The Stars got the result they wanted in Washington, but they had to sweat through every last minute of it.
Dallas left the Nation’s Capital with a 6-5 win over the Capitals on Tuesday night, a game that featured crooked numbers, a natural hat trick from Jason Robertson and a finish that turned tense fast. The most important thing, though, was the one in the win column.
Robertson scored three times in a 5:20 burst during the second period, giving Dallas the third fastest natural hat trick in franchise history. Only Tom McCarthy, who did it in 5:15 in 1984, and Jamie Benn, who needed 5:17 in 2018, got there quicker. Robertson’s outburst pushed him to eight goals on the season, tying him with Mikko Rantanen for the team lead and nudging him back toward the kind of scoring pace that carried him to 45 goals last season.
“You’re going to win all different ways and that’s how we won tonight,” Robertson said.
The Stars needed that cushion because the game never stayed comfortable for long. Dallas built a 5-1 lead after Rantanen scored midway through the second period, but Washington clawed back to make it 5-3 by the second intermission. Roope Hintz restored a three-goal edge at 6-3, yet the Capitals kept coming and scored twice more before the Stars finally escaped.
“We’re going to have him evaluated again,” Gulutzan said. “We’re hoping right now that it’s not as serious as we first thought, so we’ll know more tomorrow.
I think a little bit more about how he wakes up. So we’ll re-evaluate then.”
That was the kind of night it became for Dallas: productive, messy and stressful all at once.
Joel Kiviranta opened the scoring after Washington came out pressing early, and Radek Faksa helped set up the goal on the Stars’ first shot of the game. Kiviranta said the start mattered after Dallas had to absorb the Capitals’ early push.
“We have played roller coaster hockey lately, so we tried to keep pushing and get our game going,” Kiviranta said after his goal opened the scoring against a hard-pushing Washington team.
Washington entered at 8-6-0 after a lopsided loss to Minnesota and came out with plenty of urgency. The Stars weathered that first wave, then turned the game with Robertson’s second-period explosion. He scored 23 seconds into the period, then added another a few minutes later before finishing off the hat trick from the left point.
“A couple of times you’re just feeling it and you stick with it. It’s nice when it goes in,” Robertson said. “It just happened so quickly, you didn’t even have time to digest it.”
Kiviranta called it “Robo doing Robo things,” and that pretty much fit the mood.
Dallas improved to 9-5-1, with a .633 points percentage that leaves the club third in the Central Division. It also marked another win for Jake Oettinger against Washington, as he moved to 7-0-0 in his career against the Capitals.
Still, the Stars didn’t exactly leave with a clean bill of health. Defenseman Miro Heiskanen exited in the second period with an upper body injury, and his status will be updated Wednesday when the team practices in Columbus. Gulutzan said the team hopes the injury is not as serious as it first appeared.
“We knew this was a big boy game, a heavy game, and that’s their push,” Gulutzan said. “You’ve got two really good teams and it’s hard to dominate a game for 60 minutes. It was a back and forth game and their push came in the third.”
Dallas is now 9-1-0 in its last 10 games against Washington, but the recent stretch has been less tidy than that record suggests. The Stars are 2-2-0 over their past four, and both wins have come with their share of strange moments. On Tuesday, they got enough offense to survive one of them.
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