The Dallas Stars New Year’s Eve dominance continued on Tuesday night at the American Airlines Center.

Dallas used three third-period goals to pull ahead of a Buffalo team which seemed to have an answer until the very end.

“That’s a game where you can get impatient,” Dallas coach Pete DeBoer said. “Pucks aren’t going in. They’re a dangerous team, they don’t need many looks to stick it in the net. I just thought we had great patience, we just stuck with our game, stuck with our game and just grinded it out.”

Roope Hintz got the scoring started in the second period when he fired a wrister past Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen who had a strong night in net for Buffalo.

The Stars’ lead wouldn’t last long as less than a minute later, a puck deflected off Jason Zucker’s leg and into the net to tie things at one.

In the third period, Jason Robertson snapped one home to make it 2-1.

“I think we played well enough to deserve the win,” Robertson said. “We just kept pushing, pushing, the goalie [Lukkonen] made some great saves, but we kept following our fundamentals and got rewarded. We outshot them, had a lot of shots, lot of chances, and I think that’s a good game plan for each and every game.”

After Robertson’s goal, the Sabers once again had a response this time just over two minutes later to knot the game up at two.

With 11:32 left in the third period, Wyatt Johnston finished a gorgeous tip-in to give Dallas a 3-2 lead.

“Just got to the net. We’ve been talking a lot about getting pucks there, so just trying to get there. [Harley] threw one at me and just tried to tip it on net, and lucky enough it went in,” Johnston said.

“Cheating the game is not going to work in this league. It’s going to cost you a lot more than it’s going to help you. Sometimes it is tough when things are not going in, and you want to generate stuff every time you’re out there, but you’ve just got to keep doing the right things and eventually things will go in.”

Esa Lindell fired a “win a car” shot into the empty net at 18:23 to secure the 4-2 win for the Stars.

Casey DeSmith was strong in net all night for the Stars as he made 21 saves on 23 shot attempts.
“It would have been easy to cheat for offense and just press a little bit too hard and get burned on the counter-attack on the rush, but I don’t think we did that,” DeSmith said. “We did a great job staying out of the box. We took care of the puck all over the ice, especially in our end, and we just really limited their chances.”

Dallas will be back in action on Tuesday when they take on the Ottawa Senators in their first game of the 2025 year.