"In a season in which Kari Lehtonen has been one of the Dallas Stars' best players, nobody is about to question the big goalie when he's having a statistical hiccup.

Lehtonen has allowed 10 goals in the past two games, including getting pulled Friday after giving up four goals on 14 shots in a 4-1 loss to the Vancouver Canucks. But Stars coach Marc Crawford said he will put Lehtonen right back into the net today against St. Louis, and the Stars players say they have full confidence in Lehtonen.

"I don't see any issue. I'm not concerned at all," Stars defenseman Stephane Robidas said. "I think we need to help him more and prevent the great scoring chances. You just don't look at him and say, 'He should have stopped that one.' That just doesn't happen much with him. If he gets beat, he gets beat because the other team made a good play, so we need to keep the other team from making those plays."

Lehtonen has been his own harshest critic this season, and he typically has said when the team loses that he has not been good enough. On Saturday, he and goalie coach Mike Valley worked on some details in his game, and Crawford said he saw the improvement in practice.

"He's working hard, and he'll be fine," Crawford said. "I'm very confident he'll work his way through it. First of all, you can see he had tremendous focus in his play in practice today, and then his execution in drills was really good."

Crawford said the Stars allowed Vancouver to get some excellent chances on the power play Friday, and that resulted in three goals with the Canucks' man advantage. The problem is that Stars fans have gotten used to Lehtonen coming up with tremendous saves in those situations.

"There's been a lot of nights this year, as our fans well know, where he has bailed the living heck out of our team," Crawford said."