2014 Playoffs – 16 Wins (Franchise Record)

Lore & Background

The Stars were founded during the 1967 NHL expansion as the Minnesota North Stars, based in Bloomington, Minnesota. Before the 1978–79 NHL season, the team merged with the Cleveland Barons after the league granted them permission due to each team's respective financial struggles. The franchise relocated to Dallas for the 1993–94 NHL season and was renamed the Dallas Stars.

In Their Own Story

The arena hummed with the low, electric buzz of a crowd that had been waiting all season for this. The ice was fresh, the boards still cold from the Zamboni's last pass, and the overhead lights cast a pale blue glow over the rink. A player laced his skates in the tunnel, the leather creaking softly, and pressed his stick against the wall to steady his breathing. Out on the ice, the puck sat at center face-off, small and black against the white, waiting. The referee dropped it. The sound of skates biting into ice echoed like a heartbeat. This was the 16th win. Not the loudest, not the most celebrated in the building's memory—that belonged to a different spring, a different banner—but this one carried the quiet weight of persistence, of a franchise that kept showing up, kept competing, kept adding one more victory to the ledger. The crowd's roar was a wall of sound, and for a moment, the only thing that existed was the puck, the stick, and the ice.

Reader's Guide

The Stars have won nine division titles in Dallas, two Presidents' Trophies as the top regular season team in the league, the Western Conference championship three times, and the Stanley Cup in 1999, when center Joe Nieuwendyk won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs. Over the course of the franchise's history in both Minnesota and Dallas, the team has appeared in the Stanley Cup Final five times (1981, 1991, 1999, 2000, and 2020).

Did You Know?

• Brett Hull was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009, but he was not the first player associated with the franchise to receive the honor—several players from the Minnesota North Stars era were inducted earlier.
• Mike Modano is the highest-scoring player in franchise history.
• The Stars played in Reunion Arena from 1993 to 2001, then moved to the American Airlines Center.