not as much) dramatically improves the comfort and wear-duration of the headset.]
There’s a lot of whining about not having controllers, but for most day to day non-game stuff you don’t need them, and not having those extra parts around (with their separate batteries, usually) is a win. For games, it supports any bluetooth gamepad that works in iOS just fine (effectively all of them); although there are a few rough edges in that, still — Steam Link, for example, can’t see my controller, even though it works fine in the app on iPad, and works fine in every other app on the Vision Pro. No idea.
The Mac Virtual screen is either wonderful (if the virtual screen is better than your real one(s)), or an OK gimmick (if not). It has some annoying quirks, but works well enough for actual use at full resolution and any reasonable size. As a dev; I’ve been using it to avoid having to take the headset off and on while testing VP apps. It’s a tradeoff — I gain the ability to transition between device and code trivally, but I lose the multi-monitor setup that I use when developing flatter apps. I’m hoping for some improvement here, but it’s enough for now.
Overall, I’d say that Apple released it a few months before the software environment could support it, and they made a massive mistake in trusting Unity (though I suppose they couldn’t have known at the time), but this is going to be a stable, well-liked platform sooner rather than later. There’s nothing broken here that can’t be fixed, and plenty that works well enough to use now. February 7, 2024 at 10:53 pm brlljotic7232 That script is so cheesy. If you’re gonna have people help demo the device, why have them talk to customers like cold machines? Is that really how they expect to sell their $3,500 device?
I think no human being has ever uttered the sequence of words "right from iPhone" outside of an Apple ad.Well, I’ll give credit to my Apple Store employee who ran my demo this past Saturday here in NYC he was really smooth and not reading from a script. And didn’t read any of those corny lines. But I was forthright with him, I told him from the start that I was unlikely to purchase a first-generation model of anything, especially something so different and which I very well might not find much use for after the sense of novelty passes.
I also asked plenty of questions about Airplaying my laptop screen to the AVP to use it as a large movable monitor. They did not have a demo module set up for that, which I agree is an oversightbut they probably are promoting the aspects which they believe will be the most popular with the largest number of people.
I don’t know whether I could (honestly) wear this or any headset for 8 hours to work from my laptop or desktop.
I will say that the entertainment aspect is stunning. I didn’t expect the verisimilitude and real sense of depth and height which the spatial video (360 degree) allowed. I actually felt a sense of ‘movement’ as if I were flying over a broad river in one of the spatial video landscape scenarios. My body responded as if I were moving.
Oh – and the audio is great, even without airpods/pro. Very nice.
I’ll be interested to see whatever short films or music videos people may create expressly for the AVP. There was a clip of Alicia Keys singing up close and filmed in spatial, and there was almost the sense that I was actually in front of her in that lounge.
But, I’m not going to drop $3.5K + tax on something even as fascinating as this. I think the device has great potential as a platform and as an entertainment device, but I don’t know that I would actually want to use it very much until it is lighter. February 8, 2024 at 7:16 am Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars

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Entertainment
Urdd Eisteddfod: Why Strictly star Amy Dowden is supporting Welsh festival that is ‘like Britain’s Got Talent’
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41 mins agoon
May 26, 2025By
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Thousands of people are expected to attend Port Talbot this weekend as the town gears up to welcome an annual Welsh festival.
The Urdd Eisteddfod is a celebration of Welsh culture when children and young people up to the age of 25 take part in a variety of competitions.
There are 400 of them in total, including singing, reciting poetry and dancing.
The Urdd organisation itself was established more than a century ago in 1922, with the aim of giving children and young people in Wales the opportunity to learn and socialise in the Welsh language.
Its six-day Eisteddfod is held during May half-term and in a different part of Wales each year.
The Urdd Eisteddfod broke its own records last year, with more than 100,000 registrations to compete.

A choir competes at the 2024 Eisteddfod yr Urdd. Pic: Urdd Gobaith Cymru
Margam Park is home to this year’s event – the first time since 2003 that it’s played host.
Among the main prizes up for grabs this year are the chair (awarded to the main poetry competition winner) and the crown (awarded to the main prose competition winner).
This year’s crown and chair have been made using some of the final pieces of steel produced at Port Talbot steelworks before the closure of the blast furnaces last year.

The chair at the 2025 Eisteddfod yr Urdd was created using some of the last pieces of steel produced at the Port Talbot steelworks. Pic: Urdd Gobaith Cymru

Pic: Urdd Gobaith Cymru
There are some new additions to this year’s Eisteddfod, including awards for singing, musical theatre and acting, named in honour of Sir Bryn Terfel, Callum Scott Howells and Matthew Rhys.
Another new award – the Amy Dowden award for dance – will also be awarded for the first time this week.
Speaking to Sky News, Strictly Come Dancing star Dowden said it was a “real honour” to be supporting the next generation of dancers.
“The arts and the industry is tough, and I just hope that [the young people] can see that I’ve managed to push myself through it,” she said.
“I’ve worked hard, I’ve had a few challenges along the way. Hopefully I can help inspire them as well.”

Amy Dowden. File pic: PA
‘It’s like Britain’s Got Talent’
As a former competitor herself in what is one of Europe’s largest touring youth festivals, Dowden says she “couldn’t imagine [her] childhood without it”.
“I’ve loved Eisteddfods since I can remember. Every year at school I took part in everything, from the baking to the reciting poems, to the folk dancing, to the creative dancing,” she said.
“The Urdd Eisteddfod is literally like one big talent competition, it’s like Britain’s Got Talent.”
Read more:
Prince William meets Urdd Eisteddfod winner
Wales: The land of song – but for how much longer?
The winner of the Amy Dowden award will get one-to-one sessions with her as part of the prize, as well as masterclasses at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
They will have the opportunity to perform on an international stage and also win a cash prize.
“I know from my dance training and everything, each of those is so beneficial to getting yourself to that professional level,” Dowden added.
UK
Living beside the UK’s first drug consumption room
Published
41 mins agoon
May 26, 2025By
admin
It’s 8.34am on a Tuesday and Vanessa Paton is taking me on a tour of Glasgow’s east end, where she has lived for almost 50 years.
Half a mile away sits the newly opened taxpayer-funded facility, named The Thistle, where drug addicts can bring their heroin and cocaine, are handed clean needles and invited to inject under NHS medical supervision.
The concept, a UK first, is controversial and costs £2.3m a year.
Authorities believe it provides a safer, cleaner area for users to do their business, away from the dirty, HIV-ridden back alleys of Glasgow city centre.
It opened in January, and around 250 people have used it so far.
But there is a growing feeling among some that a by-product of this bold project is the alleged “war zone” being created in the community around the new building.

Vanessa Paton
Former council worker Ms Paton is one of an ad-hoc group of furious locals who pick up needles as part of desperate efforts to clear their streets.
She says: “It is getting worse. The new room has appeared, and the problems have escalated with it. It’s a no-go war zone every day and night.
“The area’s becoming a toilet. That is the harsh reality of it.”

A drug den
‘It is disgusting’
Sky News spends the morning being shown areas where it is claimed the issues are getting out of control.
Ms Paton pulls a bloodied, faeces-covered hospital gown out of a bush as we walk along a path behind a row of houses.
We turn the corner to a street where children play and are greeted with syringes filled with blood at our feet, discarded needle packaging and dirty underwear.

Angela Scott
Local resident Angela Scott says: “It’s become a lot worse. It’s heightened. I’m scared that if I am picking up my dog dirt am I going to prick a needle.
“Am I going to end up with an infection that a lot of drug addicts tend to have because they are sharing needles? I don’t want to pick up something infectious.”
Adverts installed in known drug dens
Officials have installed a new needle bin in one hotspot in recent days, with posters erected advertising the nearby consumption room.


A new needle bin and poster for the nearby consumption room
Ms Paton alleges safety steps are being taken at a nearby nursery.
“There is a nursery that actually uses a metal detector in the morning to scan the sandpits before the children go out because of the concern of the needles being in it,” she claims.
This area is known as Calton and has had its troubles with drug taking and crime for many years.
Ms Paton takes us to a tucked-away, overgrown area opposite social housing and a few metres from where a new school is being built. It is a makeshift drug den.
There are hundreds of freshly used needles. It is like a minefield.

One needle is stabbed into a large tree, there is even a wooden seat which is covered in drug-taking equipment.
Once again, there is a laminated A4 piece of paper pointing users in the direction of The Thistle.
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Ms Paton says: “We picked up 50 needles in one minute last week. If we were to pick up every needle that is here today, we’d be talking hundreds.
“We are struggling to find somewhere safe to stand. There are needles between my legs, you’ve got needles behind your head.
“It’s totally soul-destroying. Nobody living here expected it to be this bad.”
Officials deny it is a new problem
Glasgow City Council told Sky News there had not been an increase in reports despite the community alleging the opposite.
Councillor Allan Casey, who is responsible for drug policy in the city, said: “This has been a long-standing issue and that is one of the main reasons why The Thistle has been placed where it is because there has been decades-long discarded needles in public places.
Responding to claims of increasing problems around the new facility, Mr Casey said: “Those reports don’t back that up.
“The council has not seen a rise in reports of injecting equipment and there has not been an increase in crime reports.”
Scotland is ravaged by drugs. The country has the worst drug death rate in Europe.
Scotland’s first minister John Swinney told Sky News the new drug room required time to “see the impact”.
He said: “The Thistle is a safe consumption facility which is designed to encourage people to come off the use of drugs – that’s its purpose. We’ve got to give that venture time to see the impact.
“We need to engage with the local community… and address any concerns.”
It is understood police have logged no calls about the facility since it opened in January, despite some residents suggesting they have contacted officers with concerns.
Inspector Max Shaw from Police Scotland said: “We are aware of long-standing issues in the area and continue to work closely in partnership to address these concerns.”
Sports
Edmonton takes control over Stars: Game 3 grades, takeaways
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4 hours agoon
May 26, 2025By
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May 25, 2025, 06:35 PM ET
While fans in Edmonton and Dallas are always singing about how they have friends in low places, only one of them has the high ground in the Western Conference finals. And that’s the Oilers after their 6-1 win Sunday in Game 3 to take a 2-1 series lead.
With the series tied heading into Sunday, the objective for Game 3 was to gain a firm grasp of the conference finals, and the Oilers did just that by having five players with multipoint performances. As for the Stars, losing Game 3 left them trailing a series for the second time this postseason, with the only other such occurrence coming after Game 1 against the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
Now that the Oilers are in control of the series, what does it mean for them going forward? What must the Stars do differently ahead of Game 4 for them to return home tied rather than a game away from elimination? Ryan S. Clark and Greg Wyshynski examine those questions while delving into what lies ahead for two teams that not only faced each other in the conference finals last season but between them have been involved in every conference final since 2020.
Edmonton Oilers
Grade: A
Much could change between now and whenever the playoffs end. But for now, the argument could be made that this was the most important playoff game the Oilers have had this postseason.
The Oilers have had numerous strong performances, such as Game 3 against the Los Angeles Kings in the first round or their final two games against the Vegas Golden Knights in the conference semifinals. But what made the Oilers’ performance in Game 3 against Dallas arguably their most important was that they found a balance between being difficult in the defensive zone while not relying on a shutout to accomplish that objective.
The Stars finished with 37 shots, 13 high-danger chances in 5-on-5 play and scored only once. Connor McDavid has repeatedly stressed that the Oilers can play defense, and that has been made clear over their past five games. But Sunday proved they didn’t need Stuart Skinner or their defensive structure to blank an opponent to win. — Ryan S. Clark
Dallas Stars
Grade: C+
The final score doesn’t reflect the majority of this game, which Dallas coach Pete DeBoer can mine for positives among the many (many) negatives and some mitigating circumstances. Having Roope Hintz warm up but not be able to go because of the foot injury he suffered from a Darnell Nurse slash in Game 2? That’s deflating. Having the on-ice officials miss a delay of game call on Brett Kulak in the first period only to have Evan Bouchard open the scoring 10 seconds later? Also deflating.
So it’s to the Stars’ credit that they got to their game at 5-on-5 in Game 3 better than they have in any game of the series, at least before Edmonton ran up the score in the third. The results weren’t there and a loss is a loss — and a loss by this margin is difficult to stomach — but their second period and the performances from some of their slumbering depth players give the Stars at least a glimmer.
However, there’s no question Edmonton has this thing in well in-hand and the Stars have to find a way to solve Skinner, which is not something I thought I’d be writing at this stage of the postseason. — Greg Wyshynski
Three Stars of Game 3
Two goals and an assist for his seventh career multigoal playoff game. Hyman’s second goal was the Oilers’ fourth off the rush, the most in one game by any team this postseason. Hyman also was plus-5 Sunday.
Bouchard scored his sixth goal of the postseason and these two were on the ice for the first two Edmonton goals. At 5-on-5 this postseason, the Oilers are outscoring their opponents 7-1, and 5-0 in this series, when Bouchard and Kulak are on the ice.
0:48
Connor McDavid restores Oilers’ 2-goal lead
Connor McDavid finds the back of the net to restore the Oilers’ two-goal lead vs. the Stars.
3. Connor McDavid
C, Oilers
For all the talk about the lack of goals from the best hockey player in the world (which was odd because he had 20 points in 13 games and was a plus-7 entering Game 3 despite having only three goals), McDavid punched out a pair of tucks for his sixth career multigoal playoff game. Also, seeing McDavid with the puck barreling toward the net on a 3-on-1 is nightmare fuel for opponents. — Arda Öcal
Players to watch in Game 4
Zach Hyman
LW, Oilers
To go from 16 goals last postseason to just three goals entering Game 3 of the conference finals is one way to assess Hyman. Another is to realize that he’s been the most physical player on a team that is among the tallest and heaviest in the NHL.
Hyman came into Game 3 leading the NHL with 99 hits. He remained physical Sunday by leading the way with six hits in a game that saw the Oilers continue their punishing style with 47. But to then see Hyman score two goals and finish with three points in addition to that physicality? It once again adds to the narrative that the Oilers might not only have more dimensions than last year’s team, they could be better than the team that finished Stanley Cup runner-up in 2024. — Clark
0:53
Zach Hyman’s 2nd goal puts Oilers up 4
Zach Hyman taps home his second goal of the game to put the Oilers up 5-1 vs. the Stars.
This is the first two-game losing streak for the Dallas goaltender in the playoffs. A lot of what happened in Game 3 wasn’t necessarily on him — a Connor McDavid beauty and a Zach Hyman breakaway were among the Edmonton tallies — but outside of the third period of Game 1, he’s not been a difference-maker in this series. Oettinger came into the game leading the playoffs with 5.58 goals saved above expected, according to Stathletes. The Stars have been able to depend on him as a slump-breaker. But this is his third game with a save percentage south of .900 in the series. As the Stars try to build on some positives from this game, they need Otter to provide the foundation for it — and in the process, silence those “U.S. backup!” chants from the Oilers fans. — Wyshynski
Big questions for Game 4
Are the Oilers about to do to the Stars what they did to the Golden Knights?
Simply put, the Oilers are where hope goes to die. Teams in a championship window that have yet to win a title are always being judged on their evolution. What the Oilers did to the Stars a year ago in the conference finals by winning the last three games showed that they could close out a series after trailing. This postseason Edmonton has shown a calculated and methodical coldness when it comes to putting away opponents.
The Golden Knights won Game 3 on a last-second goal to create the belief they may have found an opening. They didn’t score again for the rest of the playoffs after being in the top five of goals per game throughout the regular season. Breaking out for six goals to open the series seemed to be a sign the Stars may have found an opening. Since then? They’ve scored only once in the last six periods while facing questions about what’s happened to another team that went from being in the top five in goals per game in the regular season. — Clark
Can Dallas make Edmonton uncomfortable at all?
Our colleague Mark Messier made this point between periods of Game 3: The Stars have yet to do anything to get McDavid or Leon Draisaitl off their games. That extends to the rest of the Oilers. Outside of an anomalous run of three power-play goals in the third period of Game 1, there have been precious few instances of the Stars carrying play for long stretches or putting a scare into Edmonton at 5-on-5.
They had that for a bit in Game 3 with a dominant second period: plus-14 in shot attempts, plus-11 in scoring chances and a 10-1 advantage in high-danger shot attempts. But they were digging out of a 2-0 hole, only managed to get one goal of their own on the board and then McDavid stuck a dagger in them with 19 seconds left in the second.
The Stars need a lead. They need zone time. They need to get their rush game going: Skinner had a .897 save percentage on shots off the rush entering the game. Edmonton is playing with a champion’s confidence. Dallas has to find a way to inject a little doubt into its opponent or this series is going to end quickly. — Wyshynski
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