The Calgary Flames weren’t great on Thursday against the Dallas Stars. But they were still pretty good, and while the game wasn’t exactly river hockey it was a nice 60 minutes of tactics, adaptation, and counter-punching. The Flames forced overtime with a nice third period push, but ended up losing to Dallas 4-3 in overtime.
The rundown
Dallas opened the scoring off a weird sequence. Matthew Tkachuk was given an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty – the Sportsnet TV broadcast theorized that it was for chirping at the referee from the Flames bench. On the resulting Stars power play, Miro Heiskanen found Denis Gurianov’s stick at the side of the Flames net with a scary-accurate low pass for a redirect past Jacob Markström and a 1-0 Dallas lead.