DALLAS — Midway through the Stars’ 2-0 win over the Capitals on Thursday night, Jake Oettinger might have thought he was in a nightmare.
Alex Ovechkin was staring him down, right from the slot after a Jani Hakanpää turnover. Ovechkin was the Capitals’ main form of offense on Thursday, as the future Hall of Famer had a quarter of Washington’s shots on goal and looked to add to his historic sum of goals.
But Oettinger shut him down, preserving a one-goal Dallas lead and putting him on track to complete his first shutout of the season. Oettinger made 27 saves on Thursday night, and earned his fifth win of the season.
Jason Robertson scored for the Stars, as his first-period high-slot tip of a Nils Lundkvist one-timer stood the rest of the game. Joel Kiviranta added an insurance goal in the third period, a one-man shorthanded effort that gave Kiviranta his third goal of the season. Last season, he scored just once.
With the win, the Stars (5-2-1) snapped a brief two-game skid.
As the Stars raced out to a hot start under new coach Pete DeBoer, much of the talk surrounded the offense — how many goals they were scoring, how they were scoring them, and how different it was from the previous defense-first regime under Rick Bowness. Oettinger, however, quietly posted an incredible start to the season.
Entering Thursday, he had a .953 save percentage and a 1.41 goals against average. According to two different expected goals models, Oettinger saved around 6.50 goals above expected, numbers close to the top of the NHL. He was named the third star in the NHL for the opening week, joining Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid.
All Oettinger did Thursday was quiet perhaps the greatest goal-scorer of all time and earned his third career shutout in the process.
And all of this feels… normal.
It shouldn’t — not with a first-time full-time NHL starter, not with a 23-year-old. Goaltending is a position meant for the veterans, who’ve refined their game across years and years of professional hockey. Oettinger just made his 76th career NHL on Thursday, and just made his first Opening Night start two weeks ago.
But on the heels of Oettinger’s superb playoff series against Calgary, this level of goaltending has become the norm in Dallas.
Oettinger’s otherworldly (dare I say Vezina-worthy) start to the season won’t last forever. It hasn’t ever in the league’s history. Goalies don’t post save percentages closer to 1.000 than .900. But the fact is that Oettinger is giving the Stars a chance to win the game every time he mans the crease.
Dallas has won five of his six starts, and the loss in Boston was hardly Oettinger’s fault. The Bruins scored on a power-play one-timer, and a bounce off a Stars defenseman. Oettinger has really only given up one bad goal this season, Arber Xhekaj’s goal in Montreal, but has made every other save he’s supposed to make.
The foundation of the Stars being a good team this season — and a good franchise in the future, for that matter — is predicated on Oettinger reaching his first-round potential.
So far, so good.
