Hockey Night: Stars-Bruins In-Game Blog

DALLAS - The Stars will again be without Jere Lehtinen, this time with an injury to a chest muscle. That’s three regular forwards on the shelf – Lehtinen, Mike Modano and Steve Ott. So the Stars have brought up 23-year-old Aaron Gagnon, who has one goal in five games with the new Texas Stars. Ray Sawada might have been tabbed ahead of Gagnon, but he has been out since the pre-season after injuring a thumb in a fight. On defense, Mark Fistric gets the call in place of Jeff Woywitka.

The Bruins, a popular pre-season pick to win the East, are off to a 2-3 start (all played at home). That’s enough to have coach Claude Julien juggling personnel as Boston begins its first road trip, to Dallas and Phoenix.

Your pick for star of the game? I’ll take Loui Eriksson.

7:32: With Bruins defenseman Dennis Wideman out with a bad shoulder, Boston tonight will go with six defensemen on the bench.

8:14: A tough first period for Mike Ribeiro. He took the period’s only penalty, which Boston converted into the only goal. One shot, 1-for-5 on face-offs winning his last one. The Stars came into the game ranked 28th in penalty killing and gave up a goal on the only kill. The Bruins were credited with nine blocked shots and a 21-9 advantage in hits.

9:11: On Wednesday night after Dallas’ 6-0 cakewalk over Nashville, Brenden Morrow answered a question regarding Calgary’s five-goal collapse against Chicago a couple nights earlier and said, “There is no safe lead in this league.” So it remains to be seen if the Bruins’ 3-0 lead through two periods is safe. The Stars haven’t played with any swagger. Part of it obviously is facing a much more talented team despite the Bruins’ sluggish start this season coming into the game. One night, Dan Ellis couldn’t get his glove and pads on anything. Tonight, the traffic in front of the Boston net is stopping every Stars shot. Losing Nicklas Grossman less than four minutes into the second period, when he took a shot from Mark Recchi, didn’t help.

9:23: Grossman is back for the third period, avec visor.

9:34: Marc Crawford appears to have switched up three of the lines in search of a spark. The Richards line is intact. Otherwise:

Morrow-Ribeiro-Brunnstrom

Sutherby-Wandell-Benn

Petersen-Gagnon-Barch

9:54: Will be back with a post-game report after visiting the locker room.

10:55: The Bruins won tonight’s game …. three years ago? That’s when they drastically made over their team and brought in a massive free-agent class that included center Marc Savard from Atlanta and defenseman Zdeno Chara from Ottawa. A year earlier, they signed free-agent goalie Tim Thomas. That 2006 summer, the Stars’ free-agent class was Eric Lindros, Matthew Barnaby and Jeff Halpern. (They traded for Mike Ribeiro on the eve of the ’06-07 season.) Savard scored two of Boston’s three goals in the 3-0 win, Chara looked like the 2008-09 Norris winner and Thomas looked something like the ’08-09 Vezina winner. They were selected as the three stars of the game.

“No disrespect to Nashville,” center Brad Richards said, “but that game was not a good indication of what this was going to be. This was a whole different animal.”

The Stars were handed a power play 18 seconds in and seemed to deflate after the Bruins killed that. When Ribeiro committed a sloppy high stick about midway through the period, the Bruins needed only 29 seconds to capitlize.

“It’s tough to beat a team like Boston if you don’t have everybody going,” Stars coach Marc Crawford said. “And we didn’t have everybody going for whatever reason. We were guilty of going to the easy areas too much. They’ll give you the corners in the offensive zone. But let’s face it; the goals are scored in the high traffic areas in front of the net.”

So the Stars (2-1-3) are off to Chicago to come right back and face the Blackhawks (5-1-1) on Saturday night. Alex Auld will get his second start, having won a week ago in Calgary. None of the three injured forwards who missed Friday night’s game – Mike Modano, Steve Ott and Jere Lehtinen – will make the trip.