Coyle went first and failed to score. Robertson went next and was unsuccessful. Valeri Nichushkin scored, Tyler Seguin was stopped, and Kent Johnson finished it. Five attempts turned a 1-1 game after overtime into a 2-1 Columbus victory over the Dallas Stars on Thursday night.
Those isolated attempts determined who got the extra point. They offer a much smaller picture of the game DeSmith had played.
Casey DeSmith stopped 29 of 30 shots across 65:00, then watched Columbus score twice in the shootout while Dallas failed to score at all. Those shootout goals decided the standings point, but they did not erase the work DeSmith had already done to keep Dallas in position to win the game before the tiebreaker arrived.
The sharper criticism belongs to the Stars’ finishing. They needed one more goal in regulation, or a better shootout outcome, to turn a solid night in net into two points. DeSmith supplied enough resistance for both opportunities to exist. He could not take either one himself.
The game’s first goal showed the formula Dallas needed. With 6:27 played in the third, Johnston turned an Ivan Provorov turnover into a shot that Cam Talbot stopped. Mikko Rantanen gathered the rebound near the net, held the puck for an opening and scored his ninth goal of the season.
Johnston created the chance; Rantanen completed it. A single save was not enough for Columbus because Dallas followed the first opportunity with a second action.
The Stars did not find another such finish. Zach Werenski tied the game with the regulation clock down to 3:14, entering from the left circle and sending a backhand over DeSmith’s left pad. That was the lone goal DeSmith allowed in regulation and overtime, a narrow return against 30 Columbus shots.
Columbus’ goaltending deserves its share of the story. Talbot stopped 27 of 28, including Esa Lindell’s wrist shot at 9:16 of the second period with a scrambling glove save near the right post. At 16:45 of the same period, he denied Robertson’s breakaway using his left pad.
Those saves did not make Dallas helpless, but they did raise the price of every missed chance. The Stars produced 28 shots and scored once against a goalie having a very good night.
That is where the shootout can make a close game look lopsided. Dallas held a 3-1 shot edge in the five-minute overtime, and Tyler Seguin took one of those attempts with 15 seconds left. Thomas Harley’s final overtime shot came with three seconds remaining.
Neither became the winning goal, so the game moved to a contest built from isolated one-on-one chances rather than the broader work of the preceding 65 minutes.
That format is not pure luck. Nichushkin still had to beat DeSmith, and Johnson still had to finish after Seguin’s attempt failed. Dallas’ problem was conversion. A team that scores one goal in regulation has left itself exposed to a single bounce, a single save or a shootout in which one miss suddenly carries far more weight than it would during ordinary play.
