Yes this was a loss and be all accounts here the team played poorly. I would argue that as far as litmus tests go, they managed fairly well. Dallas, in my view, is the team to beat for the cup. They are loaded top to bottom and were without Tanev, Seguin, and Dadanov, and the whole team is trending upwards.
Given where we are at in getting our mojo back, Id say we faired as well as we could. Key is to not see it as a negative thing that we lost. It is to see that this team was on a serious run for the first half, got lost for a while, and slowly finding those ingredients that made us dominant again. Its like a slow congealing of confidence back into what made the first half work. The metric that the advanced analytics of Chef's line confirms that. Yes we lost but it appears that it was the little things were going right. We were always going to loose that game. Dallas is too good and the team to beat. It is about losing and sticking to your systems.
This is the perfect opponent to measure against on how you are doing systems-wise. It could have been a blowout, but it wasn't.