‘Disjointed’ Stars face elimination; DeBoer heated
-
Greg Wyshynski, ESPN
DALLAS — Like the majority of the Dallas Stars, Matt Duchene is seeking his first Stanley Cup championship. But after their Game 5 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Friday night, he’s searching for reasons the conference’s top seed is one loss away from elimination.
“We haven’t had our best for other than probably Game 3,” he said after the Oilers’ 3-1 win gave them a 3-2 lead in the Western Conference finals. “We’ve been a bit disjointed offensively this whole series.”
The Stars averaged 3.59 goals per game in the regular season. They’ve scored two goals or less in their three losses in the series.
Forward Tyler Seguin said the Stars aren’t “connected” as a five-man unit on the ice. Duchene said they didn’t retrieve enough pucks in the offensive zone — and when they did, Dallas was far too tentative in setting up for scoring chances against Edmonton goalie Stuart Skinner (19 saves).
“Sometimes when you want something so bad, you want to try and be too perfect. We need to trust our game,” Duchene said.
The Oilers, in their second straight victory, controlled play for the majority of the game. They limited the Stars to four shots on goal in the first period, and Dallas went 9:43 without a shot on goal in the second.
Dallas coach Peter DeBoer was asked about what one reported called a “lifeless” second period, and he responded by calling the description an attack on his team’s character.
“You can sit here and question our character if you want. You know what? I’m not going to do it. You go ahead and write whatever the f— you want,” DeBoer said.
The coach said Edmonton played “a perfect road game” in shutting down his team.
“If you’re going to draw a road game, that’s pretty much what you want to do, right?” DeBoer said. “They want to come out, get two power-play goals early in the game, get the lead and then defend well all night. So it’s tough to crack through.”
Oilers forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who scored those two power-play goals, said the key to defending the Stars is to not give them anything to work with by making mistakes.
“It starts with getting through the neutral zone, not turning pucks over and not giving them anything easy coming back at us,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “Sometimes you got to live to fight another day. You don’t need to be too aggressive.”
“Sometimes when you want something so bad, you want to try and be too perfect. We need to trust our game.”
Matt Duchene
Nugent-Hopkins also plays on the Edmonton penalty kill, which has not allowed a Dallas power-play goal all series. The Stars are 0-for-11, with five of those power plays coming in Game 1.
“There hasn’t been that many power plays this series. So you can maybe attribute a little bit of that [lack of success] to reps,” Seguin said. “But there’s no excuse at this time of the year. Sometimes the special teams need to win you the game, and theirs did tonight.”
The Oilers return home with a chance to advance to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 2006. But the Stars believe they have a rally in them. Dallas was the best road team in the regular season and has gone 6-2 away from home in the playoffs. Plus, the Stars believe Edmonton has yet to see their best.
“We have the confidence that if we play our best game, then we can beat anyone. So it’s just a matter of us doing that next game,” said forward Wyatt Johnston, who scored his 10th goal of the playoffs in the loss. “I mean, we can’t lose another game for the rest of the series. Our backs are definitely against the wall.”
LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani hit two homers in an 11-5 win over the San Francisco Giants on Saturday night, emphatically ending the three-time MVP’s longest homer drought since joining the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with his 24th homer, hammering Landen Roupp‘s fourth pitch 419 feet deep into the right-field bleachers with an exit velocity of 110.3 mph.
The slugger had been in a 10-game homer drought since June 2, going 10-for-40 in that stretch with no RBIs, although he still had an eight-game hitting streak during his power outage.
Ohtani led off the sixth with his 25th homer, sending Tristan Beck‘s breaking ball outside the strike zone into the bleachers in right. He also moved one homer behind the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Seattle’s Cal Raleigh for the overall major league lead.
Dodgers fans brought him home with a standing ovation as Ohtani produced his third multihomer game of the season and the 22nd of his career.
Ohtani reached base four times and scored three runs in his first four at-bats, drawing two walks to go with his two homers.
Ohtani hadn’t played in 10 straight games without hitting a homer since 2023 in the final 10 games of his six-year tenure with the Los Angeles Angels.
Ohtani had slowed down a bit over the past two weeks after he was named the NL Player of the Month for May with a formidable performance, racking up 15 homers and 28 RBIs.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
BOSTON — Hunter Dobbins had quite the week.
First, he said last weekend that he would rather retire than pitch for the Yankees because his father was drafted by New York twice before being traded.
Then, he went out and beat the Yankees.
A few days after his comments about never wanting to pitch for New York, he had to defend his dad’s story about being drafted by the Yankees in response to a New York Post article that cited multiple official databases and the Yankees’ own records that couldn’t confirm Lance Dobbins ever played with the organization.
On Saturday night, Dobbins (4-1) followed up by going six shutout innings in Boston’s 4-3 victory over New York, his second win over the Yankees in less than a week.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “I’m more worried about just the win column, whether it’s against them or anybody. My job is to try and help this team win as many ballgames as we can, and pitch in meaningful playoff baseball games. That’s what I’m more focused on.”
But he realizes what it means to the fan base in this longtime rivalry, with the Red Sox fans heard chanting about the Yankees outside the park before he spoke in an interview room.
“Yeah, I love being able to perform and get those wins for the fans here,” he said. “They deserve it. It’s a great city, passionate fan base, so being able to get those wins — especially twice in one week — means a lot and looking forward to trying to build on that going forward.”
In his victory over New York last Sunday, Dobbins held the Yankees to three runs over five innings, two on a first-inning homer by Aaron Judge.
On Saturday night, Judge went 0-for-3 against him, striking out twice on curveballs.
“It was just kind of scouting,” Dobbins said of his game plan against New York’s slugger after Garrett Crochet struck him out three times in the series opener Friday.
“Crochet has an electric fastball. I can throw it hard, but the shape isn’t quite as elite,” he said. “So we knew we had better weapons to go at him with, so I felt like we did a good job of kind of keeping a balanced attack throughout the order.”
Dobbins struck out five and gave up only two singles Saturday.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut