Colin Blackwell showed Dallas why depth matters Monday, leveling Yakov Trenin with a clean open-ice hit in Game 2.
Right up the middle, timed to perfection, nothing cheap about it. Textbook playoff body check.
Dallas is trailing this series 0-1 after a brutal 6-1 loss at home on Saturday.
Glen Gulutzan doesn't need his star forwards playing this kind of shift. He needs them generating.
Leaving the physical tone-setting to a $775,000 fourth-line forward like Blackwell is exactly the kind of role-player contribution that can shift a playoff room.
Blackwell, 33, is in his thirteenth NHL city in this career. Not quite, but it feels that way.
A Dallas Stars group looking for any spark after a 6-1 Game 1 home loss
Watch the clip. He lines up the Wild forward at center ice, reads the angle, and finishes on target with everything he's got.
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Dallas closed the regular season with 50 wins, 112 points, and a plus-52 goal differential. They were riding a five-game winning streak heading into the postseason. Then Minnesota walked into Texas and dropped six goals on them.
That result sits on Gulutzan's shoulders. Game 2 had to look different before it looked like anything else.
Blackwell's hit won't win the game. The 4 goals he scored in 70 regular-season games tell you exactly what his job is on this roster.
But you don't need a scoring line to change a bench's energy.
Minnesota's Quinn Hughes and the rest of their top end have been creating space through speed and puck movement.
The Stars' answer in Game 2 starts with making every Wild forward think twice the next time they carry the puck through open ice.
That's what Blackwell just did. The message doesn't need translation.
Jim Nill built this Dallas team to have four functional lines, and a hit like that is the payoff for keeping veterans at the bottom of the roster instead of running rookies out there in April.
The rest of the game still has to be played. Minnesota is a real team and they won Game 1 convincingly.
But the Stars needed somebody, anybody, to step up and throw the first real counterpunch.
Blackwell threw it. Whether the rest of the Dallas lineup follows him into the fight is the only question that actually matters for the next two hours.
Was Colin Blackwell's open-ice hit a clean playoff check?
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