The Blackhawks head to Dallas on Saturday to take on one of the league’s top teams in the Stars with hopes of snapping a brutal six-game losing streak.
The Stars have spent most of the 2025–26 season parked firmly among the NHL’s heavyweights, trailing only the Colorado Avalanche in the league with a .737 points percentage and a 7-2-1 record in their last 10 games. However, their success hasn’t been really driven by territorial dominance: at 5-on-5, Dallas ranks 31st in shot attempt share (45.35 percent) and 22nd in expected goal share (48.37 percent), numbers that usually belong to teams fighting uphill, not cruising near the top of the table. Instead, the Stars are riding a league-best PDO, fueled by an NHL-leading 11.8 shooting percentage and a .920 save percentage, which has papered over those underlying issues. Additionally, having the second best power play (31.6 percent) in the league obviously helps. The Stars are still winning consistently right now, but there is more room for regression than their place in the standings might suggest — and the Blackhawks could exploit that, like the Detroit Red Wings did in their recent 4-3 overtime win over the Stars before the holiday break.
The Stars’ forward group is fairly top-heavy, but the top end is undeniably dangerous. Mikko Rantanen (1.38 points per game) has been a true driver, with Jason Robertson (1.18), Wyatt Johnston (1.11), and Roope Hintz (0.94) all operating at or near point-per-game rates to give Dallas four legitimate difference-makers up front. Jamie Benn (0.74) and Tyler Seguin (0.63) have rounded out the top six with solid production, though that group took a real hit when Seguin tore his ACL in early December — an injury that likely costs him the rest of the regular season, if not longer. After that, the drop-off in production from the bottom six is hard to ignore, where players like Radek Faksa (0.39) and Matt Duchene (0.38) have been unable to rediscover past scoring form, leaving the Stars with a forward lineup that can overwhelm teams at the top but has clear soft spots underneath that can be exposed by opposing teams.
On the back end, the Stars lean heavily on a clear top three: Miro Heiskanen remains the engine, playing nearly 26 minutes a night while producing at an extremely strong point-per-game clip for a defenseman (0.89), followed by Esa Lindell (0.49) and Thomas Harley (0.54), who both log major minutes in the 23–24 range and help stabilize the Stars’ defense. That trio gives Dallas a lot of answers against top competition, but the picture gets murkier further down the lineup. The bottom three are noticeably shakier, with minutes and responsibility dropping off quickly, though Ilya Lyubushkin has held up reasonably well in a No. 4 role when asked — just in a far more limited, lower-minute deployment.
In net, Dallas is led by Jake Oettinger (.910 save percentage) with Casey DeSmith (.915) serving as the backup this season, and the tandem has produced excellent headline results. As mentioned above, their combined .920 save percentage at 5-on-5 has been a huge driver of the Stars’ success, helping sustain wins even when Dallas is getting outshot or outchanced.
And it appears Oettinger will be in net for this game, based on Dallas’ morning skate:
Stars morning skate lines vs Chicago: Steel – Johnston – Rantanen Robertson – Hintz – Bourque Hryckowian- Duchene – Benn Bäck – Faksa – Bastian Lindell – Heiskanen Harley – Lundkvist Capobianco – Petrovic Oettinger DeSmith * No Lyubushkin
— Sam Nestler (@samnestler.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 10:36 AM
The Blackhawks started the season looking a bit like the Stars — getting wins thanks to an unsustainably high shooting percentage and strong goaltending — but December has been a rude awakening. A string of injuries only compounded the regression, and now Chicago sits at the bottom of the league with a .444 points percentage after a six-game losing streak. The standings are still relatively close throughout the league, so there’s wiggle room to move back up, but they’d need to jump eight teams to reach the playoff picture, which seems unlikely. Instead, the focus should be on playing better in a sustainable, meaningful way. Obviously, wins would be great, but improvement for the young players is still the priority for a rebuilding franchise like Chicago.
On the player front, there’s not much to highlight: the Blackhawks have managed just 16 goals in their last 10 games, and Connor Bedard still leads the team with six points (2 G, 4 A) in that span despite missing half of those games. The team has also gotten some contributions from Andre Burakovsky (2 G, 4 A) and Wyatt Kaiser (3 G, 1 A), but the rest has been minimal. Chicago really needs to figure out how to work more effectively as a team to score and fill the void left by losing their star forward.
A schedule quirk means there’s no morning skate for the Hawks to offer a glimpse at what their lineup will be in this game, although there is one roster move to report:
In related news, Landon Slaggert has been called up
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) December 27, 2025
Slaggert should fit in somewhere within the lineup that was on the ice at the United Center for Tuesday’s final pre-Christmas game against the Flyers:
Blackhawks lineup in warmups
— Scott Powers (@ByScottPowers) December 24, 2025
Bertuzzi-Dickinson-Mikheyev
Teräväinen-Donato-Burakovsky
Moore-Greene-Lardis
Dach-Toninato-Lafferty
Vlasic-Crevier
Grzelcyk-Levshunov
Kaiser-Murphy
Knight
Söderblom
Tale of the Tape
Blackhawks — Statistic — Stars
46.48% (28th) — 5-on-5 Corsi For — 45.35% (31st)
44.18% (32nd) — 5-on-5 Expected goals for — 48.37% (22nd)
2.75 (26th) — Goals per game — 3.50 (2nd)
3.11 (17th) — Goals against per game — 2.61 (4th)
46.5% (30th) — Faceoffs — 52.2% (20th)
20.4% (14th) — Power play — 31.6% (2nd)
84% (4th) — Penalty kill — 82.6% (7th)
(All stats from this season)
How to watch
When: 7 p.m. CT
Where: American Airlines Center, Dallas
TV: CHSN
Webstream: ESPN+
Radio: WGN 720