Column: Huge Balls

     by Rob Stiller

Dallas Stars: Lost at the San Jose Sharks Friday 3-2 (OT); Beat the Sharks in Dallas Sunday 2-1 (4OT)

It’s only fitting that the ballsiest player on the team scored the ballsiest goal of the season for the Stars as the team advances to face the Detroit Red Wings in the Western Conference Finals after appearing on the brink of completing an historic collapse. I’m talking about Brendan Morrow, for those of you who didn’t weather the five and a half hours it took to decide a winner early Monday morning. Just as significant as the playoff implications this game held, though, is the fact that this game reminded us that hockey games needn’t be high scoring affairs to be exceedingly entertaining. As much as the league has tweaked the rules in recent years to allow for more scoring, games like this, in which two goaltenders go toe to toe for hours, are the ones that will be tagged as “instant classics” in the hockey world. If you had asked me three weeks ago how much hockey I had watched this season, an honest response would probably have been about six hours. But not only did I watch as much Sunday night, I was on the edge of my seat the whole game, as Turco and Nabokov made ridiculous save after ridiculous save. As of 2:43 Monday morning, there isn’t a YouTube video of the game winning goal. But to me this HUGE hit Brendan Morrow layed on some San Jose chump might as well have been the game winner. Video, as well as Rockets and Spurs weekend news, after the jump. [Read more]

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

It would be entirely inappropriate for me, on the day after the Stars won their first round series against the Anaheim Ducks, to offer some half-assed analysis as to how the Stars won because the fact is, I don’t really know anything about hockey.  But that’s not important.  What is important is that the Stars did win, and subsequently my interest in hockey was reborn.

I’m aware that the obvious retort to this statement is that I’m just jumping on the bandwagon, that I was just waiting in the woodwork for the next successful playoff run before I broke out my old Modano jersey, the same way that there are all of a sudden hundreds of thousands Red Sox fans in every city across America.  But this isn’t the case.  After all, I’ve always maintained that my interest in hockey waned in the wake of the lockout season, and not after the Stars were no longer in the Finals every season.  [Read more]