[united]

I thought the Stars looked rather disjointed, particularly their defensive group. Not often you can say either of Heiskanen or Tanev have off nights but both weren't near their best last night. That won't happen again.

Such is the dichotomy of rest in the playoffs. The narrative most commonly mentioned is the clear benefit of high-end players getting additional time to recover from nagging injuries - or returning all together - however seldom is the other side mentioned: the negative impact on cohesiveness of the team resulting.

Through a large sample of NHL games, the impact of rest is clearly established.
- Two days' rest is optimal, followed closely by three days' rest then one day's rest.
- From there, there is a material gap to four days' rest.
- Next is another gap to back-to-backs in which teams' struggles are well documented.
- However surprising to many is that after four days' rest, there is a precipitous decline in team performance: teams with five days' rest perform slightly worse than teams on back-to-backs and it declines significantly further the longer it goes. The implementation of the bye week cast further mainstream light on this, though the impact was even more dramatic given no hockey activity at all. However, for those who like to have some skin on games, there is still a game 1 market inefficiency in this respect (over the long term).

You want to win a series as quickly as possible for extremely obvious reasons, but it does come with a marked negative impact for game 1 of the following series.

Dallas was suffering from evident ring rust and should be much better in game 2 and beyond. Getting Hintz back will help as well once he's back in the groove.