The Dallas Stars went to Finland, now what?

The Dallas Stars were swept out of Finland by the Florida Panthers.

For all the team-building and fun headlines leading into the games, in the end the Stars dropped a 6-4 decision on Friday and lost 4-2 on Saturday to the defending Stanley Cup Champions.

It’s unfortunate, a 10-6 aggregate setback isn’t ideal, but for the Stars the real challenge of the NHL Global Series starts today, now that they’ve returned to North Texas.

With the Global Series and affiliated travel, the Stars played twice in 11 days. They’ll now play 71 games in the next 163. When you account for the 14-day break around the NHL’s Four Nations Faceoff, the Stars are effectively playing at close to an every-other-day pace for the remainder of the season with 71 games in 149 days.

That’s the blessing and curse of going to Europe in November.

It reminds me of a conversation I had last year with Detroit Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde.

The Red Wings went to Sweden last year as part of the NHL Global Series, and in the end their condensed schedule (and injury to Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin) helped played a part as they missed the playoffs by the slimmest of margins.

Lalonde, notably, said last season that he wouldn’t have been thrilled with having the Global Series on the calendar during a year that his team was actually considered a contender. New Jersey Devils coach Sheldon Keefe brought the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Global Series in 2023, and told me earlier this season how much the later travel made life difficult for his old team.

Both of those coaches said that in their ideal world, any trip to Europe would be at the start of the season, as part of training camp, and not interrupt the overall flow of the season like a late November voyage naturally brings.

A dozen NHL teams have made the mid-season trip to Europe since the NHL started regularly scheduling games in Europe in late October and November in 2017.

Of those 12 teams, seven have missed the playoffs, while another five have reached the playoffs and been knocked in the first round, like Keefe’s Toronto team last spring.

The only team to go to Europe midseason and have any playoff success came when the Tampa Bay Lightning went to Stockholm in 2019, and then won the Stanley Cup in 2020. That season, of course, comes with a bit of asterisk, as the Lightning — and the rest of the NHL — had a four-month break in between the world standing still because of COVID-19 and the playoff bubbles opening in Edmonton and Toronto.

So the Stars, and Panthers, are effectively trying to do something this season that no one has ever done before in a non-pandemic world — go to Europe mid-season, and try to win the whole thing.

Talking to players and coaches who have made the trip before, one thing seems to surface — the Europe trip will catch you at some point, the key is how much you let it impact you when that happens.

For some teams, like Detroit last season, there was an early bump out of Europe, some strong team bonding that fueled a close group. But as one Red Wings player told me later in the season, the eventual schedule crunch probably canceled out any fun team-building element.

Now the Stars are a better team than Detroit was last season, much better in fact, but they won’t be immune to the schedule crunch and challenge. How they handle that will greatly define this season.