1993 Stanley Cup Game 7 vs New York Rangers

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. The Stars played in Reunion Arena in downtown Dallas from 1993 to 2001, when they moved into the American Airlines Center in Dallas's nearby Victory Park neighborhood, an arena they share with the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

In Their Own Story

The last light of the day was bleeding through the upper-deck windows of the Garden as the overtime face-off was set. The building was a single, roaring organism—thousands of voices compressed into one sustained note. Modano stood at the dot, stick planted, breathing hard. He could feel the vibration of the crowd through the ice, through the soles of his skates, up into his ribs. Belfour was already moving in his crease, eyes locked on the Rangers' forwards, jaw set. The puck dropped. For three, four seconds the world narrowed to the blade of a stick and the hollow *thwack* of a wrist shot that found a seam in the defense, a pass cut through traffic, and then—silence. A single, impossible silence in a building that had not been quiet in hours. Then the horn. Then the noise. Modano was already skating toward the bench, arms wide, and the Garden was a thousand people screaming at once, some in disbelief, some in celebration, all of them part of a night that would outlive the season, the decade, the very era it belonged to.

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?

• In 2000, Neal Broten was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.
• In 2009, Brett Hull became the first Dallas Stars player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, followed by Ed Belfour and Joe Nieuwendyk in 2011 and Mike Modano in 2014; Modano is the highest-scoring player in franchise
• Five further players and one coach have since been inducted into the Hall of Fame.