It is April 1, 2006. I’m finishing my sophomore year of college in Los Angeles, and my older brother tells me some good news: the Kings have a promotion that allows college students to get premium seats at an exceptional discount.

As I recall, we got glass seats just to the right of the penalty boxes for something like 60 bucks a pop. Even granting that this was 20(!) years ago, it still felt like a great deal. Seeing any hockey game from the front row is an experience everyone should have if they ever get the opportunity, and doing so in a game between two division rivals with the Stars in first place? Well, that seemed like the perfect way to wrap up the first season after the lockout, particularly for a poor college student like myself.

These were, after all, the first-place Dallas Stars, the same club sitting on 49 wins and 102 points with nine games left to play.

For context, the Stars’ .699 points percentage at that time was better than the West-winning Stars of 2024, that team of the 113-point season. The 2005-06 Stars were known for being shootout fiends, sure; they were also a really, really good team.

(I talked with Jussi Jokinen in Finland a couple years ago about those shootouts and many other things, if you’d like to revisit that piece here.)

Anyway, here John and I were in Los Angeles, and we were pumped to watch the Stars up close after viewing a barn-burner in Anaheim the night before that ended in an uncharacteristic shootout loss, with the Ducks taking a 5-4 win. Andy MacDonald had scored a goal to tie the game up with less than three minutes remaining in the third, and Marty Turco had let in the first two shots of the skills competition while Jokinen and Antti Miettinen went 0-for-2.

It was a bummer of a game, but I recall us talking at the time about how at least we saved the good tickets for the Kings game, which would surely have a better result than the shootout loss to the Ducks. Surely!

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Jim Nill said last week that he expects the Stars are pretty much set for the summer. That means that we can officially start prognosticating and projecting, which is to say pretending that our guesses are actually expertise.

As much as keeping Jason Robertson for at least a little while longer is a good thing, there is still a pretty stark reality facing these Stars: they did not get deeper than they were last year. Losing Mavrik Bourque would indicate quite the opposite, in fact. The Stars will need to hope for better injury luck from nearly all of their key players, because they don’t have another first-round talent with NHL experience on the wing ready to take another big step.

There’s always a certain portion of any fanbase that is prone to proclaiming cynicism. When I was growing up, my friend Nick was a big Red Sox fan. I remember Nick repeatedly using the term “worthless” to describe, at various times, Jason Varitek, Kevin Youkilis, Doug Mientkiewicz, Dustin Pedroia, and a host of other players from that legendary 2004 Red Sox team. Mind you, he kept doing this any time one of them would have a bad game even after 2004, when they all broke the curse together. The instant things started looking grim, Nick would start ripping his guys.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. When you care about something and it hurts you, the natural reaction is to steel yourself against further hurt the next time, keeping expectations a bit lower, and waiting a bit longer before opening yourself up, which is to say it’s the hope that kills you, and people are generally disposed to staying alive.

Little wonder, in that light, that so many people are readying themselves for a relative bummer of a Dallas Stars season. Not only did the Stars lose Bourque while adding no significant talent to last year’s team (with apologies to Joel Kiviranta), but they’re also coming off their worst first-round series in five years. Even the most ardent flame of optimism needs a little fuel, after all.

We’ve spent enough time pushing back against that pessimism, so you know the case is pretty much what Nill laid out last week: better health from key players could be the big difference-maker. And while Nill didn’t add this part, I’ll go ahead and state that if the Stars were to drop from last year’s 112 points down all the way to a mere 99 points, that trade off will be worth it if they have a healthier team in April. It’s not like the path out of the Central Division is ever an easy one.

As for the doom and gloom, the case is more complicated. Cynicism clouds our judgment, and we swing wildly from elation to devastation. So, let’s try to give a clear-eyed appraisal of just what could go wrong, and the most likely effects of what such events could mean, for this Dallas Stars team.

Commencing Hypothetical Pessimism

Roope Hintz is one of the biggest X-factors, as his absence in the playoffs clearly made life easier on the Minnesota Wild. He and Jason Robertson were play-driving monsters (relatively speaking here), and while Matt Duchene performed admirably in his stead, the loss of Hintz (and later Hyry) cemented Dallas with essentially two fourth lines in the playoffs, and Minnesota feasted.

But what if Hintz at 30 years old isn’t the X-factor he used to be, especially after getting his hamstring torn in multiple places? After all, his underlying trajectory is already starting to mirror that of a lot of players entering their thirties, and he hasn’t hit 70 points since Pete DeBoer’s first year in Dallas. What if Hintz, healthy or not, just isn’t the player he used to be?

Here’s a fun1 trivia question for you: in 53 regular season games last year, how many 5v5 goals do you think Roope Hintz scored? The answer is not a terribly encouraging one.

You could add Tyler Seguin’s name to that final sentence, too. He’s shown all the highs and lows his game can bring over the past few years, but there is a probably a non-zero chance that at some point, his deluge of devastating lower-body injuries is going to take away more of his production than his work ethic and hockey IQ can add. The Stars are in a position, this year, where they kind of have to count on both Hintz and Seguin, but there is a real possibility that neither can be what the team will need them to be.

Injuries aside, let’s talk about aging curves in general, as the four oldest players on the Stars are all in that range where you kind of have to operate on a year-to-year basis in terms of expectations: Matt Duchene, Jamie Benn, Tyler Myers, and Casey DeSmith. We’ll begin with the goaltending.

For DeSmith, it’s worth pointing out that goalies are more volatile than other positions, which can often exacerbate age-related decline. However, I remain pretty optimistic about DeSmith based on what we’ve seen the last two years, and in Gulutzan’s D-zone system last year in particular. Decline is inevitable for all human beings, but with a backup’s typical workload, DeSmith should be well-positioned to continue providing surplus value.

If he doesn’t, then the Stars are in the position of needing to either go out and grab a backup from elsewhere, or to ask Rémi Poirier to make his NHL debut in a very critical season. That could work out well, but if we’re strictly discussing the worst-case scenarios, then we have to mention that it could also not work out well. Poirier is an unknown quantity, and many promising goalies struggle to make the leap and stick in the best league in the world. If DeSmith takes a step back and Poirier can’t take a step forward, then your goalie situation is sketchy, putting even more pressure on Jake Oettinger to re-find his best game after a particularly disappointing season. And with his trade protection now in effect, the Stars don’t really have an alternative if Oettinger can’t get back to his best self. Ask the Oilers how frustrating it can be to have a great team that can’t find consistent goaltending.

Tyler Myers is in a less critical position, and I still tend to think he can approximate what Ilya Lyubushkin was bringing (and at half the price) for the last couple of years. If he can’t, though, the Stars don’t have Alex Petrovic to recall anymore. That means the next RHD up would be Kyle Burroughs, probably. How do you feel about Kyle Burroughs as a starting defenseman on a team with Cup aspirations? Probably the average fan is hoping they don’t have to answer that question.

Jamie Benn is Jamie Benn. Certainly you have an opinion about Jamie Benn that no paragraph in July is going to change either way, and we’ve seen so many highs and lows of his career that you don’t need a hypothesis to picture them. If he looks a step slower this season, his playoff performance could be tough to watch. And as we mentioned at the end of last season, he’s not exactly a player you can really scratch when he might need it. That can create a predicament, especially for a team light on depth as it is.

But of all the five 35+ players on the roster, I believe Matt Duchene is the one who could affect things the most. We saw what happened last year when he was struggling with symptoms from his vestibular concussion, and we then saw what he could do when healthy and in a good spot. Duchene is signed for three more years at $4.5 million, which is a bargain when he’s producing like he can.

The most worrying thing about Duchene, for me, was how uncomfortable he looked on the wing last year. I’d always kind of expected him to make a Pavelski-like transition to wing at some point in the four-year deal he signed, but his inability to make it work last year gives me pause. Yes, he wound up being a critical center when the Stars needed him most, but the Stars might need scoring wingers even more than centers in the near future. If Duchene can’t help with that situation and he loses a step in the back half of his thirties, I’m not sure how much value he’ll be able to retain down the middle.

Moving onto the other guys at the top of the lineup, I remain pretty optimistic about the blue line (though not quite as much as I’d be if that blue line included the reigning Norris Trophy winner). Miro Heiskanen and Esa Lindell are wonderfully complementary players, and Nils Lundkvist showed last year how much value he can bring at a bargain of a deal. Lian Bichsel is entering the final year of his ELC, and remains the youngest player on the roster, barring a training camp surprise.

Thomas Harley remains the point of my concern, and I wonder if the attempted Werenski trade revealed some of the Stars’ own concerns, too. That’s not to say that you don’t trade Harley for Werenski every time on a pure talent-for-talent basis, but I have to wonder if the Stars have some lingering questions about Harley’s up-and-down season last year. If he can’t carve out his own role behind Heiskanen, then how can Harley bring a value equivalent to his $10 million cap hit?

I’m still betting on Harley, because he’s simply shown too much too early in his career not to be a smart bet. But on the deal he’s now on, Harley is no longer a luxury; he has to be a lynchpin. If he can’t drive a dangerous defense pairing, it will be hard for him (and his team) to fight off some frustration.

As for the forward group, what else is there to say? The power play carried the team for long stretches last year, and despite 45-goal seasons from two players, their 5v5 production was smack-dab in the middle of the pack at 16th. The Columbus Blue Jackets scored more 5v5 goals than the Stars did, last season.

That’s kind of what we worried could happen when the team with the 6th-best 5v5 offense lost Marchment, Granlund, and Dadonov last offseason. Robertson absolutely carried this team at 5v5 last season, where he scored 25 times—nine more than any other Stars player. But it was a top-heavy offense indeed, and those tend to fall a bit more easily than ones with deeper foundations.

Justin Hryckowian could hit a sophomore slump as more pressure lands on his shoulders and the league scouts him more heavily. Wyatt Johnston and Mikko Rantanen, for all their superstar production, showed that they can be contained in crunch time when the chips are down (at even-strength, at least). The Stars’ assemblage of fourth-liners don’t look likely to generate much more surplus production than they did last year, which is more of a problem than it might have been three years ago. At a team level, the Stars profile as a group that needs to do what they did last year, relying less on overwhelming force than on strategic bunkering, striking when the iron is hot and biding their time otherwise.

Glen Gulutzan told the media after the season ended that they’d considered some neutral zone changes, so we’ll see if those come to fruition in September. If you’re the Stars, you kind of have to make some changes, if only to ensure that you reach whatever this group’s true ceiling is. With the top end of their lineup, this roster still profiles as a team that could win any game on any given night, and I’d still take them to win four of seven against 90%2 of the teams in the league.

The weird thing about searching for this team’s floor is that you keep running up against how high its ceiling can really be. Any team is capable of bottoming out in any given season, and by rights, the Stars probably should have been the team in the West to do that last year, when everybody and their uncle got injured. Instead, Gulutzan’s group found a way to rip 112 points from their opponents, and they came within an eyelash of taking a 3-1 series lead over Minnesota.

Still, we have to acknowledge the reality that if the Stars struggle to start the year, more than one domino could fall. Jason Robertson’s contract status means that if the Stars are not looking like a cup contender when the calendar flips over, the Stars would have to seriously consider selling him to the highest bidder if they can’t find a number that both sides are willing to extend with. Every player in that locker room will be aware of the specter of losing one of their best players hanging over the team.

So if things are rocky to start the year, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they could be compounded. If some age-related decline affects some key players, that could combine with the misfortune of injuries to create a level of unrest that this locker room has steadfastly refused to tolerate. Even the best of teams has a breaking point, and this would be the first season in a long while where the Stars would have to seriously consider punting on the year if things aren’t lining up. And coming back from such a re-tool is always more easily said than done—especially with a Stars roster that doesn’t really have many players on it that are eligible to be moved and who would command any sort of significant return.

That’s where the just-abouts of Nill’s attempted trades this summer could wind up haunting the team for years to come. Because if the Stars can’t capitalize on the current window, it’s hard to see them finding a way to extend it more effectively than the combination of those two deals could have done. Selling from a position of strength tends to elicit a far better return than doing so out of desperation.

If you want to be pessimistic about the Stars, you have ample opportunity to do so, as illustrated above (and at times last season). But the other side of the coin is that these Stars simply have too much talent—both drafted and otherwise acquired—not to remain a force. The Maple Leafs may have gone from 108 points to 78 after losing Mitch Marner, but that was also a team without a functional goaltender or anything approximating a high-quality blue line.

As much as we’ve spent the last 2,000 words searching for every bit of looming disaster on the roster, it’s hard not to run up against the fact that a team as good as the Stars usually won’t go gently into that good night until overwhelming amounts of disaster arrive. And if last year didn’t qualify as significantly disastrous, maybe you would have been better off not thinking too terribly hard about what such a disaster might have to look like. Sorry about that.

I moved to a new place on the other side of Dallas this week. All things considered, choosing what wound up being the hottest week of the year for a move probably wasn’t great foresight, but that’s what I get for buying a crystal ball from that guy in the Torchy’s parking lot.

My old place in Valley Ranch was great, but it was time for a change. I’d moved there back in 2019 when the world and I were very different, so a spot in 2026 that didn’t entail hour-long drives on game days was long overdue.

Today, I’m surrounded by unpacked boxes, but there’s excitement, too.1 Change is inevitable, but there’s something invigorating about seizing it before your hand gets forced, like diving underneath a big wave just before it crashes on top of you.

Now, would I have stayed in my old place if someone had paid me $12 million to do so? Sure I would have, at least for a year. This is what we in the writing world call a “syllogism,”2 which is just one of the many words I can use to demonstrate why I would be worth $12 million, should someone discover within themselves a strange desire to so compensate me.

Jason Robertson did not move this week, as we discussed when his own one-year extension happened Tuesday evening. Why that extension happened when it did is not entirely clear, even if there are a few things we can deduce.

When we in the media (you might think of us as “a collection of syllogisms”) were asking both Jim Nill and Jason Robertson about why the deal got done when it did, they didn’t appear terribly eager to reveal who bent first.

Here’s part of Jim Nill’s response when asked about the timing:

“They had to go through their process. We had to go through our process. And in the end, you know, they filed. Deadlines always help to get things finished, which is important. This could have gone, I think I mentioned the last time we met here at the end of the summer, that I don’t know where this is gonna go. But deadlines help, which is, I think, good for both parties. I talked to Jason this morning. We had a good talk, and he’s up in Detroit. He just wants to continue his training and get excited about this year. He loves hockey, and he just wants to be training and know where he’s gonna be at for this season. So that’s a long story short.”

-Jim Nill, 7/22/26

Clear enough for you? Okay then, let’s try for Jason Robertson. Here was his answer:

“Well, I mean, kind of knew where I was going. Saturday being that deadline and those meetings and everything. I think it was in our best interest to try to avoid that and figure out something before that and do something we’d both be content and happy with.”

-Jason Robertson, 7/222/26

If I might be so bold as to summarize those answers, I’d say that the prospect of arbitration was unpleasant enough to both sides that $12 million at one year began to feel not only acceptable, but even appealing, giving the alternatives. Anyone who’s ever tried to take frontage roads during rush hour knows just how tolerable it can be the next time to head up the on-ramp, joining the thousands of others who fork over their change rather than stagger through a series of jammed intersections.

You can listen to both of the above pressers in full by clicking on the linked names above. If you do, you might just come away with the same impression I did: there are clouds on the horizon, and everyone knows it.

To be clear, Jim Nill was adamant that Jason Robertson wants to be a Dallas Star. Take this answer to the question about whether January/February is another deadline for re-signing Robertson, given the NHL trade deadline shortly thereafter:

“Well, [January 1] is when we can do a new agreement. But I think we’ll be talking before that. And, you know, things happen. It’s a long ways away. A lot of things happen in this game. You know, you look back over the last two, three years, things that happen in the business. You don’t know, but that’s our plan. Let’s get the season going. He knows where he’s at. We’re happy where he’s at. We’re happy he wants to be Dallas Star. We want him to be a Dallas Star. I’ve had those discussions. Like I said, we want to make this work, and so does he.”

-Jim Nill, 7/22/26

And then here was Robertson, when asked by Greg Wyshynski how he reconciles the fact that Dallas says they want him to retire a Star but were only able to sign him to a one-year deal:

“At the end of the day, it’s a business for them, for me, everything. I don’t know their future plans. They don’t know their future plans either. It’s too soon, so raw. It just happened yesterday. We’re both so content on getting it done and having time to re-evaluate both our futures.”

-Jason Robertson, 7/22/26

Robertson in particular was very careful with his answers, and understandably so. But if you really want to do the Big Media Market thing and overanalyze every word he used, you might take note of the fact that Robertson used a couple of “theys” when referring to the Stars during the presser. Now, given that he has been involved in tough negotiations with the team for months now, that’s a completely understandable way to phrase things. He and his camp were on one side (and will be again in a few months), while Jim Nill and the Stars are on the other. Personally, I’m not reading into things any more than that at present, but it’s just something to file away. When a player says “they were in a little crunch,” when referring to the Stars’ cap situation, my ears perk up.

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The Jason Robertson saga is over, at least for the time being. Dallas announced Tuesday evening that Jason Robertson and the Stars have agreed to a one-year, $12 million deal in advance of his salary arbitration hearing, which had been scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.

For the Stars, they get Robertson signed at the $12 million figure they’ve been sticking to since negotiations really began in earnest. For Robertson, he gets the certainty of a deal that really has no precedent, as he could potentially have made less that figure in arbitration, as we discussed last week.

As a reminder, here are the top RFA wingers who have signed deals in the last few years—and who would likely have been the primary comps for Robertson in arbitration:

One suspects that Robertson came to the conclusion that he wasn’t likely to make much more than $12 million in arbitration, and potentially even a bit less. Since arbitration figures are different things than a player’s actual value on the market as an unrestricted free agent, getting a deal done at the number Robertson and Dallas did effects a compromise that avoids any further risk for both sides.

For the Stars, they probably also don’t mind the number because it keeps their cap structure for this season at least relatively manageable. They’ve above the salary cap by a bit over $1 million as things stand now, but if everyone on the roster is healthy after preseason games wrap up, Dallas can start the season under the limit without having to make any more trades. All they’d need to do is send two players (I’d bet on Arttu Hyry and Kyle Capobianco) down to the AHL to start the year, then bring them back up the moment an injury strikes—or when enough cap space has been accrued to fit one of them as-is.

Hyry, by the way, is still waivers-exempt, while Capobianco profiles as someone likely to clear them, like he did last year. But that might not even be necessary, because if Dallas begins the season with a player on LTIR like they did last fall, they could send down both of the waivers-exempt players on their roster (Hyry and Lian Bichsel) and finagle things to get as close to the cap as possible before putting someone on LTIR, thereby maximizing their LTIR pool.

The most surprising part of this whole thing might be that the Stars and Robertson managed to agree on anything at all, given how tough this negotiation has been. But deadlines make headlines, and that remained the case on Tuesday, when things finally got settled.

Here’s the first part of the Stars’ press release:

FRISCO, Texas – Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that the club has signed forward Jason Robertson to a one-year contract that will carry an annual average value (AAV) of $12 million.

“Jason has been a cornerstone of our franchise since he was drafted in 2017,” said Nill. “A dynamic and skilled player, he has been one of the league’s top offensive threats since making his NHL debut. We’re excited for what this season will bring for both Jason and the team as we continue our push to bring a championship to Dallas.”

Nill and Robertson will each speak with the media tomorrow (Wednesday).

We discussed a lot of the finer details of what a one-year deal means for Robertson on Monday, so check that out if you haven’t yet. One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that Robertson will no longer be able to sign an eight-year extension, as those will be phased out when the new CBA kicks in two months from now.

Instead, Robertson will now be eligible to sign an extension on January 1, 2027. That could be the new maximum term of a seven-year deal with Dallas, who will have more room to maneuver with Tyler Seguin’s $9.85 million cap hit coming off the books that same summer. It could also wind up being with another team, if he and the Stars still don’t see eye-to-eye on his long-term value. Because as we’ve discussed, the Stars simply can’t afford to walk Robertson all the way to free agency next summer. If they can’t work out an extension, then he’ll likely be traded before the deadline.

In other words, this deal does what arbitration would have done anyway: kick the can down the road. It simply happened more efficiently. Any sort of harmony between Robertson and the Stars is noteworthy at this point, though.

If you’re looking for some kind of indication about whether Robertson and the Stars could wind up working out an extension, then I suppose the fact that they came to even a small agreement is worth noting. But for my part, I’d have to think Robertson might wind up looking for even more than the rumored $14 million he was asking for this summer, particularly if he has another strong season.

For the Stars’ on-ice situation, you can at least remove all the qualifiers from your projected lineups. Because barring further trades, we will probably see something like the below, come opening night:

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Kiviranta/Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

Oettinger
DeSmith

The hope would be that Seguin is healthy enough to match (or even exceed) what Bourque did last season, and that Harley can look more like himself than he did to start last year. There is a world where that happens, and it’s worth acknowledging it. A healthier Stars team could be a very, very good one, once again.

More likely, however, the Stars will profile as a team that would be fortunate to repeat their 112-point performance with what is essentially a thinner version of the same group from last year, depending on what you think of Tyler Myers and Joel Kiviranta.

If the team struggles and Robertson’s ask is too high for Dallas to stomach, will the Stars look at moving Robertson for multiple pieces, as they nearly did with Seattle earlier this summer? Teams do tend to get desperate when elite players are on the market midseason, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Dallas keeps that option firmly on the table when (and if) negotiations with Robertson and agent Andy Scott pick back up.

Alternatively, the Stars might be more open to going to a higher number with Robertson next summer, both because they’ll have more room to do so and because the market will probably have shifted enough to make even a $14 or $15 million ask seem not unreasonable. Being a little further out from Rantanen’s extension might also make such a deal more palatable for the team, but that’s only speculation.

In any case, the Stars and Robertson have made peace for now. As was the case last year, the best thing Robertson can do for his next contract is to go out and have another whale of a season. That would only be a good thing for Dallas—whether it’s for this year, or for many more years to come.

I was in a good friend’s wedding this past Saturday. After the ceremony and photos were finished, I was able to get back to the reception in time to finally eat some food. (What is it about weddings that makes one so ravenously hungry?)

So, I got my plate filled up in the buffet line, but I couldn’t make it more than ten feet back without running into someone I knew, and so conversation superseded ingestion for a while. Finally, I wound up taking my plate and heading into the kitchen, where I had a moment to eat in peace. That moment lasted until I got halfway through a chicken salad croissant, when someone saw me and said, “So, what’s up with Jason Robertson?”

That anecdote was just to illustrate how this is still a topic causing Stars fans some anxiety no matter where they are. So, let’s see if we can clear some more of the remaining fog between Robertson and the Stars as they hurtle towards some kind of clarity this weekend.

Barring any trades, Jason Robertson and the Dallas Stars will have a new contract by about this time next week, if not sooner. Per PuckPedia, Robertson’s salary arbitration hearing is scheduled for Saturday, July 25.

Robertson is one of six remaining RFAs (as of this writing) who have not yet settled on a new contract with his team, and while many players can wind up settling right up until the beginning of the hearing, Jim Nill generally prefers to get things wrapped up sooner. For things to have gotten this far (with Mavrik Bourque having to be moved in the meantime) suggests that the two sides really have been just too far apart for any reasonable compromise to be possible. Thus, a third-party will have to resolve the situation.

I don’t claim to know what Jim Nill is thinking, but a couple situations from his Stars tenure have stuck with me when it comes to how these sorts of negotiations can go. So at risk of invoking irrelevant anecdotes, let’s touch on a couple of times Nill and a Stars player had to grind out a deal in the past, because I think it’s instructive.

Defenseman Brenden Dillon didn’t have arbitration rights in 2014. Mike Heika reported at the time that Dillon and his agent were looking for a two-year deal at $3.8 million coming out of his ELC—around the same AAV Cody Eakin had just signed for (and with the very same agent).

But the Stars weren’t looking to go that rich, it turned out. Dillon would eventually sign a one-year deal with Dallas for $1.25 million in early October, right before the season began. And just over a month later, Dillon would be traded away in a package for Jason Demers.

While I don’t think the way negotiations between Dillon and Dallas went was the reason1 Dillon was moved, I have always wondered if Dillon might have stayed in Dallas longer if he had been able to get signed to a longer-term deal. Instead, things went a different way. When a team and player don’t see eye-to-eye on the player’s value, it can be an indication that their paths will diverge before too long.

For contrast, how about a situation where Nill did settle with a player on the cusp of a hearing? Because there was another tough negotiation in 2014 where the Stars almost had to go to a third-party arbitrator, only for the Stars and a certain Antoine Roussel to settle on a long-term deal at the last minute, avoiding arbitration in the nick of time with a four-year, $2 million AAV contract.

Obviously, Robertson’s deal is going to be a much, much trickier one to navigate, but hey: precedent is precedent. There’s one other tough negotiation that I always think of when it comes to arbitration and the Stars, though. And in fact, it’s the only time I can remember Jim Nill actually going to salary arbitration during his Stars’ tenure.

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The home of Stars broadcasts is experiencing some rare turmoil this week, as at least two teams in its fold are reportedly leaving the Victory+ platform.

On Wednesday, we learned about the Texas Rangers’ jumping ship effective immediately. Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported today that the Rangers will be moving from Victory+ to BZZR as of this Friday, following the All Star break. BZZR is a new streaming platform the name of which I don’t know how to pronounce, and which also doesn’t appear to have a television app yet. One would expect that such an app is being worked on behind the scenes.

As Rangers’ broadcaster Jared Sandler said today, this was apparently a move the Rangers made out of necessity, not an opportunistic one:

That necessity, as Grant also mentioned in the DMN piece, was related to “growing concerns about the viability and financial solvency of Victory+.” As Sports Business Journal reported today as well, Victory+ has been unable to secure as much additional financing as they had hoped to do, and that’s led to the platform encountering issues in making minimum payments to teams whose games it’s broadcasting—an issue eerily similar to what happened in the final days of RSNs like Bally Sports before teams like the Stars and Rangers left those platforms.

Per SBJ, Victory+ was in conversations with some NBA teams about broadcasting their games, but the inability to secure additional financing coupled with the NBA’s developing a centralized league broadcasting solution for the 2027-28 season meant that partnering with teams for only one year ultimately meant that any such short-term move wouldn’t be worth it.

From everything that’s out there, it sounds like the Rangers were concerned that Victory+ would be unable to meet its financial obligations, which would in turn put the Rangers’ ability to meet its own contractual broadcasting obligations in jeopardy. Thus, the Rangers moved to another platform in the short term to ensure the continued broadcast of their games rather than risk further uncertainty with Victory+.

Alex Silverman also reports that the NHL is setting up a similar sort of league-controlled broadcasting platform for a few teams caught in RSN no-man’s land for the upcoming season. The nature of that platform is still unclear, though as of a few months ago, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had said the approach would be more of a supportive one than the fully-formed streaming platform like other leagues are planning to do.

It sounds like the lack of additional financing for Victory+ has begun to show up in the present for other teams as well, as the Anaheim Ducks are also leaving the platform this season, per Sports Business Journal:

As part of the launch of the Rangers Sports Network in early 2025, the Rangers had chosen Victory+ as their initial DTC partner and offered fans a yearly paid subscription option. Since February, however, Victory+ has had difficulty securing additional financing. And according to multiple sources, Victory+ has had trouble making its minimum guarantee payments to teams in multiple leagues.

Victory+ has streamed games free for the NHL’s Stars and Ducks and WNBA’s Lynx and Dream. However, the Ducks have informed Victory+ that they plan to terminate their agreement with the company as well. It is unclear whether the Stars will remain with Victory+. In the case of the Lynx and Dream, those teams do not receive a minimum guarantee and are merely in an advertising revenue share with Victory+.

-Sports Business Journal
7/15/26

The Stars and Ducks were something of a success story last season, by all accounts, as the teams found a relatively smooth solution in the uncertain world following the collapse of the RSN model. That success was short-lived, it would seem.

You can read more about the Ducks’ decision here, but this excerpt was especially pertinent.

The Ducks have informed streaming platform Victory+ that they intend to terminate their local streaming agreement, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. The team, which had two more seasons remaining on its deal with Victory+, is in the process of finding another direct-to-consumer streaming partner for the 2026-27 season […] Multiple sources told SBJ that Victory+ has missed rights payments to several of its partners in recent months.

-Sports Business Journal
7/15/26

Victory+ (APMC) has yet to return requests for comment. As for the Dallas Stars, the team told me today that things are “status quo” between them and Victory+ right now. We’ll see what happens as the NHL season approaches.

(The Stars understandably declined to comment on proceedings between the Rangers and Victory+.)

Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts had mentioned some concerns about the economics behind the Stars’ free broadcasting model for Victory+ when he spoke with me a couple of weeks ago, but there was no mention of teams leaving the platform at that point.

For the time being, the Stars will apparently be broadcasting games on Victory+ when the NHL season starts, but a lot of things are still unclear. We’ll have more on this story as it develops, as it is sure to do.

I haven’t put this out on social media yet, but I wanted to give a small update for y’all here about the fact that I’m adding another byline this upcoming season. Starting this month, I’m the new NHL.com correspondent covering the Dallas Stars.

First: I’m going to be an independent correspondent, so nothing around here should change much at all. Stars Thoughts will keep doing its thing as we enter our third(!) season together, and you will still see my work popping up in magazines and podcasts1 and other places. (Or even in-person, if you’re at Boomerjacks on August 11!)

The main reason I wanted to let y’all know here first is because this new role will probably mean some very minor changes next season, and I wanted to let y’all who are keeping this place going exactly what I anticipate those changes looking like.

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Welcome to the Monday Rundown, where we cover a few different topics after beginning with a bit o’ nonsense. Today’s nonsense is food.

While I was coming back from the airport yesterday on the Orange1 Line, I got to talking with a man who was in town for the World Cup. He asked me about restaurant recommendations for Irving on a Sunday night as well as Dallas in general, and that involved a lot of double-checking hours and menus as well, as well as convoluted explanations of Texas barbecue fare.

Thankfully, his English was much better than my Spanish, so I’m hopeful that he wound up getting a good bite to eat, but it did drive home a point for me: despite being back in this city for the last seven years, I still don’t know nearly enough of the best places to eat in D/FW.

So, I put it to you: what is the one spot you would tell any out-of-towner to eat at? Do you, like me, find yourself thinking about the polenta at Corrientes 348 way too often, or do you resort to red meat at Terry Black’s or Del Frisco’s Double Eagle? Lucia? Mamani? We’re spoiled for choice in this town, sometimes.

Thankfully, D Magazine has their typically indispensable list of such places, but I want to hear from y’all: What restaurant is solidly above and beyond all others in the area, in your expert opinion?

Now that we’re all hungry, let’s do that hockey.

Jason Robertson’s arbitration hearing set for July 25

By now, you know that Robertson’s hearing has been set for the 25th of July. The Stars have up until that hearing begins to reach a settlement with Robertson (or to trade him, if they desire).

If no settlement is reached by the time the hearing begins, then the hearing will proceed to completion, and the arbitrator will e-mail their decision within 48 hours of the end of the hearing. No settlement can be reached once the hearing starts.

Right now, I have a hard time seeing either party be especially motivated to settle, which is pretty rare for salary arbitration. But given that comparisons are limited to Robertson’s fellow RFAs (meaning no-go on players like Mikko Rantanen and Kirill Kaprizov, who signed deals as pending UFAs), I think the Stars can pretty reasonably anticipate that Robertson’s one-year number resulting from arbitration would come in at or even below the $12 million they’ve reportedly been targeting in negotiations.

Remember, only certain evidence is allowed to be used in arguing your arbitration case: Robertson’s reliability is a point in his favor, and even more so will be his elite scoring numbers. He really is one of the elite scoring wingers in the NHL, and he’s been asking for compensation that reflects that fact in negotiations (or reportedly asking, we should say).

On the other side of things, Robertson’s lack of of having worn a letter as an alternate captain will surely be mentioned by the team’s side, as well as the fact that he plays winger rather than center (like, for example, someone like Leo Carlsson does). His (smaller than you think) playoff scoring dip compared to his regular season production also would seem pertinent to a team looking to build a case for lower compensation.

PuckPedia has a handy comparison chart, if you haven’t seen it. If you’re Robertson and his agent, I suppose you’ll be hoping to invoke comparisons like Elias Pettersson, who signed for over 13% of the salary cap when he was a 26-year-old RFA (though again, Pettersson plays primarily center and takes tons of faceoffs). That 13% number equates to $13.5 million now. Matthew Tkachuk is perhaps a better comparison, though he signed at a younger age and after scoring more than Robertson, if you can believe it (before injuries slowed him way down the last two years). Tkachuk got $9.5 million (just over Robertson’s qualifying of $9.3 million), but that was 11.5% of the cap at the time, which equates to just about $12 million today.

Anything is possible, but I really do think somewhere between $11-12 million is the likely outcome, if both sides go through arbitration. An arbitrator handing down a one-year deal over $12 million would make Robertson one of the seven highest-paid players in the entire league. This would be surprising to me, and I think I have pretty good reason for saying so. Here are the ten highest cap hits resulting from a contract a player signed as an RFA:

You will notice that nine of those ten contracts come in at $11.6 million or under. In other words, Robertson’s camp needs to argue convincingly that Leo Carlsson’s deal—as a far younger player playing a different forward position. Remember, arbitration hearings are very different things from negotiations. Whether Robertson actually will be worth $14 million is an entirely different discussion from whether he can justify it in the strict confines of an arbitration hearing.

Let’s narrow it down one last time to RFA contracts only for wingers, as I would guess the Stars would be doing when speaking their piece:

I think you can pretty easily argue that Robertson is a better player than Pavel Dorofeyev, who just signed a long-term deal for $11 million. But whether you can argue that a one-year deal should come in at a far higher number than a seven-year deal is another matter entirely.

The more I look at things, the more convinced I am that Robertson’s camp has nothing to lose by swinging big in an arbitration hearing. If you get lucky, the arbitrator is convinced that the market has shifted significantly in the last few months, and Robertson gets a higher reward accordingly. Thus, I don’t see a ton of motivation for them to settle in advance.

And if you’re Dallas, there’s good reason to expect (as I tend to) that a one-year award comes in closer to the scale set by the majority of comparable salaries than by one or two outliers. As elite as Robertson has been, he’s got his work cut out for him to come out of arbitration with a number that truly makes life difficult for Dallas in the short term.

If he does get a number well above $12 million, then the Stars can still make another move or two if needed. They can also trade him if it truly wrecks their cap for now, but even that wouldn’t need to happen immediately, as teams can go over the cap a bit during the summer.

But the way Dallas have gone about their business since July 1 makes me suspect that they would prefer to fit Robertson into this year’s plan for now, then explore trades in the coming months (or long-term extensions, if that possibility even exists after the painful process of arbitration). Teams often get a bit more hungry at the trade deadline, as you might recall from March 2025.

Lessons learned from Werenski rumors

Elliotte Friedman reported last week that the Stars’ offer to Columbus for Zach Werenski was Thomas Harley and Mavrik Bourque. And if you’d told me that back in April, I would’ve initially thought it was perhaps too steep a price, even for one of the best defensemen in the league.

But given the way things played out with Bourque—whose camp appears to have known that he could command $5+ million after hitting 20 goals—I think the offer makes a lot more sense. With other teams seeing the Stars’ cap crunch coming, I have to think that no really premium offers for Bourque were ever on the table. Thus, including him in the Harley/Werenski swap not only would have preserved draft capital for Dallas, but it also would have made their offer far better than a team like Toronto’s. It also would have allowed them to avoid what ended up happening: losing Bourque for roughly the equivalent of what an impending offer sheet would have returned.

Friedman also reported on that same podcast that he believes Werenski was kind of thrown off by how things accelerated in so short a time, and that this led to some kind of misunderstanding or miscommunication between his camp and Columbus (and as a result, Dallas) about his willingness to go to the Stars.

As for the other almost-trade, I still don’t know that we’ll ever get the truth about why the Stars believed Robertson was willing to sign an extension with Seattle in the attempted trade before the draft, but that deal also would have been one where Dallas recouped serious value for a seriously great player—with Dallas essentially doing the reverse of the Werenski deal and trading an older, more proven Robertson for a younger Knies (after flipping one of Seattle’s picks to Toronto) and bringing in two more assets as well.

Imagine the alternate scenario where both of Jim Nill’s big swings worked out: Dallas moves Jason Robertson, Thomas Harley, and Mavrik Bourque, and gets a return of something like two first-rounders, Matthew Knies, and Zach Werenski. You can argue about the long-term pros and cons of such maneuvering, but it certainly looks more attractive for Dallas than what wound up happening instead.

For the time being, you can fault Jim Nill for how things have worked out—NHL GMs have to own both their successes and their failures—but I don’t think you can fault him for trying to make lemonade out of some very tricky lemons.

(The salary cap is the lemons, I guess, or maybe a lemon tree. Does that make Tyler Myers a…Myers lemon?)

Announcing a live meetup on Tuesday, August 11

If you haven’t heard yet, Gavin Spittle of 105.3 the Fan has organized a unique and really fun event: On Tuesday, August 11, we’re doing a live meet & greet, Q&A session, and podcast recording at Boomerjacks in Allen. (Technically Fairview, I guess, as the Boomerjacks address is 131 E Stacy Road Fairview, TX.)

The meetup starts at 6:00pm, with a podcast recording happening roughly around 7pm. Guests will include Gavin, Sean Shapiro, Lia Assimakopoulos, and (sorry) me. There will be merch giveaways (including a shirt designed specifically for the event), a hangout session before we record, and probably a lot of other cool stuff, if I can stay out of the way long enough to make it happen. Also, air conditioning and cold drinks. Also, I’d imagine you could even get on the podcast yourself if you yell obnoxious things at just the right time.

(I may even have one or two surprises at the event myself, but you’ll have to come out to find out what that/those are.)

Personally, I’ve always loved the idea of doing a mid-summer hockey meetup, and doing one with colleagues like Lia, Gavin, and Sean is as good as it gets. Gavin has worked hard to make this happen, so do come out and say hello if you’re looking to scratch that hockey itch next month.

You don’t need to buy a ticket or anything—we wanted to make this as welcoming an event as possible—so if you just wanna grab an iced tea from the bar or whatever and record your own MST3K-style commentary of the whole thing on your phone while glaring at us from the corner of the room, please be our guest.

In any case, I’m really looking forward to hanging out with some good folks, so make sure you’re one of those good folks! I hope to see you on August 11.

The summer appears to have truly set in for everyone other than appointed arbitrators. Sure, there are a few remaining free agents and surely a trade or two still to be completed, but mid-July is upon us, and that generally means four to six weeks of wind-down in the hockey world before the furious pace of September catches us all off-guard once again.

For the Stars, we appear to know quite a bit about what next year’s team will look like. We do not know everything. As best I can tell, there are four key questions we might not know the answer to for a little while yet.

What will Jason Robertson’s next contract look like?

As expected, Robertson’s negotiations with Dallas have been every bit the grind his last ones were, to the point where the team was seriously looking at trading him rather than continue to deal with it. Perhaps mercifully for both sides, Robertson will have a one-year salary appointed for him by an independent arbitrator sometime in the next month or two, giving him and his team at least temporary clarity.

Last time both sides did this, you will recall, Robertson did not have arbitration rights. That led to a prolonged stalemate1 that ended just before the regular season in a four-year bridge deal that walked Robertson right to the point we are today. (Hey, at least Robertson didn’t miss actual regular season games, like Jamie Benn did.)

The real question might not be what Robertson’s next contract will amount to, as something around $12 million has always seemed like the betting man’s target, given all the comparables out there. The Stars have also prepared for something like that amount, if you look at their books. The team can exceed the salary cap by 10% during the offseason, and if Capobianco and Hyry start the year in the minors, they’d have around $12.3 million in cap space with 13 forwards and six defensemen on the roster. That seems the most likely scenario now that Mavrik Bourque’s contract is no longer a factor. And of course, if Tyler Seguin isn’t ready to begin the year, they can always keep him on LTIR for a few extra weeks if they want to play things safe, giving themselves a few million more dollars of temporary wiggle room.

There’s also still the chance that another team out there ponies up and makes Dallas a handsome offer for Robertson even without the guarantee of an extension, but it sure seems like both sides are content to move forward for the time being. The Stars will obviously have a huge decision to make ahead of the trade deadline with Robertson approaching UFA status, but I don’t anticipate any major surprises in terms of Robertson’s salary arbitration right now. Dallas can fit him in at $12-13 million on opening night without making any trades, and they could make even more room than that by moving someone like Faksa or Steel, if needed.

(Full disclosure though: I didn’t anticipate their losing Mavrik Bourque for very little return in this whole process, so there could always be a surprise lurking around the corner in what has been a somehow chaotic and quiet offseason at the same time.)

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Last week was a busy one indeed. But Jason Robertson’s (expected) filing for salary arbitration notwithstanding, the offseason looks to be progressing toward the dog days in rapid fashion.

But before last week gets away from us entirely, let’s go back through a few things that we didn’t quite get to from Development Camp last week, because I think it’s a week that deserves one more good look.

(You can find a couple of previous entries about Development Camp last week here and here, in case you missed them.)

While Mikhail Cherepanov didn’t make it to camp this year, he will be playing for Tom Gaglardi’s Kamloops Blazer this year. But we did get a chance to speak with the other four picks from the Stars’ 2026 draft class, including Ryan Brown.

This year’s fifth-round pick, Ryan Brown had to take a 9am flight out of Toronto the morning after the draft to make sure he got to Texas as soon as possible, where all the players had the standard check-in process ahead of camp.

That process entailed things like meeting Stars coaches and staff (and fellow players), as well as all the standard medical evaluations. Newly drafted players flying over from Europe, like Jakub Vaněček, had even longer days, as you would imagine.

For Brown, he said he had been talking to teams ahead of the draft, seeing what chances he might have to get into a development camp somewhere even if he hadn’t gotten drafted. As Jordie Benn put it at the end of the week, every single player who is at camp is there for a reason, and important people are watching. But for players who have been drafted, a lot of the pressure immediately gets relieved when you know that you’ll be going to camp with the team already committed to you.

Brown also is no stranger to adapting on the fly. One thing he talked about last week was his midseason trade in the OHL, from Sarnia to London. Brown said his first two games for London after the trade were against…Sarnia. He only had good things to say about both organizations, but I’m sure it helps to reinforce the change when you’re immediately competing against your former teammates.

There were also quite a few returners to camp this year, as always. As we mentioned last week, listening to Emil Hemming speaking as a big brother who watched his little brother get drafted was surreal in a good way. He’s only two years out of his own draft, but Hemming is already a well-known player in the organization, as first-round picks tend to be. Hearing him talk about his little brother was a jolt of reality: time really does march on.

As for Hemming’s progress, this camp wasn’t meant to really evaluate that, but if you’re asking, I’d say that I am optimistic about Hemming, even if he is probably at least one year away from the NHL. But that’s no knock, as this AHL season will be revelatory for many players going pro. There will be a lot to watch in Cedar Park this season.

Hemming’s clearly got game, but how that game will mesh with the demands of the pro level is something that only a full season is likely to reveal.

(And If you’d like someone else’s view on Emil Hemming, then I’d recommend Andrew’s story on what he saw from Emil Hemming.)

As Stephen Meserve and Sean Shapiro have said for a decade now, that jump from juniors to the AHL is perhaps the toughest jump most players will ever make in their hockey career, so I’m going to be watching Hemming’s progress closely this year. It’s a big challenge, even for highly talented players like him.

College players have a natural advantage in that jump, as they’ve been playing against older and bigger players than most junior folks will have done. Dylan Hryckowian looked exactly like you’d expect, if you watched much of his work in Texas this year, and another such college player is Jack Anderson, who signed with the Stars organization after finishing his year at Michigan Tech this past spring.

Anderson is 6-foot-6 and 225lbs, which really makes him stick out when he’s next to players like Aram Minnetian (5-foot-11) or even Vaněček (on the far left in the below photo, and who is listed at 6-foot-2).

Niilopekka Muhonen is another player going pro this year, though one wonders exactly where all these players will start the year after training camp. Part of the big organizational meetings that happen over the summer surely involves slotting some players in the ECHL or the AHL according to what would best serve them, though you can bet most every prospect will be hoping for the latter.

Muhonen’s size is a big asset in his game, as is his confidence. I had a chance to chat with Muhonen again this year after catching up a year ago, and that exchange follows here:

What did you focus on going into this last season, for your game personally?

Muhonen: Yeah, there’s always something. Like, small things you want to get better at, but I think the biggest thing for me is to just get better all around.

How much have you planned out for where you’ll be playing next year?

Muhonen: I’m not sure yet, but I think the plan for me is to go pro. So my job is just to make sure I’m in the best shape possible when I come back to training camp.

How much different is development camp for the third time, compared to your first year going through it in 2024?

Muhonen: First camp, everything’s a little bit new, and you’re a little bit scared, and you don’t know what’s going on. Now it’s my third camp, and I know some of the guys, and it’s always nice to see them. I think you can enjoy it now a little bit more.

What’s your favorite food since coming over to North America a couple years ago?

Muhonen: I’d rather have Finnish food, but I can eat pretty much anything. I don’t mind the Canadian food.

What about sweets? Are you a salmiakki guy?

Muhonen: That’s all right. I’m not a huge fan, but it’s all right. But chocolate, that’s great in Finland.

What’s the main brand there? I remember getting some.

Muhonen: Fazer. That’s the best.

There are a few Finnish guys in camp, and of course, a lot of Finnish guys on the NHL team, too. Is it fun to all hang out for a couple of days here together?

Muhonen: Yeah, for sure. In my opinion, there can’t be too many Finns. We have that little group, then if there’s a new guy, we just pull him in, and yeah. It’s fun to hang out with those guys and speak some Finnish.

What sorts of things do you guys enjoy doing together?

Muhonen: I mean, I’ve been pretty busy, but we have been watching soccer at the hotel together a little bit. Went to dinner a couple times together also.

Who are you rooting for in the World cup? Anyone but Sweden, basically?

Muhonen: Yeah. They’re out now, so that’s good.

Another returning player is Atte Joki, who was drafted in the fifth round last year. Joki will be moving from Lukko in the Finnish Liiga over to HIFK, a club that players like Roope Hintz and Miro Heiskanen have also come through. Joki’s foundational skills are strong ones this year from the handful of viewings I’ve had of him post-draft (especially at Worlds), but he’ll need to find a way to stand out if he wants to complete his journey from late-round draft pick to NHL-level player over the next couple of years.

For Joki, he knows this a big year, and a big opportunity. But don’t take my word for it—listen to him.

How do you feel about playing with HIFK next year?

Joki: It feels really good. Great, actually. It’s a bigger city and a bigger opportunity to me, so yeah. It feels nice to be there. I’m looking forward to it.

What is your focus on what you do that you’re gonna bring to HIFK? Do you have a particular kind of idea of ‘this is the type of player I am, and the type of player I need to be’?

Joki: There is not just like, one thing I try to do. I just try to help the team as best I can. I feel good to play there, so that’s what I’m going to do there.

The defensive side of your game has been strong for a while. Have you been working on the offensive side the same way?

Joki: Yeah, yeah. Actually, I try to focus on everything being better. Also, a big focus to me is to be a better skater. So that’s the one thing I try to improve. But the skill thing is also one thing that I try to do my best. It’s not the kind of the game I’m into, because I like to work hard and play two-way. But there still needs to be some kind of skills to improve.

Do you feel like you’re meeting your goals and you’re excited about where you are and your progress and in your path? Do you have new goals for this year?

Joki: Yeah, I think I’m progressing, but it’s not there yet. There is still the skating thing, and a lot of stuff like off-ice [workouts], what I can do better. Be more explosive, and stuff like that. So I’m not there yet, but going forward.

When they talk to you guys here about everything from nutrition to training and everything else, what lessons did you learn last year that you were able to practice during the year that you learned from?

Joki: Yeah, actually, those skating things, what we do on ice [in camp], those are one of the biggest things, what I did last year. And also the nutrition thing is really important to me, because I’m bigger guy. So I need a lot of good stuff, so I can do better.

Last one: it’s a very tough question. When you’re in Texas, what type of food do you make sure to eat when you’re visiting?

Joki: Tacos. Those are one thing. And also, it’s not only in Texas, but when I come to America, there is Chipotle. I love that.

Do you get the bowl or the burrito?

Joki: The bowl.

We’ll wrap up with two other 2026 draft picks: a goalie and another Finnish forward.

Anton Wilde is a 6-foot-4 goalie, but he looks about as fresh-faced as any 18-year-old you’re likely to meet.

When he was drafted, Anton Emil Wilde Larsen’s name(s) might have confused you, but the truth is that it’s not complicated: he generally goes by Anton Wilde, with the last name pronounced “vill-deh,” starting with a softer “V,” more in-between a “V” and a “W,” as best I’ve been able to figure out.

Here are a couple of excerpts from a conversation with Wilde on Thursday.

What was it like to get drafted?

Wilde: Yeah, it was amazing. It’s what I’ve been dreaming off since I was a small kid. I was with my mom and girlfriend, and we were just at home, chilling. I was super stoked and excited to get drafted.

What was it like to play in that game against Team USA at World Juniors, saving 52 or 53 shots like you did?

Wilde: Back home I’m used to a lot of shots, but I’ve never done it at that level against those guys. Doing that against Team USA feels pretty good after the game, so that’s a great game. I won’t forget it, for sure.

As a goalie, how do you bring over all your gear on a quick plane flight like you had after the draft to Texas?

Wilde: Yeah, I had to bring all my gear, but I was in a place where I didn’t have my gear from last year. So I wasn’t in my own gear, like pads and blockers and stuff.

(Wilde went on to explain that he was able to bring some gear—whatever he and some others could gather before flying over here, but that it was an adjustment. He did eventually wind up switching to some other gear later in camp, and in fact said he was even given one of Jake Oettinger’s blockers to use.)

If you want a high-quality video of Wilde in goal, well then I have good news for you: we have a highlight package of Wilde facing shots from now-fellow Stars prospects like Emil Hemming, Jasper Kuhta, Atte Joki, and Emil Hemming at World Juniors last December, in a Denmark vs. Finland matchup.

The good news is that you get to see Wilde facing lots of shots, because this is how the game’s first half went, in terms of shot disparity:

Now that your expectations have been properly set, here’s the video:

Speaking of those 2026 draft picks, one of the Stars’ most recent picks previously played a few games with the senior team at HIFK, where Joki will be this year. Jasper Kuhta was drafted as an overager in the seventh round this year, but it’s his most recent season in the OHL that might have caught the Stars’ attention, where he was a point-per-game player.

I had a chance to talk with Kuhta as well, so I’ve included a couple highlights from that conversation.

What was it like to get drafted? Where were you when you found out?

Kuhta: I was at my buddy’s house. I was pretty excited. We watched the whole draft there, and yeah. It was a special moment when my name got called. Amazing.

What do you think worked well about your game this past season, and what are you looking to build on for next year?

Kuhta: Yeah, it was a great season for me. I would say. First year across the sea and playing North American hockey here, so a pretty successful season so far for me. I feel like I was productive in the offensive zone, and my D-zone game got better, too. I think also my skating got better.

Was the smaller ice size in North America a contributing factor in helping your skating?

Kuhta: I would say so, yeah. Obviously the smaller rink makes you turn more, and you gotta be more quick. So I would say that was a big thing.

Did you have a player growing up that you modeled your game after?

Kuhta: When I was younger, I really liked Crosby. He was my favorite player. And then I would say the past three years, I’ve looked at Barkov. Finnish guy, so he’s pretty good too. So maybe those two guys.

Is it neat to have a lot of other Finns in the organization here?

Kuhta: Oh yeah. It’s nice to have Finnish guys here, so it’s easier to come here. Talk some Finnish, not only English. We obviously need some more Europeans1, so I feel like that’s only a good thing.

Any North American food you’ve learned to love since coming over here? Tacos, like Atte?

Kuhta: Tacos are great, but I gotta say…so basic, but: burgers. I like smashburgers.

One of the older players at camp this year was Ayrton Martino (2021, 3rd round) who just finished his first full year as a pro. He played mostly in Texas this year with a cameo in the ECHL, but he could have a good opportunity to make some noise if he can build off his rookie AHL season.

Here you can see him scoring on USHL goalie Ajay White.

I’ll say it again: I am excited to see what the Texas Stars look like to start next year. I really do tend to think they’ll have a much stronger start than they did last season, and players like Martino could certainly be a part of that.

And hey, if you like video, how about Charlie Paquette (2025, 7th round) putting a puck on net after trying to get around Colin Grable during a scrimmage?

And finally, lest we fail to give the goalies adequate coverage, I should mention that Måns Goos looked like a very solid goalie at development camp one year out of his 2025 draft selection. He’ll be playing in Sweden again this year, and it’ll be interesting to watch his progress in the relatively near future. Could he follow Arno Tiefensee’s example and be playing games in Cedar Park as early as 2028?

If you came to Development Camp this week, then you got to see a whole lot of players up close. It really is a vibe unique to all others throughout the year, as the pressure isn’t nearly as high as it can be in training camp, when NHL jobs can be on the line. From the sounds of things, it’s more about bonding than anything else, but that doesn’t mean the players aren’t still fighting to win every competition they can: especially if it’s for the trophy named after Stars’ player development coordinator J.J. McQueen, awarded after the exhibition game on the final day of camp.

The Stars announced today what we all figured was bound to happen: Jamie Benn will return for another season in Dallas.

Per PuckPedia, it’s a league-minimum $850K base salary, with another $1.15 in performance bonuses based on games played and playoff rounds won.

As with Benn’s deal last year, any earned bonuses will roll over to the following year’s salary cap if the Stars don’t finish the season with sufficient accrued cap space to cover them. It’s an even more team-friendly deal than last year’s (which saw Benn take home $1 million in base salary and another $2 million in performance incentives).

We talked about Benn at length following the season, so for a more in-depth recap of his year, you can give that a read:

As for next year, this deal is even more of a no-brainer than it looked like in May, following the loss of Mavrik Bourque over the summer. The Stars’ winger depth is extremely thin right now, and if Benn does nothing more than give the Stars another 60 games and 15 goals, this deal will already be great value.

In terms of result, Benn’s on-ice work last year amounted to a 57% goals share while he was on the ice at 5-on-5. The Stars scored just over 3 goals per hour during his minutes (fourth-highest on the team) while they gave up just 2.3. Here’s some context for those 5v5 numbers:

Now, there are reasons to temper even modest expectations, too. Benn will be 37 later this month, and his underlying numbers were far from pretty. But with him averaging a career-low 13:17 per night, the hope will be that he can continue to chip in offensively in a bottom-six role with players like Matt Duchene, without being asked to take on heavy defensive duty (which neither of them excel at).

That’s how Glen Gulutzan used Benn last year, and it seemed to work best when Benn was playing on the right side (his off-wing) with Sam Steel on the left. That Benn-Steel duo had a markedly positive xGF% (and plus/minus) when either Duchene or Justin Hryckowian was centering them on a third line, and you could do much worse than that with the Stars’ presumptive top-six group right now. Here’s the forward group we’re looking at right now, presuming Robertson is back to start the season, as seems most likely right now:

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Kiviranta-Faksa-Blackwell
Hyry, Bäck

That’s…fine? Obviously this is predicated on Seguin being able to do what Bourque did last year, and that’s no guarantee, given he’ll be coming off a long ACL recovery.

(Side note: I’ve wondered if the Stars might even be planning for Seguin to have a slower return than planned this year and not start the season on the active roster, which could put someone like Kiviranta or Hyry or even Benn a little higher in the lineup in the short term. But right now, you’d have to say this lineup needs Seguin to be close to the version we saw at the beginning of last year, and they might not be able to wait too long for him to do so.)

As for Benn, there are some fun rate stats to consider. Despite being 10th among forwards in ice time per game (the equivalent of fourth-line minutes), Benn was:

• 5th on the team in primary assists per hour

• 3rd(!) on the team in goals per hour (among regulars)

• 3rd on the team in shooting percentage (same caveat as above)

• 8th on the team in ixG/601 (just being Bourque, who was 7th)

You don’t even have to break things down to per-hour stats to illustrate Benn’s production last year: he was 5th on the team in even-strength goals despite missing 22 games. For a league-minimum salary, that’s plenty of surplus value.

Now, Benn’s liabilities at this point in his career are well-known: He was also second on the team in penalty minutes, and his performance in the playoffs last year was forgettable, at best. Numerous injuries led the coaching staff to put Benn into some bigger roles than befit his current ability, including some work on PP1 and some 6-on-5 deployment, too.

But this isn’t Benn-Seguin-Radulov being desperately propped up as a top line anymore. In terms of raw value, Benn’s player profile at that price kinda does make him the “ slam-dunk” that Gulutzan said it was after the season, unless you think he has some other negative qualities that weigh the team down in less directly measurable ways (as I know some folks do). I’m not discounting those concerns at all—when Benn has an off night, it can be one of the toughest watches there is—but if we’re looking at things with cold, computerized hearts, the deal looks more likely to be a good one than not, and that’s kinda what teams want their GMs to be doing.

Right now, if Robertson comes back (for however long) and Seguin stays healthy, you can see a team that still looks like a top-three team in the Central, and even better if Oettinger can bounce back. Jamie Benn is part of that, but only in a complementary sense (though not an uncomplimentary one).

And as I’ve said before, I’m kind of a sucker for these stories, on the narrative level. Bringing back the guy chasing a championship with the team he grew up with on a team-friendly deal is such an easy win, in a vacuum. Benn’s also eight points away from 1,000, so that’s another early (hopefully) season moment that counts for something.

Maybe it won’t go end up going well this season, but that could happen for a variety of reasons. Overstating Benn’s liabilities is just as erroneous as overstating his importance. And on a team with a cloud of uncertainty on either side of the forward group, Benn provides stabilitiy, and he’s doing so while taking as big of a pay cut as he possibly can against this year’s tight cap.

As things stand right now, my math has the Stars with $11.489M2 in cap space if Hyry starts the season in Cedar Park, and they coudl create a bit over $12.3M if they send down Capobianco to start the season (I think he’d very likely clear waivers again, as he did last year).

Without Robertson, here’s where that roster stands, with $12.3M in cap space:

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Steel-Hintz-Seguin
Kiviranta-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

Oettinger
DeSmith

If Robertson comes in around $12 after arbitration (or if they settle for something like that), then you can start the year with 13 forwards and 6 defensemen—and of course, you can do a bit more than that if Seguin starts on LTIR, giving the Stars an extra $3 million or so in temporary cap space until they activate him.

Benn’s deal was always going to be the one Nill fit in after everything else got set. Of course, Robertson’s situation could drag on for another month or two if they go through arbitration, but otherwise it feels like the Stars’ roster is pretty much lined up for now—unless a Robertson trade ends up materializing.

It’s not a better roster than last year’s on paper, and the almost-but-not-quite trades of the last week might make you feel like it’s even significantly less so. For that, you are more than welcome to be critical of Jim Nill or Don Waddell or Andy Scott, or whoever you want. But given all the turmoil of the last couple of weeks, it’s at least a clear plan with some upside, and I think Benn at this contract is more likely to aid that plan than to hamper it.

A year that was always shaping up to be the toughest one for Dallas’s cap post-Rantanen looks like it will indeed be tough. But the funny thing about hockey is that sometimes, the teams that do special things aren’t the ones you would have guessed they were, in July.

Dallas lost one winger yesterday morning, but they gained another about 12 hours later. On Wednesday evening, the Stars announced that Joel Kiviranta was coming back to Dallas. Kiviranta will make $1 million against the cap, which has pretty much been what he’s earned his entire career.

Kiviranta doesn’t replace Mavrik Bourque, of course. He isn’t supposed to, though. Just take a gander at this section of the press release the team put out last night, in fact:

Kiviranta, 30, had nine points (3-6—9) in 51 games for the Colorado Avalanche in 2025-26 while also appearing in five postseason contests for the club. According to Natural Stat Trick, when Kiviranta was on the ice during 5-on-5 play during the regular season, the Avalanche outscored their opponents 20-12 and owned a 59.5 shots for percentage. Kiviranta also totaled 53:15 of shorthanded time on ice and 1:03 of shorthanded ice time per game, making the 2025-26 season the fourth consecutive year in which he averaged over a minute of ice time on the penalty kill per game.

Kiviranta scored 16 goals two years ago, in 2024-25 with Colorado. Outside of that year, he’s pretty much been a fourth-liner, both in terms of ice time (10-12 minutes per night) and scoring (averaging nine goals per season over his career).

The 5-foot-11 Kiviranta is 30 years old, but his production in traditional terms is only part of his game—though Stars fans might remember that he has a pretty good shot when the situation calls for it.

Last season, Kiviranta was hampered by injuries, suffering both a concussion and a lower-body injury that limited him to just 51 regular season games and 5 playoff contests. Still, his underlying numbers were very solid (even when adjusting for being on the Avalanche), and that’s been the case for most of his career, too.

But go back to that paragraph from the Stars, and you can’t help but wonder if Kiviranta is being brought in to do something pretty similar to what players like Radek Faksa and Sam Steel do as left-hand shots in (usually) bottom-six roles. Is Kiviranta just insurance, or is he a potential replacement?

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Update: About 30 minutes after I published this, the Stars signed forward Joel Kiviranta for one year at $1 million.

I’ve almost entirely ignored the little social media notifications about comments, replies, and Other Types of Engagement today outside of this site. That’s been a result of being quite busy today between writing, press-conferencing, and podcasting.

(By the way, check out AIH’s Free Agency episode today, recorded right in the thick of things. It’s also on Spotify/Apple Podcasts and such, for the audiophiles out there.)

The other reason I’ve mostly avoided the Deluge of Takes today is that, in Dallas Stars world, there is a large amount of frustration from fans. The Stars haven’t acquired a single NHL player besides re-signing Arttu Hyry and Kyle Capobianco. In fact, they lost a popular young player they drafted and developed, and who scored 20 goals last year when they very much needed him to. Losing Mavrik Bourque for a couple of draft picks is a disappointment, even if the Stars wound up in a situation where they didn’t have much choice.

Jim Nill said today, in fact, that the Stars knew that there was a possibility of trading Bourque even a year ago.

“We knew going into this season that it was gonna be a tough decision,” Nill said today. “The numbers, like I said, you get the calculator out, and the numbers don’t add up eventually. When you get the sum of a lot of good players, those numbers have to add up. Tough decision.”

Nill was diplomatic as ever in his usual July 1 comments today, but he did confirm one thing: the threat of offer sheets was a very real consideration in trading Bourque along with Ilya Lyubushkin today.

“Mavrik became a pretty valuable player,” Nill said, “But because of his situation, we were worried about offer sheets. Also, he’s a young player. He’s starting to hit his prime, and teams are trying to figure out, what’s his situation? Where’s he gonna plateau and stuff? So it was what we thought was best for our organization. We had to be cap compliant, and we wanted to get the most assets we could for him, so it was kind of a mix of both, and probably the best situation for us.”

When asked whether the Robertson situation had an impact on decisions like the Bourque trade, Nill was careful not to point any fingers. But he was also realistic about the fact that everything was connected.

“It definitely comes into play,” Nill said of the Robertson negotiations. “Every contract does. Talk about Mavrik [Bourque]. We were looking at that contract situation three months [ago]. We thought, ‘This is what his number was.’ The game is ever-evolving, and those numbers change all the time, and so you make changes. So, does it come into play? Yes, it definitely does. But we have a rough idea where it fits, so when we have to make decisions, we kind of know where it falls into place.”

One way to interpret those remarks is that the Stars had Bourque’s value at a lower number earlier in the year, and that his ask ended up being a lot higher after the season. Combine that with the unresolved Robertson situation, and I wonder if the Stars found themselves pretty stuck. Thus, they had to move Bourque for a price that was pretty close to what an offer sheet would have returned anyway, with Lyubushkin’s contract heading out the door as well.

If you’re a fan, I’d imagine your disappointment about losing Bourque is further compounded by how the acquisitions of Matthew Knies and Zach Werenski(!) turned from imminent deals into never-minds. The Stars have, under Jim Nill, generally been a team that stays quiet right until they’re about to pounce on a big acquisition, and then it comes off with flair and bombast. This week was uncharacteristically frustrating, to say the least. Fans in Dallas are accustomed to seeing their team be the one players force trades to, after all

But Nill was careful not to let any frustration or disappointment creep into his comments today. When asked how they keep an even keel, Nill reminded people that a lot of things are going on that most people never hear about.

“We come here every day trying to, how can we make the team better?” Nill said. “How can we improve the organization? Sometimes, the number of things we talk about usually, I don’t know what the percentage is, but they don’t happen very often. You only see so many trades in sports every day. There’s only so many. But the groundwork that’s going on behind the scenes, it’s never-ending. So there’s lots of discussion, lots of talk. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. I think the message is that we’re just trying to be as competitive and as good of a team as we can be. And we’re gonna continue to do that.”

Here’s what the Stars have to show for the last week:

• Mavrik Bourque & Ilya Lyubushkin were traded to Nashville for a 2027 2nd-round pick and Vegas’s 2028 3rd-round pick.

• Kyle Capobianco was re-signed for two years at $875K

• Arttu Hyry was re-signed for two years at $900K

• Jason Robertson remains in RFA limbo (and in fact could still be offer-sheeted, though I don’t think that’s all that likely now). Nill said there was no update on talks with Robertson’s camp today, reiterating that Dallas still would like to sign him if possible.

• Alex Petrovic left Dallas to sign for two years with the Florida Panthers.

  • By the way: Nill actually confirmed today that Dallas extended Petrovic an offer to return to the Stars right after the season ended, but Petrovic ultimately chose to go elsewhere.

• Texas players like Artem Shlaine, Luke Krys, and a few others have been recently re-signed, but their NHL impact is yet to be determined, if it happens at all this year.

• Jamie Benn talks are continuing, Nill said, and he expects a decision soon:

  • “Jamie’s had discussions. I’m gonna talk to him more once we get through all this. Feeling pretty comfortable with where he’s at, but I want to finalize it with him, yes. That’s coming up.”

If you presume that Benn comes back with something like an $850K base salary plus more incentives like last year, then the Stars’ roster currently looks like this. If you assume Kyle Capobianco starts the year in the AHL for cap reasons, then Dallas would have just under $12.5 million cap space with Robertson still un-signed ($12,489,667 to be exact).

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Steel-Hintz-Seguin
Benn-Duchene-Hyry
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

Oettinger
DeSmith

If the Stars do bring Robertson back, either on a one-year deal after arbitration or (more unlikely) a longer extension, then you can move Steel and Benn down a bit in the lineup. Should the Stars end up trading Robertson, you’d assume they’d be looking for a way to get more winger help in return, directly or otherwise.

And Nill confirmed that he expects more trading to be happening throughout the summer.

“Today is kind of a day where it’s the free agent frenzy. Things will settle down now. We’re gonna sit back, regroup,” Nill said. “I think it’s gonna be a, I don’t know if ‘chaotic’ summer, but a summer of a lot of moves, a lot of trades.”

In a sense, you have to at least give the Stars credit for not making moves just to make moves, as you could argue they did in 2024. But still, there’s no denying that the roster is thinner than it was last year—and it could be far more so if Robertson doesn’t come back.

“It was a very shallow UFA market,” Nill said. “Some players did very well, and good for them, well-deserved. But I think there’s gonna be a lot of movement now within the game over the next couple of months.”

What is a fair assessment of Bourque’s value, for Dallas?

Yes, he scored 20 goals (three of which were empty-netters) last year. His release is not a strength of his game, but to his great credit, he found a way to score from much closer to the net while playing with top-six players. One of the things that sets NHL players apart from minor-leaguers is their ability to modify their game to maximize their strengths, and you saw Bourque do that this year.

Given his age, Bourque still probably has more to give, and Nashville is likely to bet on just that with a Stankoven-ish contract, if he’ll sign it. It’s important to make a distinction between the vibes of this move and the reality of what Dallas lost. Fans tend to value young players they’ve seen improve over time more than similar players on other teams, and Dallas was forced to trade Bourque away in what feels like the absolute nadir of Vibe Time.

Dallas will hope that they can replace some (or all) of Bourque’s production this year, but especially the following season, when the cap situation gets much easier for them. Sure, they’ll have Lian Bichsel’s first RFA deal to figure out and a ton of forward holes to fill, but they’ll also have $30-40 million in cap space with which to do so.

As for this year, can Tyler Seguin make up for some of Bourque’s production? Well, he kind of has to, now. If his ACL is healed enough to let him do so, Seguin could thrive next to Hintz, or possibly next to Duchene, with whom he has proven chemistry.

Other young players with strong rookie years like Artem Shlaine might get a chance for short call-ups at some point this year as well, if the need arises. But no one in the system has the pedigree of Bourque, and I don’t see a viable replacement for what he did last year in the system right now, even if a couple of the college guys are closer than others.

Dallas’s thin forward depth got thinner today, and you are fully justified in feeling skeptical of how a team that finished the playoffs with two fourth lines is going to look deeper next year after Nashville just poked a hole in the side of the swimming pool. In a weird way, I worry less about the loss of Bourque itself, and more about how Dallas is going to try to make up for it. They may have dodged some of the foolhardy contracts handed out today, but they do need to bring some bodies in—or at least re-sign one of them.

Today was a frustrating day, so perhaps the best way to view it is that this might be the lowest part of the valley the Stars will have to walk through in making their run next season. Some level of surgery was necessary, but todays’ procedure wound up going from arthroscopic to fairly invasive. Dallas will hope the healing process finds them stronger in the long run, but it’s hard to see past the pain, right now.

It was always going to be a tight squeeze to fit both Jason Robertson and Mavrik Bourque onto the roster this year. That became even more apparent with Robertson’s camp holding the line on a $14 million ask over the weekend, and it forced the Stars to qualify both Bourque and Robertson over the weekend while they continued to explore options to remake the roster.

Two of those options didn’t come off, in Zach Werenski and the Robertson trade to Seattle. And now, we’ve learned that another consequence of the Stars’ cap crunch is that they’ve opted to move on from Mavrik Bourque.

The trade in its entirety is Bourque and Ilya Lyubushkin for a 2027 second-round pick, and Vegas’s 2028 third-round pick, which Nashville had previously acquired. Let’s go over some initial thoughts while Dallas works on whatever other moves are still coming.

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For the second time in a week, the Stars have seen a big trade fall apart because a top-tier player didn’t want to change teams. Last week, it was Jason Robertson. This time, it was Zach Werenski.

Per SportsNet’s Elliotte Friedman, the Stars had a massive trade with Columbus in place with Thomas Harley as the centerpiece of the deal for Werenski, the reigning Norris Trophy winner. The Stars apparently agreed to terms on Monday night, and they were not informed that a player veto was still a possibility.

But on Tuesday evening, the Stars were informed that Werenski had blocked the deal:

The Stars appear to be caught in the middle, unaware that their trade — which, sources say, was agreed to late Monday — could be vetoed. They were informed Tuesday night.

We’ll see how things evolve, but it’s taken a nasty turn.

-SportsNet

For the record, the Stars knew Werenski had a full no-move clause, so I read this report as the Stars having an understanding with Columbus that Werenski was willing to go to Dallas. Obviously that did not turn out to be the case.

Speculation had been building about a Werenski-to-Dallas deal for a few days now, and for things to get as far as they did before the player nixed the trade has to be incredibly frustrating for both parties, and even more so for Dallas in particular, following the Jason Robertson trade that he scuttled before the draft by declining to extend with Seattle.

Robertson could still remain in Dallas as the sides continue to talk, but that situation doesn’t appear to be related to the potential Werenski trade. In Harley’s case, it sounds like he was pretty clearly the part of the Werenski deal that the Blue Jackets couldn’t refuse, only for the Columbus defenseman to quickly narrow down a formerly wider trade list to what sounds like a handful of options, including Tampa Bay and Toronto, and possibly nobody else.

Columbus is already reported to be pivoting to talk with Tampa Bay, as the Werenski situation has quickly deteriorated. As for Dallas, they now find themselves in the unenviable situation where two of their core players now know that Dallas attempted to trade them this month.

Obviously both deals are understandable, from a neutral perspective. The Robertson negotiations have not been easy ones, while a Norris Trophy-winning defenseman rightly forces a team in the middle of their Cup window to contemplate win-now sorts of moves, even for a recently extended player like Harley. But how the players involved will handle things from here remains to be seen.

So, where does Jim Nill go from here? Werenski doesn’t sound likely to change his mind about Dallas, and Harley isn’t a player you’d expect Dallas would want to move in almost any other situation. But to have a 24-year-old defenseman like Harley starting the first year of his long-term extension under the cloud of having been (nearly) traded is less than ideal, to put it mildly.

If you’re Dallas, you have to be pretty exasperated to have been on both sides of a situation where a player seemed likely to accept a big move, only to scuttle things at the last moment. General managers never want players’ names in potential trades to get out for this exact sort of reason. With Harley in particular, there could be real damage here—though Nill is probably one of the few GMs in the league truly capable of repairing fallout from a disaster like this, if that’s doable.

It’s also worth mentioning that Harley has always been a confident, calm player who rarely gets rattled about anything. If you had to bet on a young player who could shrug off something like this, Harley wouldn’t be a bad one to bet on. Still, it has to hurt to know that the team that just locked you up was willing to trade you only a few months later. Surely this is the sort of situation where the player at least has a conversation with his agent, just to talk things through.

(And yes, Harley and Robertson share the same agent: Andy Scott.)

Nill surely will continue to swing big when it comes to making moves, but does a second near-trade in the last few days cause the Stars to try a different approach altogether? Free agency doesn’t look likely to be a rich market for Dallas when it opens tomorrow, but with two huge moves falling apart right before the finish line, the frustration level has to mounting behind the scenes for Dallas, who are still in limbo with Robertson, and who also might have offer sheets to deal with for Mavrik Bourque and Robertson, depending on how the next few days go.

Jim Nill was already scheduled to speak to the media on Wednesday afternoon after free agency begins. Unfortunately, that conversation sounds likely to have a very different tone than the Stars were hoping it would yesterday.

One of the most fascinating things about development camps is how many different paths players have taken to get there.

You have players from the most recent draft class, 18- or 19-year-olds like Ryan Brown or Jasper Kuhta who didn’t know where they were going to be drafted until 24 hours before they flew into Dallas. You also have returning players like Emil Hemming, Aram Minnetian, and Niilopekka Muhonen, who have been through this process a couple of times before.

You also have players like Dylan Hryckowian and Christian Fitzgerald, neither of whom were drafted, but both of whom were at development camp last year. Dallas signed both players after they finished their college season, and they both got some time in Texas in the spring on amateur tryouts ahead of what will be their official first pro year.

And then you have the players who received an invite to development camp with a chance to earn a longer look, the way Jaxon Fuder did last year before Dallas signed him two months later to an entry-level contract. In the Stars’ case, that usually means a couple of goalies and a couple of right-shot defensemen, among others.

But even with players ranging from ages 18 to 24, the week has a little bit of a freshman orientation feel to it. Sure, most of the talks and tests are taking place behind the scenes, but there’s an energy and variety to each day that makes the week pass quickly, at least from an outsider’s perspective.

Like last year, the Stars once again brought Medicine Hat’s Joe Frazer in as another voice during the camp. He’s joined this week by Rachel Flanagan, the longtime head coach at the University of Guelph who spent the last couple of years as an assistant coach in the PWHL.

As with other NHL teams’ development camps, the NHL Coaches Association works with clubs to provide opportunities to coaches outside the NHL during times like these. Flanagan also mentioned today that she has a connection with Stars’ AGM (and fellow Ontario native) Rich Peverley, which surely doesn’t hurt the acclimation process at all.

“We’ve known each other for quite some time,” Flanagan said today. “It’s funny, yesterday I did a presentation about grit and what it means to be a human that perseveres. And I think that’s one of the really special things about him [Peverley]. He’s up there. He’s talking to everybody. He’s so personable. He knows the game so well, but he’s also had some difficult times, and he’s been able to overcome those. It’s made him probably a better leader, but also somebody that people can look up to.”

Flanagan said that the level of engagement from the players at development camp was noticeable from the start. You could see it while watching the drills, too.

“The young guys have been great. They’re asking questions. They’re very quick to make sure they come and say ‘thank you’ after,” Flanagan said. “You’re always learning. I’m learning from the coaches here, but I hope that there’s some things that I can bring that some of these young guys especially haven’t heard and just can add to their game. To feel like I’ve been a small part of that is pretty special.”

As for some of those aforementioned players, defenseman Aram Minnetian spoke with the media after today’s on-ice work, talking about everything from the decision to turn pro after his junior year at Boston College to the different cadence of training and practicing on a pro team vs. a college program. Minnetian also hasn’t lost sight of just how unique it is for him to be getting paid to play hockey.

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The first day of development camp in Frisco was a blast, even if the bigger news happened afterward.

It was especially neat to see newly drafted players hit the ice like Ryan Brown, Jakub Vaněček, Anton Wilde Larsen (who sports just “Wilde” on the back of his sweater), and Jasper Kuhta.

Some other highlights today were hearing Dylan Hryckowian speak to the media about playing with the same organization as his brother, and talking with Emil Hemming about being on the floor at the NHL draft with his brother, Oscar, when he was drafted in the first round by Columbus on Friday.

And of course, it’s always good to see returning draftees like Måns Goos as well.

Vaněček, the Stars’ second-round pick last Saturday, hit the ice wearing a Dallas Stars sweater for the first time in his career after being drafted over the weekend, and he also spoke with the media afterwards.

In fact, Vaněček told us today that he has already received a text message from fellow Czech native Radek Faksa after being drafted by Dallas. The two haven’t met yet, but even little things like that can matter a lot to 18-year-olds coming into their first NHL team.

Today’s on-ice sessions were very routine, with fairly little contact happening (other than a few spills). Cameron Schmidt looks even more skilled (and perhaps a bit bigger) than he was last year, and Emil Hemming’s confidence is as high as I’ve ever seen it. Vaněček also looked pretty smooth considering he was watching the draft in Czechia 72 hours ago.

But as Rich Peverley said himself today, this week isn’t really an info-gathering session, as such. The Stars have been watching all these players very closely for a while now. This week is more about, well, development. That’s why the organization brings in outside voices as well, including people like Rachel Flanagan, an assistant coach with the Toronto Sceptres of the PWHL who directed some of earlier group’s on-ice work today, along with more familiar faces like Jordie Benn, Stan Tugolukov, and Ryan Daniels.

That doesn’t mean we won’t still be drawing some of our own conclusions, however. We’ll have a big Development Camp Digest tomorrow, as well as many more updates throughout the week, so stay tuned.

For now, let’s get to the next chapter of this summer’s ongoing saga in Dallas. You know the one.

Late on Monday afternoon, the Stars announced that they had extended qualifying offers to three players: Jason Robertson, Mavrik Bourque, and Arttu Hyry.

In that same press release, Dallas confirmed that they had not qualified the following players: Francesco Arcuri, Vladislav Kolyachonok, Benjamin Kraws, Kyle McDonald, Jeremie Poirier, Antonio Stranges, Samu Tuomaala, and Chase Wheatcroft.

Stephen Meserve wrote over at 100 Degree Hockey today about the players Dallas didn’t retain rights to, so check that out here if you haven’t seen it yet. There aren’t too many surprises, especially with rumors of Kolyachonok heading back to Europe this summer. Samu Tuomaala was a key spark for Texas’s offense after he was acquired for Christian Kyrou last season, but his season-ending knee injury might mean that Dallas re-engages with his camp once his recovery is complete.

As always, it’s important to remember that not qualifying a player doesn’t always mean an organization is completely done with them. Dallas, of course, didn’t qualify Nils Lundkvist or Sam Steel in the summer of 2024, only to re-sign both players as free agents on July 1. We’ll see if that proves to be the case with any of the players above.

Now, let’s get into the implications of the fact that the Stars are right on the cusp of risking offer sheets to the players they did qualify today. We’ll go one-by-one.

Mavrik Bourque

Bourque is, I think, the player who profiles as most at risk of getting signed by another team to an offer sheet. Let’s go over his whole situation.

The fact that Dallas is still in the midst of figuring out the Jason Robertson situation might have kept them from knowing exactly how much cap room they’d have to work with, for Bourque. Signing him for, say, a two-year, $3 million AAV contract would directly impact what Dallas can offer to Robertson, so it’s tricky to get things done while the biggest question (Robertson) remains unanswered.

And if you’re Dallas, I suspect a longer-term extension to keep Bourque for five or six years at a higher AAV would also be desirable, if they wound up moving Robertson and having the room to do so. Perhaps both of those things will still happen, and this is just a way to buy time. But it doesn’t come with a cost, because here’s what happens now: Bourque’s qualifying offer is $997,500. He has until July 5 to decide whether to accept that offer, negotiate a separate one with Dallas, file for salary arbitration, or to sign an offer sheet with another team before July 5.

Bourque would almost certainly decline to sign his qualifying offer (QO), as scoring 20 goals in the NHL means an independent arbitrator would very likely award him a much higher contract than his QO—possibly somewhere in the $3-4 million range. If a player elects arbitration as you’d expect Bourque would, then the team would have the ability to select either a one- or two-year term once the arbitrator decides on the salary.

As for the final option, Bourque can now begin to talk with other teams and weigh offer sheets from them. Here are the thresholds for compensation for each type of offer sheet, for reference. If a team were to offer Bourque a contract with an AAV of $4.7 million, he could sign that, and Dallas would only get a second-round pick as compensation if they didn’t (or couldn’t) match it.

I’ve been operating under the assumption that Dallas would have preferred to sign Bourque before now and avoid the risk that comes with allowing other teams to start talking with Bourque at all. His younger age and the lower compensation thresholds make him a much more appealing offer sheet target than someone like Robertson, who would require a team to give Dallas their next four first-round picks after signing him.

However, if the Stars believe they will be moving on from Robertson, then maybe they don’t see offer sheets as that much of a risk to Bourque, as they would simply just match any offer sheets that were to come in. Even something in the $6-7 million range wouldn’t be out of the question if it had some term attached.

The fascinating question here is what you would do if you were another team trying to snag Bourque. How would you structure an offer sheet if you wanted to keep Dallas from being able to match it? In a weird way, you also can’t really know the answer to that question without knowing what’s going on with Robertson.

So just as has been the case for months now, Robertson and Bourque’s fates are still linked. Signing Robertson even for $12 million would have made it almost impossible to go up to even $4 million for Bourque, but by not signing either player yet, there’s some flexibility along with the uncertainty, and maybe the Stars are counting on that to discourage teams from attempting offer sheets, for now.

Again, that comes with a ton of risk. Merely allowing your players to start talking with other teams comes with the very real risk of them getting lured elsewhere. Even though I do still think the Stars aren’t likely to let Bourque get nabbed with an offer sheet, it’s not exactly the cleanest way to get things done, but Dallas’s cap crunch is forcing them to operate a little differently than usual this summer.

All told, it wouldn’t shock me if Dallas wound up re-signing Bourque for something reasonable (2 years at $3M per, for example). But again, the Robertson situation is a key part of all this, so perhaps it’s all dependent on which domino falls first: an offer sheet for Bourque, or a resolution for Robertson

Jason Robertson

Pierre LeBrun just tweeted this, in case you’re wondering whether Dallas is still trying to find a way to keep Robertson.

Jason Robertson’s qualifying offer is $9.3 million. I would be gobsmacked, floored, and bowled over all at once if he were to accept that QO rather than filing for salary arbitration.

As for offer sheets, I wonder if those wouldn’t almost be welcomed by Dallas, at this point. Given the potentially reduced return Dallas is facing with Robertson unwilling to sign extensions with teams like Seattle, getting four unprotected first-round picks from a team probably seems pretty appealing. And oftentimes, a team that’s threatening an offer sheet will reach out ahead of time to see if the team is willing to negotiate a trade that works better for both sides. That certainly doesn’t seem out of the question, for me.

What also doesn’t seem out of the question is for Dallas and Robertson still, somehow, to find a way to stay together. It would require a level of compromise we haven’t seen so far, and as we discussed, it would also have real ramifications for Bourque. But if there’s a world where Dallas and Robertson could find a way to compromise, then a lot of other things could be possible, so you wonder if Nill might have a bigger plan in place than we can see so far.

One thing I told someone today is that fans might be starting to understand why Colorado wound up trading Mikko Rantanen, after going through somewhat similarly frustrating negotiations with Andy Scott and Rantanen back in early 2025. At a certain point, an organization just wants to get things settled, even if it means moving on from an extremely valuable player. You can’t hang in limbo forever, and it’s not a great thing for the rest of the team to constantly be hearing about one player holding up all these other moves—even if it’s for good reasons.

Remember, Robertson’s last contract negotiation came in his first RFA year, before he had arbitration rights. That’s why it dragged into training camp (and the entire preseason), but it did eventually get done. (And unlike Jamie Benn’s first RFA negotiation back in 2012, Robertson got signed before the NHL season actually began.)

Players can begin signing offer sheets on July 1, so that’s obviously a big date to watch out for. If Robertson doesn’t sign an offer sheet, then he’d have to file for arbitration by the players’ deadline of July 5 at 4:00PM Central, kicking the can further down the road.

Arttu Hyry

Lost in all this is the fact that Hyry is also a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. I don’t think there’s much risk of an offer sheet here. Hyry is a useful player the Stars want to keep, and whom the coaching staff values highly. Without the Stars knowing exactly how much space they’ll have to work with regarding the two names above, even doing something like $1.5 million over a longer term for Hyry could preclude some options they might want to keep on the table for Bourque and Robertson—hence the current delay. But I can’t imagine he’d be going anywhere.

In both Hyry and Bourque’s case, I have to think some type of assurances have been given, and that both sides have a good understanding of the likely outcomes here. Hyry has been found money since being signed as a free agent, and he profiles as a key center/winger for a team that may not have a ton of depth up front regardless of whether Robertson is part of the group or not. There is a clear NHL opportunity for Hyry in Dallas, and that means a lot to undrafted players.

Hyry’s qualifying offer is the league minimum of $850K, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets something like the Oskar Bäck deal (relative to the higher cap in place now), and winds up signing a multi-year extension in the neighborhood of $1 million per season.

Hello from Frisco, where the Stars are well underway in the first day of development camp. We’ll have more on today’s camp later, but with qualifying offers due to restricted free agents today, I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on the apparent impasse between the Stars and Jason Robertson.

You can listen to the start of 32 Thoughts today, where Elliotte Friedman says that the Stars and Robertson continue to be roughly $1.5-2 million apart in contract talks—a divide that doesn’t sound likely to shrink any time soon.

(Start at the 4:22 mark to hear the Robertson bits.)

Now of course, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. But I do think there are two pretty crystallized perspectives here on both sides, with Robertson’s camp having set his minimum value at $14 million, and the Stars pretty clearly being unwilling (and practically unable) to go above the $12-12.5 million number we’ve been writing about here for months.

From the team side, the logic seems pretty clear to me. If I were to take a guess, I might summarize the Stars’ reasoning like something along these lines:

Read more

We’ll dig into every one of the five draft picks the Dallas Stars made today in just a moment, but first, let’s go over a couple of NHL updates after Jim Nill spoke with the media today.

You can watch the draft portion of Nill’s presser here, but I’ll summarize a couple points of interest, including a couple more notes about Jason Robertson.

First, Nill confirmed that the Stars did indeed discuss a trade of Jason Robertson to Seattle, as was reported by multiple outlets earlier this week.

“It’s no secret, everybody heard about the potential trade,” Nill said. “In the end, we gotta do our job. If there’s an opportunity that we think is a good opportunity for our team, we have to do it. It was also a good opportunity for him, and in the end, it didn’t materialize. I talked to his representatives right after that, and [we] continue to move forward.”

Nill declined to go into further detail about the exact process of the Robertson trade proposal with Seattle other than to say that it was “pretty straightforward.”

As you’d expect, Nill did a good job of answering further questions about Robertson without giving too much away, but emphasized that they would still prefer to keep Robertson, if possible.

“Our preference is to re-sign Jason Robertson,” Nill said. “Can we make it work? That’s what we have to figure out. But that’s our preference. It’s been our preference since day one. He’s a great player. He’s a good person. We drafted him. We developed him. It’s our preference to sign him, of course. Now, can we do that within the parameters of what we have to work with, and what he wants?”

The Stars’ salary cap situation is such that Robertson’s reported $14 million asking price is pretty much a non-starter for Dallas, particularly if the Stars want to have more depth than they did last year, when they finished the playoffs with essentially two fourth lines in the bottom-six forward group.

So it’s a challenge right now, to say the least.

“I fully understand their position,” Nill said of Robertson and his agent. “He’s a good player. With the way the game’s going, he’s earned his right to sign what he wants to sign for. We’ve got to run our business and put a team together, so we have to do our part. Can we find that common ground? That’s what we have to figure out.”

Nill also alluded to the recent shift in how NHL players are handling their contract negotiations, particularly with a salary cap that’s rising faster than ever.

“You guys have seen, there’s lots of talk out there,” Nill said. “The game…we’re on steroids a little bit right now, it seems like. Our game is just all of a sudden in the last two months, I don’t wanna say on a different level, but on a different path, a little bit. And maybe that’s our new game, and we have to adjust to it. The league is figuring it out. I think the players are figuring it out. We’ve just gotta walk through those different scenarios.”

Nill cautioned that while some details are bound to end up on social media, other rumors out in public have been inaccurate as well. But one thing that isn’t a rumor is that Mavrik Bourque and Jason Robertson both have a very real deadline approaching on June 29, when the Stars need to either sign or extend qualifying offers to both players—qualifying offers that would expose them to offer sheets from other teams.

When asked about Bourque in particular, Nill said they would certainly prefer to get things done sooner rather than later, if possible. But he also emphasized that the Stars aren’t exactly in uncharted territory, either.

“It’s funny,” Nill said, “As we go through this process, somebody said, ‘Remember six years ago when we went through this same thing?’ It’s just another experience. They’re not all the same, but we’ve been through it before.”

As for Bourque and Jamie Benn, Nill said they’re very much on his radar as well.

“We continue to talk to Mavrik,” Nill said. “I’m gonna talk to Jamie here now that we’ve gotten through the draft, and go from there.”

As for players that do have Dallas contracts, Nill confirmed that Radek Faksa did indeed end up needing a second surgical procedure on his injured foot.

“He had that procedure. It was successful,” Nill said of Faksa. “He’s in a cast now. Should be getting the cast off in a couple weeks,” Nill said. “They were actually surprised that he played. It needed to be done. I’m glad it’s okay. It’s all good.”

Nill confirmed Faksa is on track to be fully healed before training camp, but he then went on to mention another player still in the process of recovery. The Stars’ GM also said Tyler Seguin’s recovery from his ACL surgery continues, and they won’t be rushing anything.

“Tyler Seguin, he’s on his rehab part [of recovery]. Still got a ways to go. He’s still got a couple months [away], but he’s getting close,” Nill said. “Should be available for camp. What level? Those injuries, those are the ones that kinda, you feel good, but it doesn’t get up to speed. The body’s gotta get back up to speed. So he’ll be going through that process. We’ll have to watch him in camp, just be careful with him.”

Nill also mentioned that NHL training camps will be shorter this year with just four preseason games to be played, so they’re looking at alternate ways to get more game-like action for players that might need it.

Okay, enough of that. Let’s get into the very newest Dallas Stars.

The Stars Draft Picks

In 2026, Dallas had five picks, four of which were in the fifth round or later. It continues to be a thin draft pick cupboard for Dallas, so we’ll have to wait and see how they manage to continue filling the gaps.

This year, Dallas wound up taking two left-shot defensemen, two left-shot forwards, and a goalie that catches left-handed. But what are their names? Well, I’m glad you asked!

In the 2nd round, the Stars took Czechia native Jakub Vaněček (LHD) with the 59th overall pick. Vaněček played for the Tri-City Americans of the WHL last year.

Jim Nill said the Stars had Vaněček slotted as a late first-round pick on their board. Places like McKeen’s had Vaněček ranked similarly highly, while Elite Prospects had him at #67 overall. Nill acknowledged that opinions always begin varying more on players when you get into the late first round and beyond. Thus, most teams are going to have players that their board would say have “dropped” when you get into that area of the draft.

This was a neat feature on Vaněček from Worlds, by the way:

We talked about Vaněček a tiny bit earlier today, but the McKeen’s profile is a far more detailed one than I can give if you want to really dig into what he can do. Overall, Vaněček has the size, skating, and two-way ability to make him a perfectly solid pick in the late-second round from what I can put together, and the Stars said as much themselves.

“He was real good in the April tournament [U-18 World Championships],” said longtime Stars Director of Amateur Scouting Joe McDonnell. “We knew he was good prior to that, but we thought he took it to another level in April. Really like the skillset on him, and good size as well.”

McDonnell added that Vaněček showed more offense at Worlds than he had during the season, and the stats bear that out. He’s committed to play college hockey for Western Michigan starting in 2027 after (we presume) one more year in juniors.

As far as his fit down the road, I think it’s pretty much all upside. If Vaněček turns into a player, then you have a skilled defenseman in 3-4 years to help the organization with speed on the back end when NHL veterans like Lindell are approaching the end of their deals. I don’t really see much point trying to project players or rosters that far out in much detail, since things change so much over time, but for my money, it’s usually more prudent to take the best player available rather than try to draft for need, and McDonnell confirmed that the Stars did stick with the BPA approach this year.

In the 5th round, the Dallas Stars selected LW Ryan Brown from the London Knights (OHL). He’s 175-lbs, 5-foot-11, and Elite Prospects describes him as an Energy Guy, which you can see here:

McDonnell said that Brown played on OHL London’s first power play after being traded from Sarnia, and he showed he could play that role pretty well.

“He was excellent,” McDonnell said of Brown. “He’s got a bomb of a shot. Not the biggest guy, but he competes. He’s an offensive-style player.”

McDonnell also said the Stars do place a high value on drafting skill—as you’d expect most teams would.

“You always want skill,” McDonnell said. “If you just have big guys that just crash and bang type thing, I think they’re easier to find in trades. It’s hard to get skill. You’d like to develop your own players if you can, so if you can develop them with skill, that’s a big plus.”

(You can read a longer profile on Brown here if you want, rather than having me try to summarize it for you. There’s some intriguing upside there for a fifth-rounder, I’d say.)

In the 6th round, Dallas selected Danish goaltender Anton Emil Wilde Larsen. He is 6-foot-4, and he catches with his left hand, which you can watch him do in this video:

Taking one goaltender per year is not uncommon in the draft, and Dallas didn’t depart from that tradition today. Wilde-Larsen (I’ve seen it both hyphenated and not) didn’t have great numbers last year, but neither did anyone on his club team in Denmark.

Given that context, it might have been Wilde Larsen’s heroic work for Denmark at worlds that turned Dallas heads, more than anything else.

“He was great in the April tournament,” McDonnell said. “He was real good there. And he’s going to Sweden to play next year. So again, it’s a real good program from what the guys say, in Linköping, so it’s gonna be a good development path for him.”

Dallas’s first pick of the 7th Round was forward Jasper Kuhta, a left-shot, 6-foot-2 forward committed to the University of Massachusetts next year. Like Vaněček, McDonnell acknowledged that Kuhta’s performance with his national team was an impressive one. But in the late rounds of the draft, there are always caveats, and age is one in this case. Kuhta will be 20 years old in October, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Dallas’s purposes.

“He’s two years ahead of everybody else, so he’s a little more polished,” McDonnell said. “He’s just a little bit more advanced than your 17-year-old kids.”

McDonnell added that Kuhta’s strong performance at U-20’s for Finland was a strong positive for them in making the selection as well. As for his league play, Kuhta scored 32 goals in 61 games for Ottawa of the OHL last year, putting up a point-per-game—again, as a 19-year-old, which is important context in these things. Kuhta also played on the first power play for Finland, and he’s got a quality one-timer—which you can see here:

Dallas’s last pick of the draft was Mikhail Cherepanov, a 6-foot-1 left-shot defenseman who played in the NAHL last year.

Cherepanov is committed to play college hockey at Lake Superior State University in 2027-28, but that’s in two years. Cherepanov played in the NAHL this year, but next year, Joe McDonnell confirmed that Cherepanov will be going through the CHL Import Draft. That means they aren’t sure what team he’ll be playing for this season just yet.

“He looks like he’s a bit of a riverboat gambler, but he’s big. He can skate. We gotta get him into the CHL,” McDonnell said.

One of my favorite Cherepanov comments was from old DBD colleague, Derek Neumeier:

A few other notes from today:

• Full development camp rosters will be released before Monday. I am pretty confident of this fact on account of development camp begins Monday morning.

• One of my favorite bits of trivia is that the last Stars’ 7th-round draft pick to play in the NHL was Dylan Ferguson, drafted in 2017. But to be precise, my favorite part of this fact is that Ferguson played in the NHL that same year, when he got into a game for Vegas during their inaugural season as an emergency recall.

• As for other seventh-round comparables, the Stars will probably be thrilled if they get a Jyrki Jokipakka-like career out of Cherepanov. Defensemen can always surprise you a bit.

• New Assistant General Manager/Player Personnel Rich Peverley is in the process of moving to Dallas, Jim Nill said. Peverley’s promotion to AGM earlier this year means Peverley is now even more closely involved in the day-to-day of the organization, though Nill did say Pevereley is also still fulfilling some of his same duties in overseeing a lot of the Stars’ development.

• One other thing McDonnell said today is that he personally misses the old, centralized NHL Draft.

  • “Yeah, I’m still not a big fan of it [the decentralized draft],” McDonnell said. “I like everybody together, having fun with it, and seeing all your guys that you see throughout the whole year, but it is what it is.”

    • (To be honest: I agree with him.)
      

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The Dallas Stars have drafted defenseman Jakub Vaněček in the second round of the draft. As of right now, they don’t pick again until the fifth round. We’ll see if that changes.

The Stars’ blue line depth in prospect terms was somewhat thin going into the draft, so it makes sense that they’d take one of the best defensemen left on the board in Vaněček. The 6-foot-2, 200-lb Czech D-man just finished his first year in the WHL with Tri-City, where he put up 14 goals and 21 assists in 59 games. From what I’ve read about him, I’d call him a “skatey” defenseman with size, and that’s a desirable quality in a late second-round pick.

We will hopefully get a chance to see him up close at development camp next week, so stay tuned for much more on him and the other Stars’ picks from today.

Now, let’s get into some other Stars news.

Zach Werenski?

The reigning Norris Trophy winner is reportedly not going to extend with Columbus in two years, and that means the Blue Jackets are looking to maximize their return for him. Two of the teams that have been mentioned by NHL insiders as having serious interest are Philadelphia and Dallas, though Werenski’s no-move clause gives him ultimate control over the situation.

Werenski turns 29 next month. He has two years left at $9.58M, then he’ll be due a huge raise going into his age-31 season. He just won the award for being the Best Defenseman in the League, which means he is, ah, pretty good. Every single NHL team would be better for having Werenski on their team, and markedly so.

As for the price to acquire Werenski, Pierre LeBrun reported today that the Blue Jackets are not remotely interested in futures. That means they want immediate NHL help. LeBrun reports Toronto as the one Canadian team Werenski might consider going to, so it’s probably safe to assume Matthew Knies would be on the table in a trade like that, which means a team like Dallas would need to be ponying up with a package built around a similarly desirable player. This is the reigning Norris Trophy winner, after all.

So, what could Dallas realistically move for Werenski? Jason Robertson doesn’t seem likely to be involved in this sort of trade unless it’s a three-way deal, as Columbus doesn’t profile as a place I’d put high on Robertson’s list (though I’ll admit I don’t know that for sure). Columbus won’t want to acquire another star player only to lose him in a year—especially with Kirill Marchenko also informing them that he’s gone next summer. That means Dallas would have to be moving a different player (or two), which pretty much has to involve at least one of Mavrik Bourque, Lian Bichsel, or…Thomas Harley.

Here’s the question you have to ask if you’re Dallas: how much better do you get by losing Harley and gaining Werenski for two years? Are you willing to accept the risk of losing Werenski after that—or if not, are you willing to pay the price of keeping him after Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar have significantly raised the bar for elite defensemen’s salaries in the NHL?

Harley just had a down year, yes. He also just showed, like Werenski, that he can play on the biggest international stages, with two great appearances for Team Canada (and one outstanding playoff run in 2025) under his belt. Harley’s eight-year extension at $10.6 million might seem rich relative to his most recent performance, but he’s not even 25 yet, and he’s already shown he can be the team’s number one defenseman and PP1 quarterback when needed. He’s also under team control until well into his thirties. That is an asset you don’t flip lightly, if ever.

But with the Jason Robertson situation looking likely to prompt at least a partial roster makeover, would the Stars be willing to lose another good young player in order to keep the window as wide-open right now as possible? Harley is obviously the player Columbus would want in return, but it’s tough for me to see Jim Nill parting with a player that could turn into Zach Werenski for an older version that will be a ton more expensive in two years.

Oh, and by the way: Werenski can play on the right side, which he’s done with Team USA, where he played on the right side with Jake Sanderson at 4 Nations and the Olympics. Pulling off a deal like this would give the Stars the option of playing Werenski with Heiskanen on arguably the best defense pairing in the league, or else putting the two on separate pairings, creating an impossible matchup issue for opposing teams.

Obviously, it’s a tantalizing prospect. But Dallas would be bidding against a ton of people, so the price would be steep. And this time, they don’t have a Rantanen-like haul ready to hand over, unless they could work Jason Robertson into the deal, somehow. That, to me, seems like the most likely way to work this. Because if you could somehow manage to move Robertson and get back Werenski without losing Harley (again, this requires a third team), then you could have a team looking like this, next year (which fits under the cap, by the way):

The winger depth is obviously a major issue there, as you’ve lost the best left-wing in the NHL in exchange for the best defenseman in the NHL. It’s a pickle, to be sure. Speaking of wingers, let’s talk about those. Or at least one of them.

As Elliotte Friedman reported before the second round of the draft today, the Stars are still “actively” exploring trading Jason Robertson. They’ve also introduced the possibility of moving him without any extension in order to avoid the messiness that has been his camp’s refusal to extend with the team(s) Dallas has worked out trades with, so far.

The issue here is just how much less a potential trade return would be without an extension attached. Sure, it opens up the market, but Robertson only has one year left, and teams have to be wary about thinking he’d automatically extend with them unless something is in writing.

As Sean wrote today, that trade return could be quite a bit less—as much as one first-rounder instead of three and that’s got to be casting even more of a pall over whatever’s left of negotiations between the two camps than was already there. I can’t imagine Dallas is remotely pleased about how things have gone, even if they bear some responsibility for winding up in this position themselves, too.

Of course, Robertson’s knee injury right before the playoffs in 2025 didn’t help his value, as he didn’t really get back online until the Stars were losing to Edmonton in the third round. You have to wonder if Robertson’s trade value might have been higher last year if he’d been healthy for all three rounds—and if Dallas would have been more open to trading him in that case, with two years remaining in team control rather than just one? (That’s just speculation, to be clear.)

Robertson’s apparent refusal to sign for less than $14 million right now is the impasse, by all accounts. That, again, is absolutely his right, and an ask that’s not far off where the market is going and maybe already has gone. But both sides’ apparent inability to work out a sign-and-trade seems to have caught Dallas at least a little bit off-balance, and this is where I wonder just where the disconnect in communication has been between the two camps. I can’t imagine the Stars would have gotten as far down the road with Seattle (and maybe St. Louis?) as they reportedly did if they didn’t think there was at least a decent chance Robertson was open to going there. The frustration has to be pretty high, at this point.

The question now is this: can the Stars and Robertson come to an agreement on anything, or are they in a position now where they just want to move him and move on, even if it means taking a slightly (or significantly) smaller return?

Honestly, I’d still be shocked if they don’t get a big haul for Robertson. He’s as desirable a player as there is out there, or at least he was, until Werenski’s availability really became public.

But if Dallas’s offers are suddenly only for one first-rounder and a player or two, would they be more willing to risk qualifying Robertson and inviting offer sheets, all of which would net them four first-rounders? That would likely give them more cap room this year, and who knows—maybe they’d be willing to extend Robertson at his higher ask starting next year, if nobody offer-sheeted him.

(It should be noted that any scenario involving keeping Robertson pretty much requires moving Harley to acquire Werenski, given the cap constraints.)

Anyway, I’m now wondering if Dallas would eschew a Robertson trade right now if the asks are too low to be worth it, opting instead to go the QO route and look to trade (or extend) him later in the year. Werenski might command some of the premier trade packages that were in play for Robertson, and I wonder if that could stall things a bit, potentially. Qualifying Robertson would also likely give the Stars room to extend Mavrik Bourque before Monday, which at least gives them surer footing going into free agency on Wednesday.

Anyway, we’ll see what Jim Nill has to say after the draft today, but as it stands right now, everything is very much still up in the air.