The National Hockey League's 2021 season is just over a week old, and the Dallas Stars are undefeated. In fact, they've yet to surrender a single goal to an opponent.
Of course, they haven't scored any goals either. Or won any games, for that matter, because they haven't actually played any opponents.
The defending Western Conference champions' season has been in stasis following a COVID-19 outbreak that saw 17 players test positive -- by far the largest concentration for any NHL team to date. It was an outbreak that NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said the league was still "trying to get our arms around how the spread occurred" a few days before Dallas was due to start the season on Jan. 14.
After their first four games were postponed, the Stars will finally open up on Friday at home against the Nashville Predators (8:30 p.m. ET, ESPN+), raising their conference championship banner in front of a smattering of fans. Dallas is one of three NHL teams that are allowing ticket-buyers into their arena for the start of the season.
Their opponents in the realigned Central Division have gotten a head start in the standings after completing uninterrupted training camps. The Stars have had no such luxury, as their facilities were shuttered for a few days and their first road trip was postponed.
"We're going to fall behind on game conditioning. There's nothing we can do about that. You need real games to get that conditioning back," said head coach Rick Bowness, who was given the job on a permanent basis after leading the team to the 2020 Stanley Cup Final as interim coach.
But adversity is nothing new for the Dallas Stars. Or at least it hasn't been for the past year.
"We had adversity last season. We fought through it. We have adversity now. Hopefully we'll be better for fighting through it," forward Andrew Cogliano told ESPN this week.
Last season began with a disastrous 1-7-1 start, followed by a 14-1-1 course correction. There was the firing of coach Jim Montgomery in December 2019 for "unprofessional conduct," which was later revealed to involve his struggle with alcoholism. There was the NHL season that was paused on March 12 and restarted in two Canadian "bubbles" that summer, where the Stars had an unexpected run to the Western Conference championship inside the Edmonton secure zone.
That run ended with a loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup Final, a six-game series played inside an empty arena, in another country and with most players cut off from contact with family and friends.
"Obviously with the way everything has gone in the world this year, you learn to accept a bizarre feeling that you're never going to experience again. Someone was going to experience that bizarre feeling in the bubble, and unfortunately it was us," said Cogliano. "The worst part of it was the ending. It was weird. It takes a lot of time to gather your thoughts and figure out what was happening. And you're not leaving the bubble to go have a party or socialize or anything. You're basically going back to another isolated situation, for the most part."
The Stars felt the crushing emotions of a Stanley Cup Final defeat -- it's still hard to shake the images of captain Jamie Benn's poignant despondency in postgame interviews -- and left the bubble hours later.
"It was just abrupt, you know? You finish that game and then you're leaving the next morning. I don't think guys miss it, that's for sure. But it gave us an opportunity to play for the Stanley Cup. We made the most of it. Our team showed it was mentally tough," said Cogliano.
More adversity hit when the Stars found out that center Tyler Seguin and goalie Ben Bishop wouldn't be available for the start of the season after both players underwent offseason surgery.
And then the team discovered that it wasn't actually going to start its season.
On Jan. 8, the Stars shut down their facilities after six players and two staff members tested positive for COVID-19. The team's first three games in the realigned Central Division -- two at the Florida Panthers and another at Tampa Bay -- were postponed. When facilities reopened on Jan. 12, the Stars were missing 14 players. The NHL later revealed that from Dec. 30 through Jan. 11, there were a total of 17 Dallas players that tested positive for COVID.
The NHL said the Stars would not play until they could ice a competitive lineup. After the team's Jan. 19 game against Tampa was postponed, as well, a new opening night was established: against the Predators on Friday in Dallas.
It's expected that the Stars could be missing only one regular player on the COVID-19 protocol-related absences list for that game, and that it'll be a full lineup outside of their injured players.
Of course, if we've learned anything this season, it's that lineups can change quickly.
"Everything's in pencil. It's subject to change!" said Bowness, when asked recently about his depth chart. "It's not a black-and-white world right now. It's gray. We're just going to have to roll with it day to day."
Many Dallas players were asymptomatic. Others, like playoff hero goalie Anton Khudobin who caught COVID-19 earlier in the offseason while in Russia, felt the impact in their respiratory systems, whether it was climbing stairs or when they got back to skating. Khudobin, who signed a three-year contract with the Stars in the offseason, said COVID-19 also caused him to lose his senses of taste and smell. "Whenever you're eating, you just don't feel what you're eating. If you're eating mashed potatoes, you don't know if it's mashed potatoes," said Khudobin.
Rookie forward Jason Robertson said he was "one of the first few guys to go out, and one of the first guys to come back" to training camp.
"Everyone was asking 'how do you feel, how do you feel?' [Bowness] eased us in during the first practice. Kept our reps low. And then started working on conditioning after practice, to test our lungs and test our legs," he said.
The interruption in training camp, and the delay in the season start, has had huge implications for the Stars' preparation.
"The intensity of the players has been good. The attention to detail is getting better. When you take five days off, you're starting all over again," said Bowness.
Where the Stars have an advantage in this sporadic preseason is in their familiarity. It's a roster that's been kept largely intact from the one that competed in the bubble.
"We know each other. We're comfortable with each other and with Bones and the coaching staff. Since he arrived, it's been a close-knit atmosphere at the rink because he's instilled it," Robertson said. "But at the end of the day, it's unfortunate for our team. You're looking forward to training camp, you're in training camp and you stop everything you're doing. If feels like we've been practicing forever, but some guys haven't."
There was neither policing nor protocols during the offseason. Players were on their own. Cogliano, for example, was extra cautious since leaving the bubble last summer because his wife, Allie, was pregnant with their second child. They welcomed their daughter Olive earlier this month.
"We've been safe. We have a family to think about. We found our routine in being safe, and we did it. Everyone's different. Everyone has their own opinions. For us, we had a couple of other things riding [on being safe]," he said.
Some have looked at the positive tests in Dallas and wondered about some kind of herd immunity the players may have achieved. Cogliano has heard that speculation, too.
"We've heard the term before, as it relates to populations and countries," he said. "At the end of the day, I think when this all happened, you want people to be healthy. I don't think anyone was thinking about [herd immunity]. How it turned out, we don't know yet. We don't know when guys would have contracted it otherwise while we were traveling or in hotels. We're just thankful everyone is healthy."
The Stars open their 56-game season playing in a temporary division that's a mashup of Central and Atlantic Division teams, along with the Carolina Hurricanes and Columbus Blue Jackets from the Metro. These teams opened their seasons on time, even if some have also had games postponed, like Nashville has. Bowness said one of the bigger challenges in opening against teams that have already played is the physicality; hence, he asked the Stars to hit each other more in practice and scrimmages than would normally be expected.
Dallas is among the better teams in that division, but defenseman Jamie Oleksiak said there's no margin for error with such a truncated campaign.
"We don't have the luxury to have the start we had last year. Despite the fact we've had a little bit of a setback here, we have to be ready to go. In a condensed season, every game is going to be more important," he said.
It's not the start of the season the Stars expected. But then, they've come to expect the unexpected.