In case you missed it, Sean and I had the venerable Prashanth Iyer on AIH this week, and we spent a good deal of time talking about Dylan Larkin’s trade request out of Detroit. It’s a good discussion, as you’d expect given that Prashanth is one of the most Detroit-savvy people out there (and I suppose Sean knows a thing or two about them, too).

But today, I wanted to pour some cold water on the latest thing to get churned out from ye olde rumore mille. Specifically, I wanted to enumerate the reasons that despite Dallas having checked in on Larkin’s asking price with Detroit, I don’t see a recently hypothesized Jason Robertson for Dylan Larkin trade making a lick of sense, as things stand now.

Let’s start with the obvious issue here: Robertson is a left-winger, and Larkin is a center. Positionally, how would Dallas even make this work, given how few top winger options they have as it is?

With Wyatt Johnston, Matt Duchene, and Roope Hintz all slated to center the top nine, you’d pretty much have to ask one of them or Larkin to move over to the wing. The experiment moving Duchene to wing last year didn’t go well, and if everyone’s healthy, Duchene would play a different role than Larkin anyway. Realistically, you’d be looking at displacing Hintz or Johnston in favor of the left-shot Larkin, who will be 30 years old in July. Making a huge trade that also displaces either the player being acquired or one of your top centers is, to put it mildly, a pretty optimistic way to view such a move.

After all, Mikko Rantanen clearly prefers playing with a right-shot centerman, and Johnston is the only real option as things stand. That means you’d be looking at moving Hintz to the wing. And while I actually don’t hate the general idea of Hintz’s speed getting more opportunity out wide, it’s a big ask. Hintz also isn’t quite as much of a goal-scorer as Jason Robertson (who is?), so a Larkin-Hintz duo projects to score less than Hintz-Robertson did. Again, it’s hard to see why such a move would be worth it for a team looking to win now.

This isn’t to disparage Larkin, to be clear. He’s a fantastic two-way center whose term and cap hit project to be great value for whatever team he plays for next year. When a player like that hits the market, any team would be foolish not to look at the price tag and ask about wiggle room. But again, we’re looking at the idea of moving Jason Robertson in exchange for Larkin, so we need to view the potential acquisition through the lens of what’s going out the door as well as what’s coming in.

Speaking of scoring, Larkin has done a lot of it…on the power play. Yes, he’s hit 30 goals for five straight seasons, and that’s not nothing. But when you drill down a tad bit, a whole bunch of that production is coming on the power play: specifically, 57 of his last 129 goals have come on the man-advantage, or nearly half. Larkin hasn’t hit 20 even-strength goals in any of his last four seasons.

(This is a good spot to remind everyone that Jason Robertson has scored 20 even-strength goals in all of his last five seasons, including hitting the 30-goal mark at even-strength just this past year. The dude scores goals like few other players in the league can do.)

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Brief note: Don’t miss the bonus episode of AIH that Sean and I recorded with former Stars player Jason Demers1 which just went up today. It’s a really entertaining chat, so give it a look.

The season couldn’t have started better for Nils Lundkvist. After missing the second half of last year and the entire Dallas playoff run, Lundkvist opened the 2025-26 season with a two-point night in Winnipeg, including this goal past the reigning Hart and Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck:

For me, Lundkvist’s moment in the next game was just as impressive, if not more so, as he confidently led a rush chance against Colorado and bulled his way to net, starting a scoring chance that Mikko Rantanen and Thomas Harley finished in style:

Unfortunately, things got derailed shortly after that. Those three points in two game would be followed by only eight more in the rest of the regular season, because Lundkvist had the unenviable distinction of starting a trend of literal bad breaks in Dallas.

Lundkvist would miss six weeks after suffering a fracture to his lower leg/ankle area in the fourth game of the season, against Vancouver. The play happened off-camera and wasn’t shown on replays—yes, I checked both broadcasts—but to my recollection from way up in the press box, Aatu Räty finished a check on Lundkvist along the boards in the second period on October 16, and Lundkvist immediately went down the tunnel with what we later found out was a fractured lower leg/ankle.

We would end up learning that Lundkvist and Bichsel suffered oddly identical injuries, but I won’t show a replay of Bichsel’s injury for reasons of good taste. Still, if you remember how Bichsel’s skate got wedged into the boards, you might have some idea of what may have happened on Lundkvist’s injury.

In any case, Lundkvist had to use a knee scooter for a bit, and by the time he returned in early December, the Stars were well into the depth of their blue line with Harley and Bichsel both on shelf. But despite a smattering of time with Lindell and Kyle Capobianco, Lundkvist spent the bulk of the year paired with Harley, to great effect.

In over 540 minutes together at five-on-five, Lundkvist and Harley were very good, though we’ll discuss Harley’s more volatile season as a whole in the coming weeks. Here’s an eye chart with the Stars’ three most common pairings in the regular season, just so you have a relative idea of where the Harley-Lundkvist pairing’s numbers lie. The most important number, of course, is their 27 goals for, and just 17 goals against while on the ice:

That 60% share in 5v5 goals is either inflated or a more telling representation of the work that pairing did in the most important areas of the ice, depending on how you approach it. Lundkvist’s strongest stretch came when the team’s as a whole did: from late January to early March, when his confidence and mobility meshed seamlessly with the entire team’s work rate and aggression to create goals like this one—again, scored on the unfortunate Connor Hellebuyck.

If you watched the playoffs, you already know how good Lundkvist was then, too. He and Harley put up 60% or better in all their pertinent 5v5 metrics against Minnesota, and after being on the ice for two goals2 in Game 1, Lundkvist didn’t see another Wild goal go in while he was on the ice, while Dallas scored three of their own (including a pair of Lundkvist primary assists in Game 2).

Sure, Lundkvist and Harley faced the second defense pairing a bit more than the Hughes-Faber combo, but one second defense pairing won their minutes against the other, and that’s the job, generally speaking. When Lundkvist was concussed out of the playoffs by a vicious (and accidental) skate to the face, the Stars’ blue line was never the same.

And when you consider that this was really Lundkvist’s first run-out as a full-time blueliner in the postseason—he averaged an absurdly low 4:28 per game in his 12 playoff games under Pete DeBoer—the job he did playing 16+ minutes a night before his concussion was a very satisfactory one indeed.

Overall, Lundkvist earned a “T” grade for this season, for his tantalizing show of just how much he’s grown since his arrival in Dallas four(!) years ago. This is no longer a player with the mere potential to grow into a mobile right-shot defenseman, but such a player already. It was telling that after acquiring Tyler Myers in March, Glen Gulutzan still opted to keep Lundkvist paired with Harley, rather than elevating the much larger and much veteran-er Myers. (And given what wound up happening when Myers was elevated out of necessity after Lundkvist’s Game 4 injury against Minnesota, Gulutzan knew what he was doing.)

In Gulutzan’s defensive system, Lundkvist seemed to thrive on knowing where he needed to be defensively, and likewise when he could activate the other way. In the old man-on-man coverage under DeBoer, Lundkvist appeared to grow a little more gunshy with each passing year, perhaps more worried about being out of position than driving play when opportunities presented themselves. In more conventional D-zone coverage, Lundkvist performed well in transition, perhaps benefiting from clearer delineations and more assurance of coverage when he chose to go forward.

Teasing causes and effects from the usual shot metrics was trickier than ever this season, both because of the changes Gulutzan made and because of how much of a roller coaster the 112-point season could be, at times. In one sense, Lundkvist’s peak with Dallas still appears to be his 2023-24 stretch alongside Ryan Suter, though that pairing was so heavily sheltered in the offensive zone that I’m inclined to say his tougher minutes alongside Harley this year are a stronger proof of concept than anything we’ve yet seen.

You can reach for a lot of different players as hopeful comparables for Lundkvist, whether someone like Gustav Forsling or Sam Girard, but perhaps the best way to understand Lundkvist is to recognize his tools for what they are. He’s capable of excellent defensive stickwork, and his skating is a genuinely great asset. Pairing smooth skating and speed with outstanding fitness allows him to cover a lot of ground, and that’s just as valuable in gapping up on attackers and closing down puck-carriers as it can be in transition.

Furthermore, Lundkvist still has an underrated release which is capable of things like the 95 MPH bomb he stepped into against the Islanders in late March (which was blockered away by Ilya Sorokin). Lundkvist isn’t likely to return to the power play in Dallas any time soon, however, so smarter wristers are probably where he can make his shot shine most brightly, as he did in the first game of the season in Winnipeg, or in the playoffs against Minnesota, on the shot Robertson tipped in:

I think there’s a lot to like about Lundkvist’s game, and even more one you separate yourself from the journey he’s had. So often we bemoan how traditional NHL thinking gravitates towards the Greg Pateryns of the world when it comes to bottom-four defensemen, but if the Lundkvists of the world are being trusted for second pairing minutes, I don’t have much issue with a Pateryn3 or a Hakanpää or a Myers being deployed on the third.

Nils Lundkvist is four years removed from being acquired from New York for Jim Nill’s first of many first-round pick trades. The emergence of Thomas Harley during that time has lessened the Stars’ need for Lundkvist to channel his inner John Klingberg, but this season was the first time you really began to see how that could still be a good thing. Combining an irrepressibly positive disposition with a high work-rate and a deep skillset could make Lundkvist as valuable as his coach wants him to be. And it sure seems like the Stars have a coach who is excited to explore that ceiling, for once.

Yes, Lundkvist could really use a fully healthy season to ensconce himself in Dallas’s top-four, but this year’s injuries were more of the freakish variety than anything else, so I’d still bet on him carpe-ing the diem out of 2026-27. When Jim Nill signed Lundkvist to a very reasonable two-year extension at $1.75 million per season back in April, it looked like a bargain. By this time next year, it could well end up being a steal.

The mayor only had to ask the crowd to quiet down twice, and only one of those appeals came with a warning that further disruptions would result in folks being asked to leave. All that to say, if there’s a more entertaining way to spend a Monday night in June than attending a city council meeting, nobody suggested one to me last night.

You can watch the video stream of last night’s Plano City Council meeting here, beginning at 1:24:50. I opted to attend in person, partly out of a sense of civic responsibility, but mainly because I have a fondness for these kinds of things. One of my earliest on-location journalism assignments as a college student was to attend a city council meeting in La Mirada, California back in 2005, and here I was 21 years later, sitting in a much bigger but otherwise quite similar room to hear the latest news about the Dallas Stars’ proposed move to Plano in 2031.

The agenda for the June 8 meeting is here, but it’s clear that the bulk of the larger-than-usual crowd is present to give (and listen to) public comments preceding City Council votes on four specific considerations pertaining to the Dallas Stars’ proposed move to Plano. Those five items were:

1. The designation of a Tax Increment Financing Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) in the Willow Bend area. The TIRZ is the primary mechanism for how Plano will fund the city’s proposed $700 million contribution to the costs of a new sports arena projected to cost at least $1 billion.

   

   By the way, the city is not directly contributing towards the additional $1-2 billion projected to be needed for developing the surrounding entertainment district, some of which Tom Gaglardi’s Northland Properties will co-own, as reported by the Morning News.
   
   The City of Plano relased a statement about the TIRZ and other motions following the meeting, including the below excerpts:

   

2. An Economic Development Incentive Agreement for the owners of the current Willow Bend mall site, possibly to encourage the cooperation of the current owners of the Shops at Willow Bend in quickly moving forward with demolition and construction to literally pave the way for construction beginning in 2028.

   

   You’ll note that Plano also stipulated that the property owners will include a new Visitor’s Center for a Visit Plano location of at least 6,500 square feet in the newly proposed complex.

   

3. A vote to approve the nonbinding Letter of Intent the Dallas Stars announced a few days ago.

4. “Consideration to approve a Resolution designating and providing for the planning, acquisition, establishment, development, construction, and renovation of a sports and community venue project under Chapter 334 of the Texas Local Government Code and designating methods of financing for the project, subject to voter approval at an election called for such purpose.

   

5. Finally, the City Council had an unrelated vote to award a traffic detection improvement contract to a local engineering firm.1 (Like the other four items, it also passed with an 8-0 vote.)

The Preliminary Stuff

Before all this happened, the City Council returned from their executive session, which involves a closed-door discussion about noncontroversial items that need to be voted upon. The Council then votes on all those items at once in what is called a Consent Agenda, which is described thus: “The Consent Agenda will be acted upon in one motion and contains items which are routine and typically noncontroversial. Items may be removed from this agenda for individual discussion by a Council Member, the City Manager or any citizen. The Presiding Officer will establish time limits based upon the number of speaker requests.”

On June 8, the preliminary session began around 6:30. No Stars-related stuff was on the docket here, though there was this fun graph about how 911 services are funded, if you’re interested:

Two other notable moments from the preliminary open meeting were as follows:

• The first three rows of one section were marked with taped-up pieces of paper that read, “RESERVED FOR JUNETEETH DAY [sic].” It was not clear to the casual observer whether these placards were intended to keep the rows clear until June 19th, on June 19th, or for that meeting only in commemoration of a Juneteenth holiday proclomation. Consequently, one or two people tentatively sat in the third row of those sections until the 7pm Open Meeting, which began with that proclomation and a photo op.

  

• A woman near the front of the gallery2 had a coughing fit that suggested lungs at far less than their healthiest condition. After her second prolonged coughing spell, a member of the City Council (also the City Manager) stood up and walked a bottle of water over to her, and the coughing mercifully subsided.

• A middle-aged couple had arrived early, and they murmured audibly (and negatively) throughout both the preliminary and primary portions of the meeting. The man was particularly vocal (let’s say), though he clearly wasn’t planning to make any public comment, as indicated by his shorts and slip-on shoes, and as repeatedly demonstrated by his reading a book3 during much of the evening’s proceedings.

The Main Course

The Open Meeting itself began promptly at 7pm, with Plano Mayor John Muns banging the gavel to call the meeting to order. (You can view that part of the meeting starting at 2:09:38 in the video.) That was followed by an invocation4 from a local pastor and the pledges to both the USA and Texas5 flags. Business followed.

Before the City Council voted on the noncontroversial items on the Consent Agenda, they agreed to remove one item (“Item E”) from that list for the moment. That item was a proposal to spend $2.55 million to buy some land in Plano. Someone had requested to make public comments before that vote took place. As it turned out, that someone was a 30% stakeholder in said land (who is also a local dentist, though his website appears to be down) who expressed his concerns about how quickly he felt the process to be moving, as well as his disagreement on some of the land valuation itself.

He asked the Council to hold off on voting until more discussion could be had. After his three minutes of commenting time were up, the Council then voted 8-0 to move forward with procuring the land. This would prove to be a template for how persuasive other public comments would be later on.

After that, the Council opened it up for public comment on the first of the above five items, and this is where all the murmurings and quiet scorn finally got their time to shine. Specifically, people could get up to three minutes in which to give public comments on any of the five items up for consideration, starting with the formation of the TIRZ. Six people had signed up for that item, and all six were present.

Four of the six people who made public comments on the TIRZ had also signed to comment on at least three other items, though not all of them would choose to speak every time.

Here I should add a word about the nature of the public comment portion of these meetings, which can range from the above dentist’s quiet appeal to delay action to impassioned pleas from local citizens and, most entertainingly, gadfly grandstanding, as Parks and Rec lampooned repeatedly over the years.

But while the particularly strident objectors tend to get the most attention, I actually found it encouraging to hear passionate citizens devoting their evenings to make their views known to elected officials. On Monday, nobody sounded unhinged, even those who had clearly prepared pointed soundbites at the end of their comments. These were, by all accounts, concerned and passionate citizens trying to use democratic means to voice their concerns to elected officials. At its core, it was beautiful.

The six citizens commenting on the first item raised questions including the following:

• Plano had a hiring freeze related to budget issues last year, so why are we devoting $700 million to draw a sports team to our city? Will this abandon central Plano to prioritize the new sports arena district?

• Plano already has some areas with bad traffic bottlenecks. Can we appeal for a federal grant to address these and future traffic issues rather than rely on city funds to do so?

• What is the risk of taxpayer exposure should the TIRZ not end up being able to fund the entire $700 million?

• “This is nothing more than a corporate welfare scheme”

• More safety measures are needed to ensure local residents are kept safe, including AI-enhanced cameras for security and the consideration of asking for DHS funds for potential terrorist threats.

• What if the Stars relocate in 30 years, as the Bears and even the North Stars did previously? Will that leave Plano with the same dead stadium downtown Dallas might be saddled with right now?

After all the comments were made, Mayor Pro Tem Rick Horne spoke. He said that the proposed Stars arena and surrounding district would “revitalize” the city by taking the place of a mall that was “dead.” His comments prompt sporadic but audible “NO” objections from the gallery, which build to the point where Mayor Muns has to interject, reminding all in attendance that a City Council Meeting requires decorum, and that those unable to be present quietly would be asked to leave. Things quiet down, for the moment.

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Esa Lindell will make $5.25 million for four more seasons. Technically, his full no-trade clause only covers the first two years of that term before changing to a 20-team no-trade list in the summer of 2028, but I doubt it’s going to matter. Because Esa Lindell might be among the last players Dallas would ever look to move, and the 2025-26 season showed precisely why that is.

Let’s start with the most obvious thing: Esa Lindell once again sported an “A” on his sweater this year as an alternate captain for nearly every game (and he played all 82). The only times Lindell wasn’t wearing a visible badge of leadership was during the eight games in the fall when both Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin were in the lineup. Other than that, Lindell wore a letter all year.

In terms of how the sweater letters were rotated this year, the priority list appeared to go like this, unless I’m missing someone:

Benn - C (duh)
Seguin - A
Heiskanen - A
Lindell - A
Hintz - A1
Duchene -A2

Lindell is the longest-tenured Stars defenseman on the roster, and he trails only Seguin and Benn in unbroken3 longevity with the team overall, having completed his 11th season in Dallas this past year. He’s a clear leader in the room, and he extends that leadership to his mesmerizing consistency on the ice, too.

What did Lindell do in the 2025-26 regular season? Here are some raw stats for you:

• Average time on ice: 23:14 per game (25:18 in playoffs)

• One of just four players4 to play in all 82 games in the regular season (and all six in the postseason)

• Shorthanded time on ice: 322:28 (Led the NHL)

• Plus/minus: +30 (Led the team)

• Penalty minutes: 20

• Tied career-high in points (32) and set career high in assists (26)

Lindell was leaned on heavily this year, and he once again proved why he’s been a go-to resource for coaches during nearly all of his decade in Dallas. Lindell embraced a more slot-focused defensive system in his own zone while playing top-pairing minutes alongside Miro Heiskanen.

And if you think Lindell was just sitting back in a rocking chair, playing safety to Heiskanen’s aggressive cornerback work, I would submit this goal from November as evidence to the contrary:

With the Stars’ fourth line on the ice, Lindell sees Kirby Dach (#77 in red) slide out of the play after blocking a shot. With Faksa covering for Heiskanen at the point, Lindell doesn’t hesitate, jumping up into the suddenly soft ice between the circles and burying a puck from a dangerous shooting area.

It was an example of the shot tool that Lindell has always had, even if he’s made his NHL career more on what he prevents other players from doing with the puck. Lindell was asked to be Heiskanen’s full-time partner this season, and he rose to the occasion. We talked about the Lindell-Heiskanen partnership in detail previously, so I’ll not rehash that here, but feel free to check it out if you want:

For Lindell’s part, it’s funny how this most recent season kind of mirror Lindell’s Dallas debut back in 2015-16: an outstanding regular season that ended in playoff disappointment. Lindell’s first four NHL games barely got a mention when I wrote up that season a lifetime ago, but Lindell began by playing with Patrik Nemeth and Jyrki Jokipakka, so it wasn’t as though he was asked to light the world on fire. Rather, Lindell was asked to play next to a Swede and then a fellow Finn—something that would become a theme in his Stars career (Lundkvist/Klingberg and Honka/Hakanpää/Heiskanen).

Lindell didn’t hit the 30-minute mark in the regular season like he did a year ago, but he would surpass that mark in the postseason, playing over half an hour in both overtime games against Minnesota. The other four games of that series tell an interesting story, though. With the Stars’ scoring struggles on full display, Lindell wasn’t asked to do quite as much: he played just 20:29 in Game 5 and 22:14 in Game 6 (which he played largely next to Ilya Lyubushkin).

That’s kind of the story for Lindell, too. Lindell scored at prodigious (for him) amounts this year, but his offense has never really had to be the hallmark of his game, so it tends to fly under the radar. Instead, the focus more often tends to be on his partner’s offense, whether that’s been John Klingberg or Miro Heiskanen or even Nils Lundkvist.

Lindell shot less than ever this year (6.7 CF/60, a career-low) at 5-on-5, but he had the highest shooting percentage of his career at evens. If you didn’t already know the Stars were a pickier team in the shot department this year, Lindell’s season would be undeniable proof of that approach, both in practice and in its effectiveness.

As far as his overall impact, Lindell had arguably the best season of his career. He put up a 54% expected goals share that undersells Lindell’s 60% actual goals share (that plus-30 came from somewhere, after all). Despite the Stars’ rougher shot metrics overall, the high-danger areas were also dominated by Dallas during Lindell’s ice time, with Dallas controlling an excellent 55% share of high-danger shot attempts with Lindell on the ice as well as an absolutely absurd 68% of the high-danger goals when number 23 was patrolling the blue line.

The Stars’ house was quite simply brick and mortar when Lindell was at home this year.

It should be said that Lindell was not buried in the defensive zone quite as much as he was in the Pete DeBoer years, which didn’t hurt these numbers. Playing with Miro Heiskanen means you are going to get a bit of time up the ice here and there, certainly. But not being buried doesn’t mean being sheltered, and Lindell was still starting more shifts and taking more faceoffs in the defensive zone than he did in the offensive end. It hardly need be said, but he was doing so against top-tier competition, too.

All up, Lindell was asked to anchor the top defense pairing in a new defensive system, and he did so as well as anyone could have possibly hoped. It was the only Stars defense pairing that didn’t see major injury-related absences at some point during the year (until the Folingo hit tore Heiskanen’s oblique on April 9, at least), and that consistency was the pillar of the Stars’ defense.

We’ve been pretty flowery so far, but two negatives bear mentioning from Lindell’s campaign, so let’s touch on those before we wrap up here.

First, Lindell’s yeoman’s work on the penalty kill was less effective this year, and he did so alongside Heiskanen for the first time in a while. In fact, Lindell and Heiskanen logged the most penalty kill ice time of any NHL defense pairing this regular season, playing over 218 minutes on the kill this season, but how did those minutes go? Not as well as you might expect.

In terms of goals allowed per minute, the Lindell-Heiskanen PK defense pairing was average, ranking 17th-best among 38 defense pairings to log at least 80 minutes together on the PK. They outperformed their expected goals numbers (if you put stock in such things), but they were a fair tick away from the most dominant PK pairings in the league, with pairings like Erik Karlsson/Parker Wotherspoon or Cale Makar/Devon Toews outperforming them in both actual goals and underlying metrics.

Jake Oettinger didn’t have a great year on the PK, but he also wasn’t a disaster outright. Pretty much across the board, it’s just a fact that the Stars’ PK was worse this year than it was last season, even if the Stars did dominate Minnesota at special teams in the postseason. And given that their most-used players on said PK were Heiskanen and Lindell, it’s fair to ask the biggest questions of the two.

Lindell doesn’t get a free pass or anything, but I do think it’s worth considering what changed this year. Because when you look at Lindell’s career work on the PK, this year really does look like a bit of an outlier. His 9.1 xGA/60 was a career-worst, as was his high-danger shots allowed while on the ice.

Lindell’s results and some of his key metrics (xGA, HDCA, HDGA) were all much better in the 40+ PK minutes alongside Lyubushkin than they were with Heiskanen, and if I’m being honest, I still kinda think the Stars would be better off pairing Lindell with more of a right-handed specialist like Lyubushkin on the kill. I just don’t see the upside in rolling Heiskanen out there to do heavy PK work for 82 games. Lindell’s numbers certainly didn’t see an upside, either. (Of course, this is all moot if the Stars do as expected and move on from Lyubushkin’s cap number.)

The second area that Lindell bears some criticism for is the playoffs, where he and Heiskanen got handily outplayed by Quinn Hughes and Brock Faber. Lindell and Heiskanen were both on the ice for six goals against at 5v5, while Lindell managed to be present for just a single goal scored by Dallas. That’s not all on the defense, of course, but the net effect was undeniably disappointing. (And again, Heiskanen’s torn oblique muscle probably is something of a contributing factor here.)

It would have been one thing if Lindell had been the one simply taking on water while other pairings thrived in easier usage, but with Tyler Myers and Thomas Harley also getting fairly steamrolled at 5v5, Dallas needed their top defense pairing to keep the ice at least level, and they couldn’t do it. Even the Stars’ dynamite power play couldn’t dig them out of the hole that was dug for them, which is pretty damning.

Overall, it was a postseason to forget for Lindell and many of the Dallas Stars, as Lindell took more penalties and delivered fewer hits per game than he had in any of his prior playoff runs. Throughout his career, Lindell has been asked to absorb heavy defensive minutes in the postseason. But this time, for whatever reason, Lindell and Heiskanen both bent and broke, and the Stars’ first-round exit leaves questions that we’ll have to wait a year to answer.

As Glen Gulutzan said after the season, the Stars overachieved in the regular season and underachieved in the playoffs. Lindell is as good an example for this as anyone, and I’m awarding him a “B” grade for this year that stands, as always, for Better than you realize.

For my part, I’m inclined to put more emphasis on his first 82 games than his final six. Because for the vast majority of the year, Lindell did what he’s always done, and often better than ever. He isn’t a number one franchise defenseman, but his workload might fool you into thinking he’s every bit as important as one. But if you didn’t notice him for much of this season, then it probably means he was doing something right. He almost always is.

The Dallas Stars had three defensemen who played at least 70 games this season: Thomas Harley (70), Miro Heiskanen (77), and Esa Lindell (82). The next-highest total on the blue line? that would be Alex Petrovic, who played in 54 games during the regular season before returning to the lineup at the end of the Minnesota series.

In other words, the Stars had a lot of rotation happening on the back end, and it was largely out of necessity. Three defensemen sustained fractures to the leg/ankle/feet area, Tyler Myers tweaked his groin, and Miro Heiskanen tore an oblique muscle before spraining his ankle in the playoffs. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

I say all that to put Lian Bichsel’s 50 games this season in proper context. A lot of defensemen (and forwards, come to that) missed time this year with injuries, so that meant a frequently rotating cast of partners for everyone but the top pairing. Very little was stable this season, other than the Stars’ ability to keep piling up points.

Bichsel’s own 32-game absence began after he suffered a nasty fracture on this play against Ottawa on November 30:

Bichsel would remain out until after the Olympic break, when he returned to play 14:30 against Seattle on February 25. He wouldn’t miss another game all year, including the playoffs.

It’s easy to forget that Bichsel was only 21 years old this season. Once again the youngest player on the roster, Bichsel nevertheless had a regular roster spot locked down every night he was able to play. While he was the third-youngest defenseman in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Bichsel’s responsibilities didn’t diminish in crunch time. In fact, they increased.

Last year, Bichsel averaged 11:47 per playoff game. This year, Bichsel played nearly 17 minutes per night against Minnesota (16:54), with that total only marginally affected by the overtimes in Games 3 & 4. Under a second NHL coaching staff in two years (albeit with Alain Nasreddine still there), Bichsel once again earned and kept the trust of his head coach, no matter how high the stakes got.

Little wonder that he did, too. While Bichsel’s size and skating are obvious selling points, he turns those assets into real results on the ice without crossing the line nearly as much. In a new defensive system that kept defensemen a bit closer to home, Bichsel’s penalty minutes trended the right way, as he took fewer penalties in 50 games this year than he took in 38 games last year—while also drawing more.

After scoring four goals and adding four assists in his 38 games as a rookie, Bichsel put up another four goals in 50 games this year along with five assists. Like a lot of the team, Bichsel’s shot metrics weren’t impressive, but he still matched his 48% xGF percentage from last year while improving some even more important categories, like actual goal-differential, where Bichsel went from being on the ice for a 52% share of the 5v5 goals last year to 57% of them this campaign.

That improvement was driven by a big decrease in goals Dallas allowed while Bichsel was on the ice, as he dropped a full digit from his 2.67 GA/60 last year, to 1.67 this time.

The more you drill down, the more you see that Bichsel was fairly representative of the Stars’ defensive approach as a whole. Xg numbers and raw shot attempts might have seemed ugly, but the Stars were largely allowing the sort of shots they were comfortable with this year, which is to say those away from the low slot. And when the third defense pairing was out there, they protected the house even more intensely than usual:

In the other direction, Bichsel’s offensive work seemed as confident as ever, particularly right after his return in late February. This goal against Vancouver was emblematic of Bichsel at his most confident, when he saw an activation opportunity and seized it without hesitation to great effect after the return pass from Lyubushkin:

(It was the first of two goals Bichsel would score that night, but we’ll save the second for further down the page.)

Among his three most regular partners, Lyubushkin made Bichsel the most dynamic, with all the shots-for numbers going up when 6 and 46 were paired together, albeit with more given up defensively, too.

That eye chart gives you some idea of what the journey was like this year. Bichsel-Lyubushkin had the best results: an 83%(!) share of the goals at 5v5. But Bichsel-Myers had the best expected goals, as well as the fewest high-danger shots allowed. Do you trust the process or the results, when it comes to third-pairing defensemen?

Well, we know how the playoffs shook out. While Bichsel was only on the ice for one goal against all postseason, it was not a pretty one for him or anyone else on the Stars, as he overcommitted to the right side in Game 3 on this initial rush by Matt Boldy, putting himself out of position to defend the subsequent chance:

But putting that goal on any single player is probably a fool’s errand. Some mistakes are a team effort, and this certainly qualifies.

In any case, Bichsel otherwise kept the Wild off the board during his ice time in the postseason, whether playing with Myers in Games 1 through 4 (though his and Myers’ marathon shift in their own zone during the overtime of Game 4 was not exactly a masterpiece, to be fair), with Lyubushkin in Game 5, or with Petrovic in Game 6.

Thus, Bichsel gets an “S” grade this year for his Steady improvement this season. It’s tough for even enormous 21-year-olds to keep hold of spots on the blue line, but Bichsel’s play absolutely merited the run-out he kept getting. With three lefties above him in the pecking order, Bichsel was always going to be given the chance to take another measured step, and he did that, even if some opportunity to do more might have been missed by the nasty injury he suffered.

In terms of watching him from game to game, that “S” might also stand for Shrewd. Bichsel’s game looked a bit “smarter” this year to my eye, with a year of NHL experience clearly having helped his reads and breakouts, even as he and the entire team went through an adjustment period early in the year in the new system.

Confidence is the thing everyone talks about when young players finally take that big step in their careers, but in Bichsel’s case, that confidence is very much already there. He knows how good he can be, and when the results reflect that reality, you can see his game get even more out on the front foot, in all the best ways. The trick for next year will be for Bichsel to use his abilities even more effectively as both threat and reality, keeping opponents honest while not being afraid to test them even they appear to be doing so. Sometimes,you just need to prove that you can dominate even the most prepared opponent.

In all likelihood, Bichsel will get another run with Myers to start next season, but he’s proven himself more than capable of playing with others, should the need arise. And for a player who just turned 22, he has a lot of runway still in front of him. Here’s hoping the good things we saw this season proved just a glimpse of what Bichsel’s ultimate potential winds up being.

You have surely heard by now, but Tom Gaglardi and the Stars released a statement yesterday confirming that they submitted a non-binding Letter of Intent to the City of Plano that portends a move out of Dallas, presumably when the current lease at American Airlines Center expires in summer of 2031.

Here’s the bulk of the team’s statement:

The Dallas Stars announced today a major step towards a potential new arena in Plano as part of a proposed sports and entertainment district at The Shops at Willow Bend. The organization has signed a non-binding Letter of Intent (LOI), which has been submitted to the City of Plano and placed on the agenda for consideration at the Plano City Council meeting on Monday, June 8.

Located west of the Dallas North Tollway, the proposed mixed-use development, being advanced jointly with Levin Holdings & Cawley Partners and Centennial, could include sports, entertainment, retail, dining and public gathering spaces anchored by a future Dallas Stars arena. The project is envisioned as a year-round destination for the community while strengthening the team’s connection to its North Texas fan base.

“This project would present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our franchise,” Dallas Stars Owner, Governor and Chairman Tom Gaglardi said. “We eagerly await the vote by the Plano City Council and look forward to continuing the conversation to be part of the redevelopment of The Shops at Willow Bend.”

The Letter of Intent includes plans for the mixed-used development project as well as design and construction of the arena.

The Morning News further reported yesterday that Plano will vote next Monday on a proposal to use various means of funding to contribute $700 million toward what will be a $1 billion development project. In other words, the city is considering doing what they did with AT&T recently, tempting a business to relocate with extremely appealing financial incentives.

I’m not exactly Doctor Business™, but if you’re the Dallas Stars, the idea is obviously a whole lot more appealing than getting locked into a long-term lease in American Airlines Center while the Mavericks build a newer arena (and what sounds like a similarly sprawling project) elsewhere in town. Nothing is set in stone yet, but you don’t get this far down the road without a fair amount of research and discussions being done. In all likelihood, this is the most attractive location for the Dallas Stars to play the 2031-32 NHL season, and they appear to be planning to do so as things stand right now.

So, let’s talk about why that move be a fortunate or unfortunate thing, depending on your perspective. We’ll start with some rays of sunshine before getting to the clouds, but let me stress that these points are far from comprehensive, but simply the first things that have come to mind ever since the possibility of the Stars’ relocation first became public knowledge last year.

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Update as of 4:30pm: Per Lia Assimakopoulos and the Dallas Morning News, the Stars have indeed picked the Shops at Willow Bend in Plano as the site for their new arena.

As Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News reported yesterday, The owners of the Dallas Mavericks just announced their intention to spend over $50 million to purchase land at the old Valley View Mall site, which you’ve surely heard about.

That site is technically in Dallas, a definition not exactly impeded by a recently redistricted map. But while Dallas politicians will surely claim that technicality as a win, the real losers are, as usual, the fans—as they have been ever since Mark Cuban sold the team.

Something worth keeping in mind is that the Mavericks still appear to be looking to squeeze everything they possibly can out of the move. See if you notice some of the careful language choices in a statement the Mavericks released yesterday:

After seriously studying and considering several options, while working closely with the City of Dallas to identify possible locations for a new Dallas Mavericks arena and entertainment district, the Mavericks organization has entered into option agreements for the potential purchase of approximately 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site.

We have appreciated the enthusiasm from the Dallas City Manager, elected officials and the broader community to keep the team in Dallas. We look forward to continuing the collaboration toward that goal.

The Valley View site meets most of the criteria established at the outset of our evaluation process. It is our goal to stay in the City of Dallas, and we believe this site provides the strongest opportunity to achieve that goal.

We have the opportunity to create a vibrant mixed-use destination anchored by a state-of-the-art arena, along with restaurants, entertainment options, public green spaces and family-friendly experiences. Done thoughtfully and with community engagement, a project of this scale will serve as a meaningful economic catalyst for Dallas and its residents.

We believe in Dallas, and our priority has been clear from the beginning: keeping the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas.

The phrases “considering several options,” “option agreements,” and “meets most of the criteria” all jump out at me. Because while the Mavericks will be making monthly payments in the lead-up to the eventual closing date just under two years from now, they are clearly still keeping their options open.

Remember that the same Adelson family dropped $22 million to purchase 100 acres in Irving near the old Texas Stadium, as D Magazine reported at the time. And as the Morning News reported yesterday, that land is very much still something the Adelson family could use as leverage in their talks with the City over the coming months. With the threat of an Irving site that is actually closer to downtown Dallas than the Valley View site, the Adelson family will have no shortage of ways to incentivize Dallas politicians to bend over backwards to make the Dallas site as appealing as possible to a family with more money than almost anyone else on earth.

Because with the hyper-rich, the Rockefeller quote always holds true. The Adelson family will only ever have enough when they get just that little bit more. And there’s always a little bit more to be gotten, if you’re willing to do what it takes.

That approach appears to have led to the acrimony between the Mavericks and Stars over the last year or two, where a previously stable relationship turned into lawsuits and millions in frozen revenue dollars seemingly overnight.

The Mavericks’ new owners came into town from Las Vegas looking to build a casino empire in a state that could have been fertile ground for the industry their fortune was built upon. Instead, they found Texas’s dysfunctional political landscape resistant to even the millions upon millions of dollars they quietly shelled out to lobbyists and campaign funds, and they have now said as recently as last week that no gambling component is currently planned for the new Mavericks site.

From everything I’ve been able to gather from my own research and the reporting from other local outlets, I think we have a pretty clear picture of what really went wrong between the two Dallas AAC tenants. Let’s start with what the Mavericks themselves claim to have happened, per the Morning News:

Mavericks and city officials believed the Stars had agreed to remain in AAC through 2061, with the Mavericks building their own arena in time for the 2031-32 season. But in an October 2025 interview with The News, Stars CEO Brad Alberts strongly denied a deal had been reached.

That dispute reportedly took place back in October of 2024, and the Mavericks wasted no time in punishing the Stars for not meekly following along with their plans, sending a letter with $110 in cash to Tom Gaglardi, summarily announcing their intention to grab 100% of Center Operating Company (COC) in what the Stars have described as a hostile takeover. Per the Stars, tens of millions in AAC revenue has been held in escrow since that decision, which is no small amount of money for a hockey team. Per the News, revenue from COC accounts for 15% of the Stars’ annual cash flow. The Mavericks surely knew this, and they chose to hit the Stars where it hurt the most.

To be clear, the Mavericks don’t appear to be actually claiming any damages from the Stars’ backing out of a deal about AAC lease extensions. If the Stars had agreed to stay in American Airlines Center through 2061 in any meaningful business terms, the Mavericks would surely have brought action against them for reneging on this agreement. Again, the basketball team did not do that, which suggests that any such “agreement” they claim to have had in place was about as real as Nico Harrison’s championship vision.

This rundown from the DMN is about as good a summary as you’ll find. City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert claimed that the city and the Stars had “finalized terms” on a proposed deal for the hockey team to stay in AAC for another 36 years—despite never speaking with or hearing from Gaglardi himself. How believable that claim is, I’ll let you decide.

If you find that claim of the Stars’ alleged agreement on terms that would have kept them in AAC until 2061 difficult to believe, you’re not alone. Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts told the News at the time that Bizor Tolbert was mischaracterizing any such agreement, and that the early October 2024 meeting where Alberts was shown a terms sheet dictating that the Stars stay in AAC until 2061 was the first time he had seen any such terms.

In fact, neither the team or the city are claiming any breach of contract by the Stars themselves. Instead, the Mavericks’ lawyers appear to have taken a completely different tack, apparently combing every document they could find until they got what they were looking for: leverage. Specifically, they found a clause from the original 1998 franchise agreement that required both teams to keep their “principal corporate and executive offices” within the Dallas city limits, which the Stars have never done—not under Tom Hicks, not during bankruptcy, and not under Tom Gaglardi.

By all accounts, that clause wasn’t something the Stars were even aware of until it was brought up in 2024, when they reportedly promised to amend that oversight and move their headquarters accordingly, which the team alluded to having done with a Twitter post last November.

Dallas has gone along with the Mavericks’ actions, presumably in hopes of keeping the basketball team happy and, more importantly, within the city limits. So whatever was or wasn’t agreed to before Alberts balked at that 2061 lease extension in early October 2024, it seems clear that the city was operating more off hopeful conversations than any meaningfully binding agreement.

The agreement Alberts said the Stars had discussed in August of 2024 was very different: a five-year extension of the current lease, which would keep both the Stars and Mavericks in AAC through just 2036, with proposed AAC renovations happening as well.

But from everything that’s happened since, it sure seems like the Mavericks were always looking to find a way to lock the Stars into the AAC while they got a newer, bigger venue of their own elsewhere. Having their own space, after all, would give the Mavericks prime concert and event revenue on days without basketball games, and the older AAC would probably find it tough to compete for some of those events. Thus, I can see why the Stars would have ideally wanted to have their and the Mavericks’ leases tied together.

In fact, one wonders if the Mavericks always had that 1998 franchise agreement breach card up their sleeve, and whether they would have played it even if the Stars had agreed to stay in an AAC where a hockey team that relies on gameday revenue gets relatively little from the surrounding area.

Regardless, summary judgments hearings ahead of the scheduled trial have all but won the biggest parts of the case for the Mavericks, pending the Stars’ ongoing appeals. Texas Business Court Judge Bill Whitehill ruled in April of this year that the Mavericks did have a right to claim the Stars’ 50% interest in COC as a result of the Stars’ failure to have a franchise headquarters in Dallas, regardless of the nearly three decades that had elapsed since the agreement and the Mavericks’ claim.

Unless the Stars’ appeals of those decisions radically change things—which is possible, but far from certain—it looks like the Mavericks will indeed be able to squeeze just that little bit more out of their downtown partner alongside their negotiations with the city itself. None of this appears to actually benefit Dallas in any way that I can see, but that’s never really seemed to be the goal for the new owners of the Mavericks. It’s about getting everything they can, however they have to go about doing it. You don’t fuel a global casino empire with altruism or civic loyalty, it turns out.

The Stars, for their part, aren’t exactly looking to do charity work either. With the NHL salary cap skyrocketing, I’m sure they have to look down the road to ensure their own health and growth, particularly with the collapse of the RSN model forcing teams to try alternate means of broadcasting games, as the Stars have done with Victory+. But NHL viewership lags far behind that of sports like the NFL and NBA, and the days of getting $25 million a season from FOX or Bally or whomever are long gone.

Thus, Alberts has been clear about what the Stars need to do in the future to keep that revenue where they want it to be. They want to play in an arena with fewer suites and more “premium seating,” surrounded by businesses they profit from that bring in revenue all year long, whether those be shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, or all of the above. Playing at Willow Bend in Plano, for example, could do this. The Mavericks are clearly planning to do the same thing, whether at the Valley View site or elsewhere.

More and more, you wonder if both teams came to the conclusion that every year either team stayed in the AAC beyond the current lease’s expiration in 2031 was one fewer year in which they could be drawing all that ancillary revenue from a bigger plot of land in a different location. Money not made is money lost, from a certain perspective.

How the Mavericks (with the city’s blessing) have gone about their dealings with the Stars don’t exactly appear to be good-faith negotiating, from all the reporting that’s out there. But then, the Adelsons have never had any incentive to negotiate in good faith. As ever, it’s about power and profit, and they found a way to extract both while the city of Dallas followed their lead. And now, that same city finds itself desperately clawing to keep the Mavericks within spitting distance of I-635, with hopes of either team staying downtown having all but vanished at this point.

Mayor Johnson apparently sat down with both owners: Gaglardi and Patrick Dumont (Miriam Adelson’s son-in-law) on April 11, 2025 in an attempt to clarify what the Stars were looking for in order to stay, with both owners speaking again the following month. Nothing definite appeared to come from those conversations, but in the following September, the Stars’ first and biggest ask was one the city has persistently refused to help with: resolving the Mavericks’ dispute about that pesky 1998 headquarters breach in the franchise agreement. Dallas’s city manager (Tolbert) responded that the city unfortunately was staying out of the dispute between the teams, so the Stars were on their own.

Other things Alberts told Tolbert that they would need as of September of 2025 (all per the News, again) sound like requests they didn’t really expect to get by that point: the waiving of the Stars’ annual AAC lease payments and $400-500 million in AAC renovations paid for by the city. Needless to say, neither of those sounds like it’s on the cusp of happening.

It’s interesting to look back at what Tom Gaglardi told reporters earlier that year, in the same April of 2025 when he and Dumont sat down with Johnson. I and a few other local reporters spoke to him about this very issue, with all of us as yet unaware of the things transpiring behind the scenes. Here’s what Gaglardi said about the Stars’ prospects for leaving downtown, with the Mavericks’ having recently announced their own intentions to explore other options.

Gaglardi made two things clear: first, that the Mavericks are the ones actively exploring leaving downtown after that date, not the Stars. And second, that nobody really knows what’s going to happen then.

“My heart would say we should stay in the city, and downtown. It’s a beautiful arena.” Gaglardi said, “You know, it’s gonna have to be reimagined for another 30 years [after 2031], but there’s been work done to that effect, some really cool concepts and plans, and I believe the AAC has a bright future.”

Gaglardi is positive but noncommittal. He’s also a realist, and someone who has bought and developed a lot of land downtown in Dallas. But when asked whether his investment in downtown would commit him to staying in the AAC past 2031, he demurs a bit. The investments are solid ideas on their own, but they don’t dictate where the Stars will play.

“I’ve always thought we would be playing there [the AAC] post-2031,” he says, “and now we know the Mavericks are going to do something different, and so we’ll deal with what that new reality might look like.”

Gaglardi speaks of his fellow owner Patrick Dumont in collegial terms. He talks about how several months ago, Dumont had met with him to talk about both teams potentially going to a new building together. But more recently, that’s changed. The Mavericks’ owner has a vision for the basketball in basketball-only arena, while the Stars are doing their own research.

One thing that is helpful, however, is that the Mavericks have made their plans clear far in advance.

“We didn’t create the topic. The topic’s been created by the Mavericks, and that’s fine. I appreciate that,” Gaglardi says, “versus coming out in 2029 and saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ To have six years of runway to know where they’re going to be gives us lots of chances, lots of time to figure out what we’re going to do.”

An Afternoon with Tom Gaglardi and the Dallas Stars Media
April 22, 2025

Looking back on these quotes now, Gaglardi did a good job of being diplomatic despite the Stars’ having six months of COC revenue held in escrow thanks to the Mavericks’ actions the previous October that began with that brazen letter containing $110 in cash.

As for downtown, it sure seems like a foregone conclusion that the Stars and Mavericks will, in 2031, leave a gaping hole in Victory Park that city leadership will have to rely on its collective wisdom to fill. While Dallas basketball and hockey fans sit on tollways or the notorious I-635 en route to pricey parking lots in new locales, the city will be left wondering what exactly it really gained for what it lost.

I suppose the Mavericks will tell them the answer, even if it winds up costing them a little bit more.

Tomorrow night, Vegas and Carolina will kick off this year’s final series of the playoffs. It’ll be Carolina’s third Cup Final in 26 years, and Vegas’s third in just nine. It’ll also be the first time this decade that a team from Florida won’t be participating, as the Panthers and Lightning were each in three of the prior six Finals.

If we were trying to extrapolate geographically, then we’d say the Dallas Stars have an excellent chance of getting back to the Final, on account of they are one of the teams that plays below the 40th parallel. The last team to win a Cup that played further north than that was the Washington Capitals, in 2018. Things were different back then (though not quite as much as you might wish them to be).

But if we assume that hockey championships are won based on things besides latitude lines, then we need to look deeper. What allows teams to get close enough to have a chance to win a Cup?

This is something I’ve been pondering for a bit now, because we all know the playoffs aren’t a linear climb where you just assume the runner-up is the favorite next year. Things are volatile in this league, and this is especially true if your team is coming out of the Central, where a club might face a Stanley Cup favorite in the first or second round.

It’s different elsewhere. Carolina had to face the 11th, 9th, and 6th-ranked teams in their first three rounds. Vegas had to face the 15th and 18th teams (in that order) before facing Colorado.

Had Dallas made it to the Final, a third-place finish in the NHL would have forced them to play the 7th and 1st-place teams before getting Vegas (13th). It’s one of many quirks of a quirky format, and it’s led to some real duds in the third round since the NHL went away from conventional 1-8 seeding a decade ago.

I say all this not to make excuses for anyone, but to point out the simple fact that it’s tough to gauge just how close a team is to a Cup Final by looking purely at how deep into the playoffs they got. In a very real sense, Dallas might’ve had an easier shot at winning a Stanley Cup this year if they’d finished with 91 points rather than 112.

Regardless, the Stars didn’t really look like a Cup contender in their brief postseason, when their five-on-five scoring dried up something’ fierce. They were missing key players and struggling to play their best hockey in all three zones, and while I’d still bet on them to have done better against Vegas in the first round than they did against Minnesota, you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and the Stars lost in six.

Things aren’t likely to be easier any time soon. So if we assume that Dallas continues to get dealt similarly tough hands in the future, just how likely is it that they’re as little as one year away from their third Cup Final since 2000?

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Matt Duchene has always prided himself on being honest. Whether the story is good or bad, he’s not going to mince words when answering questions. At 35 years old, the former 3rd-overall draft pick has seen it all, and he’s chosen to approach life in Dallas with a candor that you don’t often see in professional sports.

This season made you wonder if that would change, at times. After suffering a vestibular concussion that Duchene called the hardest injury he had to return from in his 17-year career, many would have understood if Duchene had chosen to withdraw a bit. That’s not who Duchene is, though. Time and time again, he faced the cameras and reporters, talking about success or failure, glory or frustration.

After starting the first season of his newly signed four-year extension with a devastating injury that kept his scoring to a meager 4 goals and 7 assists through his first 26 games, Duchene kept going back to who he is. And it finally worked, as he caught fire right when the team did. Duchene put up a scorching-hot 9 goals and 12 assists during the team’s record-tying 14-0-1 stretch before and after the Olympic break, with 12 of those 21 points coming afterwards, when the Stars were largely without Roope Hintz and Mikko Rantanen.

In a season that could have been defined by injury and frustration, Duchene instead wrenched the narrative back into his favor. When Dallas needed him most, he stepped into Hintz’s vacant center spot like it had been made for him all along. And when the dust had settled, Duchene had piled up 34 points in the final 31 games of the season. Despite his new tinted visor, Duchene’s playmaking vision was as clear as ever.

And this year, Duchene carried that vision into the playoffs. In just six games against Minnesota, Duchene topped his playoff scoring totals from each of the prior two three-round runs in Dallas. The veteran led the entire Dallas roster with nine playoff points, and he did so while centering the only consistent forward trio Glen Gulutzan had to work with in the postseason.

That’s how a season that began with a devatasting hit ended with Duchene scoring one of the biggest goals of the year, tying Game 3 in the third period before Johnston eventually won it in double overtime.

Duchene’s grade for the season is a V. Perhaps that could stand for vocal, with Duchene being one of the more outspoken leaders on a bench that was without Jamie Benn early on, without Tyler Seguin after December, and without Mikko Rantanen and Roope Hintz for some or all of the final months. Dallas needed people steadying the ship in multiple ways, and Duchene very clearly did that.

Earlier in the year, there was some hope for versatility, but in a way, Duchene’s lack of success when moved around the lineup wound up demonstrating why he was able to take over for Roope Hintz to the degree that he did. Some centers can play more freely when moved to the wing, while others tend to thrive when in the middle of the ice, and Duchene showed himself to be the latter sort, this year.

This is where the coaching staff deserves a fair bit of credit, I think.. It would have been easy to move Duchene lower and lower down the lineup as he struggled in returning from his concussion. Instead, the Stars got creative.

Initially, that meant taking some of the responsibility off Duchene’s shoulders with a move to left wing. In his first game back in early December, Duchene played opposite Mikko Rantanen on the left of Wyatt Johnston, on the Stars’ top line. You could see the thought process for th emove, as Duchene had the potential to address the Stars’ lack of top-six winger depth while also being required to do less defensively. In theory, it was a good idea, and you can’t imagine too many players who wouldn’t jump at the chance to play with Johnston and Rantanen.

To say it didn’t work would be an understatement. The trio never look comfortable together, and they got outscored 8-4 during their 5v5 ice time together. All the underlying numbers were similarly disastrous. The line, for whatever reason, ended up being far less than the sum of its parts, and the experiment was abandoned after a half-dozen games or so.

This is where frustration could have taken over Duchene’s game, and perhaps some did, here and there. But rather than getting pushed to the side and asked to fix it himself, Duchene’s subsequent line combinations indicate a real commitment by the coaching staff to figure out how to get him going. Duchene got time centering Jamie Benn and Justin Hryckowian, until Benn’s concussion on January 4, when Blackwell was moved into that spot out of sheer necessity for a game or two.

But after seeing Duchene moved up to the right wing with Hintz and Robertson when Dallas was trailing in the third period against Anaheim, it was clear everything was truly on the table. That Robertson-Hintz-Duchene line got two more games, and although they weren’t scoring, they looked a lot more in sync than Duchene had in his previous wing assignment.

The next game was where you really saw the lengths Glen Gulutzan was willing to go to in order to get Duchene going, though. When Mikko Rantanen caught the flu bug that was going around, Gulutzan shocked all of us by moving Wyatt Johnston to right wing for essentially the first time all year. Duchene was asked to be the team’s top-line center, with Steel on the left side of him and Johnston in what turned out to be a much-needed 6-2 win over Boston back at home. The turnaround was just about to happen.

Duchene got two more games in that top center spot before Rantanen was back to full health. From there, things standardized: Duchene went back to centering Benn and Steel on the third line, and the Stars were off and running on that points streak.

Duchene got a few games with Benn and Michael Bunting later on, but the most important deployment down the stretch came after Sam Steel’s injury on Long Island (and Bunting’s in Philadelphia right after that), when Duchene was asked to move up and center Bourque and Robertson, as he would end up doing in the playoffs. And in less time together than Duchene had gotten with Johnston and Rantanen way back when, that trio would outscore the opposition by the converse margin of 8-4, foreshadowing what Minnesota would encounter in mid-April.

While much of the mix-and-match approach was out of necessity, I really do go back to that stretch with Duchene getting to center Wyatt Johnston after Johnston had been Duchene’s center earlier on. How many coaches would be willing to displace a young player like that? It didn’t wind up being the best solution in the long term, but I really believe that Gulutzan’s willingness to give Duchene a chance at all three forward positions spoke volumes. The goal was the make the team better in the long run, even if it meant trying some unconventional things in the short term.

When the Stars signed Duchene to that four-year extension last summer, the term raised some eyebrows. It wasn’t quite Brad Marchand-ian, but given Duchene’s inconsistent work in the playoffs and general aging curves, there were some questions lingering over the deal. Those questions only became more prominent after Duchene’s concussion and subsequent scoring struggles. Was a decline already here?

As it turned out, one of Duchene’s best runs with the Stars was right around the corner. A healthy Stars team probably has Hintz and Johnston in those top-six center spots going forward, but it’s a credit to Duchene, the training staff, and his coaches that he was able to fill that role so well during his time this year. Even without Seguin and Marchment, he still found a way to be the center depth Dallas needed.

The margins of Duchene’s game got better this year, too. In a very different system, Duchene’s defensive game got some of its corners rounded off. He’s still a player far more comfortable in the offensive zone than in his own, but he found a way to make that work, whether playing with Benn and Steel or Bourque and Robertson.

Going forward, Duchene will have to bring that same creativity and play-driving with whatever wingers Dallas has to match with him. Perhaps that will be Bourque and Robertson, when the need arises. It could well be Benn and Steel again to start next season, with whom Duchene outscored the opposition 10-5 on top of a 54% expected goals advantage. Or perhaps it will be someone we don’t even know about yet.

Regardless, Matt Duchene will never be the two-way force that Roope Hintz is, but he doesn’t have to be. This year, he found a way to match his game to the important moments, despite all the struggles early on. Duchene finished the regular season with 16 goals and 45 points in 57 games, good for fifth on the team despite missing a full third of the season, and I suspect it is no coincidence that the team’s surge largely coincided with his own.

Perhaps that “V” is really for Validated, because after a long recovery with more symptoms on and off the ice than we might ever hear about, Duchene wound up being exactly what the Stars hoped he would be once the calendar flipped to 2026. All of the work, experimentation, and dedication coalesced into the veteran center finding some of his best hockey at the most critical time.

It was a disappointing end to the season for the team, but for Matt Duchene, there’s good reason to think that the next three years could end up being much better than expected.

Colorado will be having to answer some version of all the same questions Dallas did last year after falling to Edmonton in rather lifeless fashion in a too-short Western Conference final.

It’s absurd on the one hand, because Colorado was the best team in the league from start to finish this year. They were outstanding defensively and offensively, and they looked as terrifying as any hockey team in recent memory when they were on their game, which was most nights.

But getting swept by a 95-point team—even one that was clearly a bit of a Smurf in Vegas—will force even the most confident Presidents’ Trophy team into some self-reflection. Every game was close, but the sum of the four games was about as disappointing as a series can get. And despite the fact that this loss came two rounds later than last year’s Mikko Rantanen Revenge Tour, it feels like more change will be coming this time.

But we’re not here to dissect Colorado. Instead, let’s look at what we learned after Vegas Got Away With It, Yet Again.

The regular season doesn’t matter, with one caveat

Jim Nill made a point in his end-of-season media availability to say that he didn’t think the NHL playoff format rewarded Presidents’ Trophy-winning teams enough.

He’s right, obviously. Finishing at the top of the heap after the grind of 82 (now 84!) games across six months deserves something more than a mere seeding and home-ice advantage. The current NHL playoff format doesn’t reward top teams the way baseball or football does, where lower-ranked teams have additional Wild Card rounds and such to get through, and it probably should. The divisional playoff format exacerbates this problem even further, as teams in weaker divisions get to play their first two rounds against lesser teams before facing whoever survived the other division in their conference.

In other words: it’s a travesty that Vegas finished with 95 points1 and got an easier road through the playoffs than Colorado. In terms of overall league standings, Vegas only had to face Utah (15th) and Anaheim (18th) in their first two rounds, while Colorado got to open against Los Angeles (20th) before facing either Dallas (3rd) or Minnesota (7th).

Despite finishing 13th in the NHL, and with fewer regulation wins than the Blues and Panthers, Vegas was guaranteed to play its first two rounds of the postseason against two of Edmonton, Anaheim, or Utah. Playing in a weaker division is unquestionably a bigger playoff advantage than being the best team in the NHL, and that cheapens (if not outright invalidates) the grind put into the regular season.

Any Stars fans is well aware of this, after the Stars finished one point shy of the Presidents’ Trophy in 2024, only to be “rewarded” with a grueling first-round series against a “Wild Card” team that also happened to be the reigning Stanley Cup champions: the Vegas Golden Knights.

You’ll hear a lot of people talk about how Vegas has “learned” how not to expend too much effort in the regular season, and you can’t really argue with the results of their approach, right? They just get into the playoffs, and then they deploy their real arsenal to often devastating effect.

There’s merit to that argument, albeit less so after the LTIR rules were changed this season. But really, the biggest factor in Vegas’s ability to “just get in” hasn’t been their own savvy or strategy or willingness not to try to win the division. In actuality, they’ve just benefited from how utterly lousy the Pacific Division has been.

Here’s an eye chart, but take a look at where Vegas has finished over the last four years:

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A little spoiler alert, first: the Stars’ defense corps didn’t have a great postseason. Getting outscored 14-4 at five-on-five in a first-round loss means that’s the case for a lot of players, but defensemen tend to be the ones in-frame when goals are being actively created, so that means you probably have a few bad memories from this spring.

That’s fine, but we’re not here to let a six-game sample size overshadow the broader picture of what defensemen do in the NHL. Instead, we are here to talk about Miro Heiskanen in today’s episode of Very Real and Important Player Grades.

But before we dig into what Heiskanen did for the Stars this year, it’s important to point out that Heiskanen played the entire season alongside Esa Lindell. It was the Finnish duo’s first season-long run together in the NHL, and it could well be some of the most viable long-term partnership Heiskanen has ever had in Dallas.

Miro Heiskanen and a Defensive Partner Digression

The Lindell-Heiskanen duo played around a dozen games together in 2024-25, after the team gave up on trying to get Heiskanen back onto his left side following the failed Matt Dumba/Ilya Lyubushkin experiments. (Yes, you may have forgotten, but Heiskanen played around a dozen games next to Lyubushkin last year before Mark Stone Happened.)

Heiskanen even got a ten-game stretch with Lindell in his rookie year, when injuries across the Stars’ defense corps in the fall of 2018 forced their hand. Heiskanen began the year with Marc Methot and Connor Carrick, but injuries meant he even played a game with Julius Honka and a few with Joel Hanley (because of course Joel Hanley). That month alongside Lindell was actually the most stability Heiskanen had in his rookie season under Jim Montgomery, before right-handers Roman Polák and John Klingberg wound up being the go-to options alongside the breakout rookie star, with Polák being the go-to option in the postseason.

That rotation of defense partners has been a theme of Heiskanen’s time in Dallas. So often, he’d start the season with one partner, then that experiment would be abandoned early on in favor of another option, and we’d generally see option C by the end of the year.

In 2019, it was Andrej Sekera who began with Heiskanen, but that likewise didn’t last long before Klingberg was tried out briefly. But Klingberg and Lindell were always the most reliable partners, and that meant Jamie Oleksiak got the longest run with Heiskanen that year…until Stephen Johns gave us a couple of months of what might have been, when Johns was paired with Heiskanen for the final weeks leading up to March 2020, when the season appears to have abruptly stopped for some reason. (Weird, right? Remind me to look into what happened.) Johns would sadly finish his Stars career in Game 1 against Calgary, and it would be Heiskanen and Oleksiak who were paired together for the rest of that Stanley Cup Final playoff run.

That chemistry with Oleksiak stuck with Bowness, as he ran Heiskanen with Oleksiak for every game of the (weird, realigned, and shortened) 2021-21 season. But alas, the Seattle expansion draft arrived the following summer, and the Stars lost Oleksiak1 as a result.

With the departure of Oleksiak and John Klingberg one year away from free agency himself, the Stars had limited options for supplementing their defensive depth. Thus, Jim Nill signed Ryan Suter fresh off his Minnesota buyout to a four-year contract in July of 2021. So while Heiskanen began that ‘21-22 year with Lindell for 25 games or so, Suter would wind up being Heiskanen’s go-to partner for the back half of the season, as well as that famous Calgary playoff series.

Heiskanen’s rotating defense partners were not going unnoticed even back in 2022, when Saad took a look at what the Stars were doing and could do differently when it came to Heiskanen’s minutes. Saad even mentioned Alex Petrovic way back then, clearly foreseeing his 2024 Dallas playoff arrival, but it was pretty clear even then that the Stars needed to make a move to get more right-handed blueline talent, and they would trade for Nils Lundkvist just a couple of months later, in September of 2022.

Pete DeBoer arrived ahead of 2022-23 as well, and we saw yet another version of the same tune: a low-cost RHD was acquired and paired with Heiskanen to start the season, but the experiment was abandoned before its end. This time, it was Colin Miller, who got around 50 full games in which to prove he could handle himself next to one of the best defensemen in the world, and failed to do so. Instead, Suter and the newly acquired Nils Lundkvist displaced Miller for a chunk of time in the middle of that season, and DeBoer would go back to Suter with Heiskanen late in the season and throughout the playoffs.

Finishing our tour of Heiskanen’s defensive counterparts is the 2023-24 season, and it was a straightforward one: Heiskanen played the first half of the year with Ryan Suter and the second half with Thomas Harley, as well as the vast majority of the playoffs.

There were two times when DeBoer chose to alter the Harley-Heiskanen pairing, not counting the loss of Chris Tanev in Game 3 vs. Edmonton, which mixed things up out of necessity. The first time was when DeBoer pretty plainly sent a message to his GM that he was not going to use Nils Lundkvist in the playoffs, by doing this in Game 5 vs. Colorado, with Heiskanen next to Suter again:

And the second time we saw Heiskanen next to someone other than Harley by choice was in that fateful Game 6 defeat to Edmonton, which is as far as the Stars have gotten in the postseason since 2020. Here’s what Pete DeBoer ran out in that moment of desperation:

Indeed, it was Lindell-Heiskanen back together with the Stars on the brink of elimination, in a poetic foreshadowing of what we saw in this year’s Game 6 elimination, when Glen Gulutzan split up Lindell-Heiskanen in favor of Harley-Heiskanen for Game 6 vs. Minnesota, when the reunited duo saw four of Minnesota’s five goals go into the Stars’ net during their time on the ice together:

Whether playing with Marc Methot, Connor Carrick, Roman Polák, Andrej Sekera, Matt Dumba, Stephen Johns, Ilya Lyubushkin, Ryan Suter, Jamie Oleksiak, Colin Miller, Thomas Harley, or Esa Lindell, Miro Heiskanen has consistently been the best defenseman on the ice for Dallas when he’s been out there. But man, you’d love to see him find a stable defense partner for more than one season, and Esa Lindell certainly looks like he could be that guy.

In their 77 games together this regular season, Lindell-Heiskanen were outstanding. Of the 28 defense pairings to amass at least 700 minutes together at 5v5, the pairing holds up well. In fact, the Stars’ duo had an xGF% that was a tiny bit better than Cale Makar and Devon Toews put up for Colorado, if you can believe it.

Despite being asked to do more defensive-zone work than most of the other pairings on this list, that Lindell-Heiskanen duo ranked fourth-best in xGA/60, actual GA/60, and high-danger shot attempts allowed among those same 28 pairings. Little wonder that they stayed together all year, I suppose.

My sense is that even after the Game 6 reunion of Harley-Heiskanen, the Stars still see Lindell-Heiskanen as the better of their current options as things stand now. So it wouldn’t surprise me to see that pairing in Game 1 this September, when the Stars begin an 84-game regular season.

Now, let’s get into the pretend grade.

For this year, Heiskanen earned an A rating. That “A” stands for a few things, so let’s hit each of them in turn.

Heiskanen Almost played a full regular season slate of games for the first time2 since his rookie year. And I would've happily given him credit for doing despite his January absences, as those were family-related. But alas, Heiskanen got Foligno’d in Game 77, and while the final regular season games he missed didn’t end up mattering for the standings, he carried a torn oblique muscle into the playoffs, which mattered much more.

The playoffs, yes. That’s where the “A” might stand for Arduous, because every bit of offense the Stars tried to generate felt like it required heroics from Heiskanen and all of his teammates. Heiskanen tallied six points in six playoff games, with his four assists supplemented by two big power play goals. But your memories of those goals are probably tainted by the fact that both came in Games 4 and 5, which Dallas lost.

You also couldn’t help but contrast Heiskanen’s dogged work (again, done with a torn oblique muscle) with that of Quinn Hughes and Brock Faber, whose easier offensive production was stark in this series. When Heiskanen and Hughes/Faber were on the ice together, goals at 5v5 were 5-0 for Minnesota, with the Wild also holding a nearly 60% share in expected goals.

That isn’t intended to put all the blame on Heiskanen, particularly with key absences up front. It is a trope in sports fandom to blame the best players when a team falls short, and that’s very often wrongheaded. After all, Heiskanen was asked to do the heaviest lifting of anyone, and he averaged a ridiculous 31:30 per game in the postseason, on account of logging 43 and 33 minutes in the extended overtime contests of Games 3 and 4. He also scored a point per game. Sure, the 5v5 minutes were tough, but Heiskanen was far from the problem.

Anyway, the playoffs were the playoffs, but they shouldn’t overshadow what Heiskanen did over the course of the regular season, which was quite Above Average. Racking up 63 points in 77 games, Heiskanen was 13th in points-per-game among NHL defensemen this year. His nine goals might strike you as modest, but that total was two more than a certain Quinn Hughes amassed in 74 games, and it was also the third-highest in Heiskanen’s career. Coupled with his 54 assists—the second-highest total of his career—Heiskanen wound up with a quite prolific offensive season, at even-strength as well as on the power play.

The final “A” for Heiskanen is All-Around, which also happens to be a phrase directly from the verbiage that spells out Norris Trophy criteria. In addition to quarterbacking a top power play unit that really ran more through Mikko Rantanen, Heiskanen was also asked to be a top penalty-killer under Gulutzan, and his 3:06 in shorthanded ice time per game was the highest in his career.

It was a decision Gulutzan made going into the season, and he stuck with it throughout the year. My opinion is far less-informed than that of those who matter, but if I’m being honest, I do still have trouble agreeing with that call, particularly given that the public numbers with Heiskanen don’t exactly indicate that he elevated the penalty kill relative to other Stars defensemen.

Yes, Heiskanen’s skating and stick work are as good as it gets in the NHL, and he certainly had some heroic moments shorthanded. But for my money, Heiskanen’s elite skills are best leveraged in minutes where they can shine the brightest, and while he can close down pucks quickly when the opportunity arises, I generally think the cost of him being “less involved” in the game while shorthanded would be more than made up for by being able to roll a fresh Heiskanen out right after the penalty kill.

Sure, the penalty kill dipped a bit from the prior few years under Alain Nasreddine, but it was still solidly above-average relative to the rest of the league. I also harbor a (completely unsupported) belief that forward pressure has a bit bigger impact on PK success3 than defensemen’s duties usually do. If you can survive shorthanded minutes while saving your top offensive forces for minutes with higher offensive potential, that seems logical to me. I just didn’t see enough from Heiskanen shorthanded to warrant his taking those minutes this year, but again, my opinion only counts for what opinions usually count for, which is to say not that much.

Still, I can’t help but notice that Heiskanen played just 17:14 at 5v5 per night, by far the lowest in his career. And despite scoring quite well in the 5v5 minutes he did play, Heiskanen’s overall 5v5 impact was down by his standards. While shots on goal numbers were skewed this year for league reasons, Heiskanen had some of the lowest totals in his career in individual shot attempts, scoring chances, and high-danger shot attempts. But despite all that, Heiskanen’s results were a different thing than the process, as Dallas scored 55.77% of the goals during his 5v5 ice time, which was the third-highest share of his career. It was a weird feature of this Gulutzan team to defy some common proxies in the results it achieved, so how you feel about Heiskanen’s process vs. results is probably going to be a deeper reflection of the team’s approach as a whole.

To wrap up special teams, if you’re going to be critical about Heiskanen’s usage on the PK, then you also have to be laudatory of his work on the league’s second-best power play unit, which Heiskanen featured on all year. Even if his shot wasn’t the focus of the unit, his work in transition, zone entries, and puck rotation was clearly a boon to a terrifying power play unit.

Oddly enough, Heiskanen’s two power play goals in the playoffs equaled his total of PPGs from the entire regular season, so it’s probably time to admit that he’s just not the sort of defenseman who’s likely to pile up 20 goals one of these years. That might put a damper on hopes for Heiskanen’s winning a Norris Trophy, but that’s not to say that his overall body of work wasn’t still very good. I had him as a top-ten defenseman in the league this year, easily.

After logging the most ice time of any player at the Olympics, Heiskanen returned to wind up logging the fourth-most TOI per game in the NHL over 77 contests. He played a ton, he scored a bunch, and he did it while being asked to do everything. And once again, the pillar of the Stars’ defense showed why he’s one of the best there is.

You can’t help but wonder what might have been, had the Stars gotten a bit better injury luck in the playoffs, but Heiskanen’s season really was outstanding. Maybe the “A” should really just stand for Awesome, because that’s what Miro Heiskanen is, fundamentally.

As you may have heard, Colorado is on the brink after traumatizing their fans with a multi-goal collapse for the second straight postseason. Vegas can complete the sweep at home tomorrow night in a series that has persistently refused to obey our expectations.

Carolina evened their series 1-1 after escaping Raleigh with an overtime win in Game 2, which means the Canadiens won’t have their own opportunity to go up 3-0 tonight at Centre Bell. Despite getting thoroughly outshot by Carolina (as everyone does), the Habs have saved their attempts for where (and when) they matter most. Frederik Andersen has begun to look thoroughly beatable as a result.

The fickle nature of goal-scoring gets intensified in the playoffs, where teams can convince themselves that they were “just one goal away” for purposes of blame or excuse as the situation dictates. Season-long trends can vanish in a puff of smoke, because it turns out that a seven-game series really isn’t long enough for all the bounces and saves to even out.

Watching Carolina and Colorado in their respective conference finals, I couldn’t help but think about just how valuable playoff scoring is, and how desperate the good teams get to ensure they have a roster where they can get that one goal when they need it. This has been an issue for many good Carolina teams in past years, where the lack of name-brand1 superstars becomes apparent in later rounds.

Since 2018, Carolina has been among the best playoff teams in hockey—at least, for the first two rounds. After that, things have been rough. Here’s how they’ve done in the three Eastern Conference finals they’ve reached over the years:

• 2019: Swept 4-0 by Boston

• 2023: Swept 4-0 by Florida

• 2025: Lost 4-1 to Florida

That’s all gone on during the same stretch where fellow perennial contenders like Tampa Bay, Colorado, Vegas, and Florida have found ways to reach the summit. Carolina, however, keeps falling short.

This could still be their year, thanks to that Nikolaj Ehlers winner the other night that kept their backs off the wall for the time being. But you know the voices were lurking at the back of their mind (or their mind’s ear, I guess?) when Montreal nearly took a 2-0 series lead on the road. It’s happening again.

Dallas fans know well how constantly stumbling in the third round can play tricks on the mind. It’s when all the mounting bumps and bruises can finally turn into bigger problems, and a loss in those rounds can all but wipe away any of the goodwill earned over the preceding two. Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, and now Valeri Nichushkin know about this phenomenon far too well.

Teams all want the heavyweight scoring ability that gets a final four team over the line, and they’ll do almost anything to get it if they don’t think they have enough of it. This is what led to Mikko Rantanen’s USA tour a year ago, and it’s what I wanted to talk a bit more at length about today.

But again, about that scoring. Sure, you’ll have the odd series where Brett Howden or Eric Robinson get hot, but on balance, the best players tend to show up in the biggest moments. Take the 2000 West Final between Dallas and Colorado, for example: the only players to score more than one goal in that seven-game classic were Hull, Modano, Nieuwendyk, Forsberg, and Milan Hejduk.2

Do you remember the puck off the post that saved Belfour’s bacon in the final minute of that Game 7 in 2000, by the way? Many thanks to a certain local media member for ensuring we still have this footage:

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Jamie Benn gets a C for his performance this year, and the C stands for Captain. There’s your grade. If that’s all you came for, then take you filthy report card and go have a nice summer. But if you really want to dig into the coursework from this season, then stick around.

I’d encourage any Stars fan pondering offseason moves to go back and watch Benn’s milestone goal early in the season. In his fourth game of the season after recovering from a collapsed lung, Benn scored his 400th goal off a feed from (who else?) Wyatt Johnston in what wound up being a blowout win over the Edmonton Oilers back in November.

The team would put out a tribute to Benn’s achievement soon afterwards, complete with a career goals montage that will make you feel things. Benn’s goal coming as it did while Mikko Rantanen was serving an automatic one-game suspension for his pair of recent match penalties, it was a pretty memorable night against Glen Gulutzan’s former team. Jamie Benn getting A Moment in the midst of it felt like a good sign of things to come after a long wait.

Because yes, that goal was a long time coming after Benn ended the prior regular season stuck on 399 goals for 17 straight goal-less games to end the 2024-25 season. Aside from his goal in the first round against Colorado last year, Benn wound up waiting 262 days between scoring goal #399 (also against Edmonton) and goal #400.

When the dust settled on Benn’s season this year, he wound up with 60 games played, 15 goals scored, along with 21 assists. That came without much power play time either, as the Stars leaned more heavily on their top unit this year. Benn only featured on the first unit for a brief stretch after the Olympics, when both Roope Hintz and Mikko Rantanen were out of the lineup. Benn tallied two power play goals and one power play assist as the PP netfront guy from February 25 to March 28, when Rantanen returned and took his spot back.

Otherwise without a ton of power play time, Benn still found a way to keep scoring. He was fifth on the Stars in both 5v5 goals and 5v5 points overall on the team this year, trailing only the usual top-six guys. In fact, Benn’s 15 goals were tied with Roope Hintz1 (who played 53 games) and just one short of Matt Duchene (who played 57). Benn even outscored Justin Hryckowian’s 14 goals, despite Hryckowian’s featuring in 81 of 82 games this year.

In a year where the Stars’s forward depth was constantly under pressure from key absences, Benn was productive in limited minutes. Playing a career-low 13:17 per night—two minutes less than his 15:18 last year under DeBoer—Benn was useful in his role. The captain’s defensive work was noticeably improved this year as well, which meant the coaching staff didn’t have to give him primarily offensive-zone starts, as DeBoer had done the last couple of years.

So for $1 million (plus $2 million more in performance bonuses that will hit this year’s cap at a less convenient time), the Stars got a forward who played on both the left and right wing, who scored at a 20-goal pace over 60 games, and who was also top-five on the team in 5v5 production. That’s perfectly decent value even before you add whatever intangible benefits a longtime captain and franchise icon provides behind the scenes. Cromulent, even.

In the playoffs, Benn’s scoring dried up, but the underlying numbers were still quite solid. He played 35 of his 46 minutes at 5-on-5 with Arttu Hyry and Sam Steel (from Games 2-5), and that line posted the following numbers per Natural Stat Trick:

• 41-24 in shot attempts

• 15-9 in shots on goal

• 63% expected goals

• 18-8 in scoring chances

• 7-1 in high-danger shot attempts

They still found a way to be outscored 0-2 during those 35 minutes over four games, however. And that wasn’t always bad luck, as this goal in Game 3 caught Benn (and some of his teammates) just a bit too defensively passive:

In Game 6, things came to a head with Benn’s giveaway for the series-clinching empty netter. That needs no reintroduction to your memory, but it does illustrate a point we discussed shortly after the end of the season: when injuries have necessitated Jamie Benn’s taking on a bigger role than necessary, it hasn’t usually worked out terribly well for him or the team. Depth is important, as we’ve discussed.

The 2025-26 season was the first season Benn missed time due to injury since January 2021, and that meant we only got eight games featuring both Benn and Tyler Seguin in the lineup together this year. Seguin joked after the season that Benn has to come back for at least another year, because Seguin still has another year left on his contract, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Benn does just that, though I don’t profess to know what he’s thinking. There’s clearly a need for scoring depth on the wing for this team, and both Gulutzan and Jim Nill have said they want Benn to return. I think they’re both being entirely sincere in saying that, too. It really is all up to Jamie Benn.

Given everything Benn has meant to this franchise, he’s always going to be viewed with higher levels of scrutiny than other players. He’s earned that scrutiny through both poor decisions and heroic moments alike. When Jamie Benn makes a mistake, it hurts fans a little more than if a journeyman player does the same thing. And conversely, when he’s done something great, it has always been a little greater for the captain’s having done it.

Should Jamie Benn come back? In all honesty, I really do believe it should be up to him.

It would be one thing if he were taking a roster spot that a younger and better player would otherwise fill, but the Stars’ dearth of winger depth right now means Benn was and probably still would be one of their best eight winger options on any given night. His willingness and ability to move over and play on the right wing this year—a move Gulutzan probably deserves more credit for trying—means he comes with some flexibility, too. If you can sign him for another $1 million plus a bit more in incentives that won’t hit until next year when the Stars have more space, then I think it’s worth doing.

But the conversations around Jamie Benn have always been emotional ones, so I can understand why this one has been, too. I’ve watched all but a tiny handful of Benn’s nearly 1,400 NHL games, and it’s impossible to forget some of the moments in that highlight reel we linked at the top of the piece. When you’ve seen a player pull off some of the moves Benn has, it’s hard not to hold that up in contrast with the player he’s become well into his thirties.

Heck, even back in early 2019—over seven years ago!—this was an ongoing conversation: What happened to Jamie Benn? Sure, the profane criticism from ownership via Jim Lites didn’t exactly help, but Benn’s game has never been one that is easy on the eyes, for better or for worse. Even some of the prettiest goals of his career came with dekes that were almost understated, so when those dekes stopped working as often, it could look to fans like2 Benn wasn’t trying. As a prospect who had to overcome early criticisms of his skating, Benn has always been the sort of player who is either blowing you away or leaving you wanting a little bit more, with little room in between. It’s not a fair standard for anyone to be held to, but nobody ever said an NHL career would come with justice.

Benn has been a throwback player for practically his entire career, and he still is. From a one-game cameo with a visor after a concussion to getting fined for cross-checking Ryan Hartman (who received no such discipline for taking out Arttu Hyry’s knee), Benn has always refused to adhere to your expectations of him. Early in his career, he was dragging Stars teams into the fight, almost singlehandedly evening the playoff series against the Ducks in 2014. (Just read what Brandon wrote about Benn’s first playoff series if you don’t believe me.)

Jamie Benn was everything to this franchise during a time when they were trying to shed the demons from the dark days of bankruptcy. Nowadays, Benn usually isn’t the one carrying this team, and they’re at their best when he doesn’t have to be.

The captain has earned the right to decide how to end his time in Dallas. If it’s another season on the ice, then this year proved that he can make it count, so long as the Stars can deploy him in roles where he’s most effective.

I sometimes think athletes are where we most honestly betray our fear of mortality. We don’t want to see stars age, to see them slow down. We want to see their primes, and then we want to see another player’s prime, to forever live in the apex of speed, strength, health, and glory. If we’re really lucky, we’ll even get to see a late-career revival, to get a chance to praise the ol’ gunslinger for how “he can still go out there and give ‘em a great shift or two,” before he finally gets to go out on his own terms. In a perfect world, Mike Modano would have finished his time in Dallas like Joe Pavelski did.

Seeing Jamie Benn at 36 years old this year was very different from seeing him at 21, but isn’t that true of all of us? Time can’t be rewound, but we can adjust our perspective and find a way to do our best. We spend the vast majority of our life way past our physical prime, but those latter days can still end up being the ones that matter most. Because the thing about sports, and about life, is that there’s always more to appreciate, so long as you’re looking in the right places.

If you follow the Premier League, then you know that Arsenal just finished atop the league table (standings) for the first time in over 20 years. In football (soccer) parlance: they won the league.

In somewhat anticlimactic fashion, Arsenal clinched the title the day after playing their penultimate game of the campaign on Monday, because second-place Manchester City tied Bournemouth on Tuesday, ensuring that Evil would not be able to catch Good on the league’s final day of the 38-game season this Saturday.

If you know anything about English football, you know that led to some pretty riotous celebrations in north London. It wasn’t a game day, but that didn’t prevent thousands upon thousands of people from flooding streets when the title was clinched on Tuesday night.

For my part here on the other side of the Atlantic, I had a couple of text threads with friends that were going crazy. Video clips were exchanged, “name some guys” was being played constantly, and we lapped up every montage of Big Moments the internet could compile as quickly as we could.

Soccer is different from the major North American sports in a lot of ways, and not all of them good. But one thing that remains unassailable about soccer fandom is its full-throatedness of support and dedication, from the memorized songs and chants about nearly every player on the roster to the solemn singing of the team’s anthem right before every match.

When you have all of that in the background, a championship gets echoed for years, with every song imbued with that memory of ultimate victory. It’s pretty darn special, really.

In any sport, if you’ve followed a team that’s won a championship, you’ve tasted this sort of euphoria.

Let’s look at Texas, for instance. Rangers fans got the unlooked-for glory of 2023, almost completely healing some very painful wounds from 2011. I’m not sure Arlington’s city streets are quite as conducive to parades as London’s, but that’s not the point. When your dudes win it all, you get to let loose for a bit and bask in the glory, from victorious trophy acceptances to the little digital fireworks Google adds to your team’s page for a day or two after the championship. Adolis García got a contract he struggled to live up to after that all-timer of a playoff run, and I still don’t think anyone begrudges him a dollar of it. Corey Seager’s struggles this season (well-articulated by Jamey) are all easier to sift through because of the plain fact that he’s done one of the most special things a baseball player can do.

Mavericks fans enjoyed this as well, back before the team was sold and subsequently ripped in half. A one-name star got the championship he so richly deserved back in 2011, and Bob is even re-living that run right now, if you haven’t seen it. Every time I walk by the statues outside AAC, I think about the Mavericks fans I knew in 2011 and what that title meant to them, what it still means to them. In a way, the Luka trade was made far worse because there was such a clear and recent template for why you don’t do what they did: the reward for sticking with a superstar, for hoping for that one special run to cement his legacy, is priceless. Turns out, priceless commodities fetch a lot less on the trade market when you let a Business Genius run the team.

F.C. Dallas (formerly the Burn) have yet to win a true championship, though they have a couple of U.S Open Cups. Having lived in Seattle during both of their MLS Cups, I can testify that it changes things, so here’s hoping Dallas gets to taste that one day.

The Cowboys? Well, they’re the Cowboys. For 30 years now, they’ve coupled the arrogance of the Yankees with the championship résumé of the Minnesota Wild. I already resent having to type their name, so let’s move on.

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In Disneyland and its associated resorts around the world, there’s an exclusive location called Club 33. It started as a location for Walt Disney himself to host special guests for meals without being bothered by the hoi polloi, but it’s now become yet another way for a theme park to tantalize grown adults with the allure of exclusivity.

Best of all, you can become a member, maybe! All you have to do is “express your interest,” which seems to involve a screening process presumably designed to weed out the crazy people from those willing to plop down like $35,000 for the privilege of paying $130 for a nice meal inside a theme park.

When you have the cultural cachet of Disney, you can sell mystique like this any time you feel like it, and they do. But like most things marketed as exclusive and upscale, it’s essentially just a VIP experience. If you’re lucky enough to get into Club 33 or its associated locations around the world, then you, too, can experience an edible, ephemeral piece of Disneyana.

But you know what’s more exclusive than Club 33 is a little something called Club 45. If I’m doing my math right, something called “Club 45” would be, like, 12 times more exclusive than a “Club 33.” (No need to check my math, I’m sure that’s right.) And the numbers bear that out, too.

Here are all the players to have scored at least 45 goals in a single NHL season for the Minnesota North Stars/Dallas Stars franchise: Dino Ciccarelli (2x), Brian Bellows, Mike Modano, Bill Goldsworthy, Wyatt Johnston, and Jason Robertson (also 2x).

That’s right: there have been just six Stars/North Stars players to score at least 45 goals in a single season. Half of those happened during a very different era of hockey, where goaltending was often more of a whispered rumor than any real obstacle to scoring. Check the numbers if you don’t believe me.

Average goals per game in the Minnesota era (1967-1993): 3.48
Average goals per game in the Dallas era (1993-2026): 2.85

Yes, offense has finally gotten back up to the three goals per game mark in the last five years, and the league has benefited as a result. But we are still a long ways away from the heady days of the 1980s.

That’s what makes what Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston have been doing so remarkable. Robertson is already second in franchise history in goals per game for players with at least 100 games played for MNS/DAL, which Johnston is not far behind, in sixth.

Here’s an ugly screenshot from the invaluable Hockey-Reference.com, just to show my work:

Johnston started out the year with four goals in his first four games, while Robertson took about a month to heat up. But once both got going, there was very little opponents could do to stop either of them.

That also held true in the playoffs, when Robertson and Johnston combined for 9 of the Stars’ 15 goals against Minnesota, as well as 4 of the team’s 5 even-strength tallies. The Stars’ best scorers kept scoring in the postseason, even if few others could do the same.

The 2025-26 season may not be remembered as fondly as some other recent campaigns, but what Robertson and Johnston did this year was genuinely remarkable. So, let’s remark upon them with some made-up grades.

Wyatt Johnston - P

The “P” stands for Power Play Prowess, of course. Johnston became just the fourth player in the past 20 years to score 27 power play goals in a season. And he’s really the third, considering that one of those four was Ilya Kovalchuk in the juiced My NHL season of 2005-06, when NHL teams got literally twice as many power plays per game as they did this year.

There’s a tendency to dismiss power play goals as less valuable than even-strength markers, and I get it. You have an advantage, so you’re scoring goals under more favorable circumstances than when the other team has all their defenders out there. But to me, that’s like a batter being notorious for hitting home runs in 3-1 counts. Sure, you’d rather have someone mashing dingers on every pitch, but it’s a heck of a weapon to have someone so adept at punishing a team the moment they make a mistake. After all, if scoring on power plays were easy, Alex Ovechkin probably would have gotten over the 25 PPG mark at least once.

Johnston isn’t Ovechkin, however. Instead of being an unstoppable cannon mounted in a predictable position, he was a sniper in a ghillie suit, always creeping around too close for comfort, which is to say he was basically always in the slot.

This is only a partial highlight reel from this season through January, but it’s compact enough for our purposes right now. Just watch how often Johnston reads the play to get his stick blade open, and how little time he needs to release it:

Johnston obliterated the franchise record for power play goals in a season, but he also tallied 18 even-strength goals (or 17, if you don’t count his one empty-netter). Far from a power play merchant, Johnston was simply an elite scoring machine this year, doing things at 22 years old that almost defy explanation.

It is no exaggeration to call Johnston a cornerstone of the team. I mean, just look at his four seasons in Dallas to date:

That’s an absurd share of offense, particularly for a player drafted 23rd overall. Johnston already has 263 career points, while nobody else in his draft class has even hit the 200-point mark yet.

Scoring is the most expensive thing to acquire and keep in the NHL. It’s why Michael Bunting will get a lot more in free agency than Dallas will be able to pay him, and it’s why Wyatt Johnston will make an average of $8.4 million per season for the next four years. He’ll probably be able to command at least double that amount when he hits free agency in 2030, but we’re not concerned with the future right now. We’re talking about a remarkable season in the recent past.

The only real downsides of Johnston’s season were on the defensive side. His -5 plus/minus in the regular season raises some eyebrows when set next to his 86 points, and his defensive metrics were similarly, ah, *flutters hand unevenly*. But Johnston would be far from the first 22-year-old to be fine-tuning the details of how to shut down the elite NHL talent he found himself facing. Really, Johnston’s defensive usage itself was a testament to how important he’s become. (And it’s not like he wasn’t scoring himself, either!)

Johnston’s faceoff percentage also dipped below 48%, as he had to handle the bulk of the right-side draws after Tyler Seguin was lost for the season. Johnston also wasn’t asked to do much penalty-killing this year, so those numbers don’t include many shorthanded draws, either. In fact, Johnston’s faceoff struggles (such as they were) extended to the power play, where teams normally have an advantage. Johnston went just 50.8% on power play draws, while Benn, Hintz, Hryckowian, Duchene, Seguin, and Steel all went at least 60% on the dot. Again, it can be tough to be the main/only right-shot faceoff guy on the team.

I find it hard to be anything other than optimistic about Johnston’s improving the margins of his game as time goes along, however. Given how outstanding the core of his game already is, I’m taking the over on Johnston’s defensive metrics and faceoff numbers next year. He’s simply too good, too disciplined, and too smart not to round off the few remaining corners his game has left.

This year’s playoffs were tougher for almost everyone. In 40 minutes against Kirill Kaprizov, Johnston lost the 5v5 scoring battle handily, to the tune of 5-0—a major contrast to his matchup work against MacKinnon and McDavid1 the postseason prior.

In fairness, the 5v5 scoring was far from a Johnston-only issue for Dallas, though. Besides, Johnston’s double overtime goal in Game 3 will stay in your memory for a long time, because playoff overtime goals tend to do that.

I still remember Cody Eakin’s overtime goal in 2016, and Mattias Norström’s overtime winner in 2008. And you surely remember Steve Ott’s remarkable breakaway overtime goal against Colorado in 2004, right? You are going to remember that goal by Johnston, which put the Stars up 2-1 in the series, for a long time, as well you should.

Wyatt Johnston isn’t perfect, because no player is. But he was the leading edge of Dallas’s attack in high-leverage moments, and he scored the types of goals that make you believe we’re only beginning to see the best of what he has to offer.

After all, he’s already done things that literally no other Star has ever done, by which of course I mean his setting up that prank on Lian Bichsel.

Jason Robertson - R

The other member of Club 45 was Jason Robertson, who led the club with 96 points on the year, with 51 assists on top of what is somehow just the second-highest goal total of his career.

Robertson also set a club record of his own, scoring in seven straight games in mid-November to set the Dallas Stars mark. It might be hard to remember right now, but Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston really carried this team in some otherwise tough stretches. You do not get to 112 points without your best players doing special things, and two of the Stars’ best forwards very much did that.

However, you might also have forgotten that Robertson’s record-setting goal streak came after a nine-game goal drought. Despite putting up seven assists during that time (while the team cobbled together a 6-1-2 record), Robertson hadn’t scored in what, for him, felt like eons. There was talk early in the season about how Robertson didn’t have a recent foot surgery slowing him down this year, so what was the problem?

But every time I talked to Robertson during that period, he exuded confidence. He knew he was still getting to good areas, and he knew the chance-generation was there. So when he finally got back on the board with a huge third-period tally in Ottawa, it was vindication more than relief that you saw.

From there, Robertson went off. In his final 66 games, Robertson scored at a 50-goal pace, putting up 42 goals and 40 assists while the team finished 41-16-9.

Three of Robertson’s goals came in the midst of that November hot streak, in what ended up being his only hat trick of the season—a natural feat in multiple senses:

Robertson also sits just one hat trick behind Benn, Seguin, and Modano in Dallas Stars history. His scoring was and is prolific, elite, unstoppable, and everything in between. Robertson’s 96 points were 10th in the NHL, and he and Johnston tied for 4th in the whole league in goals.

This year, Robertson’s goal-scoring carried over into the postseason, as he tallied in five straight games against Minnesota, winding up with eight points over the six games in total. In a series with precious little space available in prime areas, Robertson did what he’s done his entire career, and found a way to score.

This montage is long, but I think it’s worth appreciating the many different ways in which Robertson created goals this season. Having both him and Johnston to worry about must be nothing short of a nightmare for opposing teams, particularly on the power play.

Robertson also led the team in average ice time among forwards, surpassing even Mikko Rantanen (by four seconds) with an average of 20:15 per night. And why wouldn’t you keep going to Robertson, given how much he tilted the ice in Dallas’s favor?

Put it this way: on the seven line trios on which Robertson played at least 40 minutes at 5-on-5, all of them had a 51%+ shots-on-goal share (despite Dallas as a whole being a 49% team over the regular season).

On the results end, things reflected that reality: all but one of those trios were at least a +4 in their time together. Here’s an eye chart to that effect:

Matt Duchene filled in admirably for Roope Hintz after the Olympics, but there’s no denying that we were thoroughly robbed of seeing what this team’s true depth could have looked like in playoffs, had both Seguin and Hintz been available.

Back in February of 2024, I wrote about how Robertson’s defensive game belied his reputation. The way he goes about his game is more incisive than the methods that tend to get defensive plaudits, and besides, wingers haven’t won Selke awards since Jere Lehtinen. But when Robertson is on the ice—with anyone—the Stars’ defensive results always tend to improve. His +22 was second on the team, behind only Esa Lindell.

It might also interest you to know that Robertson actually started more of his shifts in the defensive zone, on average, than Wyatt Johnston did. That’s not a slight on Johnston at all—why wouldn’t you try to get him as close to the other net as possible?—but rather some additional context for Robertson’s work. He wasn’t asked to do the heaviest defensive lifting like Roope Hintz, or even Tyler Seguin, but Robertson did excel in the duties he was asked to perform. He usually does.

Robertson’s “R” grade for this season stands for Redoubtable, a word that carries a sense of both fear and admiration. His performance this season was indeed nothing short of admirable, and his scoring prowess instilled fear in every goalie he faced.

This summer, that fear is of a different sort, as Stars fans have to wait and see how the Stars navigate Robertson’s need of a contract ahead of his final year before free agency. No one is irreplaceable, but some players are far more difficult to replace than others. If the Stars and Robertson can’t find a contract they can agree upon, Jim Nill will have the toughest job of his entire Dallas career in charting a new path forward.

Robertson and Johnston’s four years together in Dallas have coincided with the best sustained run the franchise has had since Ken Hitchcock’s arrival in 1996. There is still work to be done, and both of them still have the biggest thing of all to prove. But if they put up more seasons like this one, they’ll give the Stars every chance in the world of finally returning to the most exclusive NHL club there is.

The Stars need some more salary cap space. This is not breaking1 news. What will be news, whenever it breaks, is how they give themselves that space.

Jason Robertson is the impetus behind all of this talk, and he should be, considering that he’s averaged 40 goals per season across each of the last five years and scored nine goals among 12 points over his last nine playoff games. That’s the kind of player a team either has or is trying to get.

The Stars have two choices, realistically speaking. They can either re-sign Jason Robertson, which requires more cap space, or they can trade Jason Robertson, which would provide them with either a comparable player or else more cap space with which to pursue said player(s).

At this point, I still think the path of least resistance for both sides is for Robertson to be locked up long-term. But whether Dallas does so or not, some trades will need to happen this summer. So today, let’s look at every player in the organization the Stars are technically allowed to trade, even the ones that they almost surely won’t.

But first: a caveat.

Players with Full Trade Protection

Yes, I know. Anyone can be traded. But on a team as good as Dallas has been, there is very little incentive for any of the six players below to waive the trade protection they negotiated for themselves in order to depart a team whose stated goal is to win a championship.

So for today’s purposes, we’ll be assuming none of the players with no-move and full no-trade clauses will be part of any such discussions. Those players are, per Puckpedia:

• Mikko Rantanen

• Tyler Seguin

• Roope Hintz

• Matt Duchene

• Miro Heiskanen

• Esa Lindell

We’ll now move onto the players without such full trade protection, at least for the moment. These are not in order of likelihood, or really in any particular order at all, but we’ll start with a very logical name with which to begin.

Jason Robertson

What would precipitate a trade of Robertson is pretty simply this: if he wants more money than the Stars can afford to pay him.

We’ve gone over what that number probably is. And while the Stars probably would look for ways to scrimp and save an extra $500K or so if that really was all that stood between keeping Robertson and having to go find a new version, there’s always the possibility that Robertson is looking for a final figure that Dallas simply cannot offer.

If that turns out to be the case, then Dallas has two options, as far as I can see.

The first option for the Stars is to try to trade Robertson for another established player of roughly approximate value right now: a Brady Tkachuk, Dylan Larkin, William Nylander, or Robert Thomas, for example. The main problem with such a deal is that any team moving a player like that will view their own guy as the more valuable of the two, since moving on from an established player is always a potential disaster if the new guy doesn’t work out. Getting extra assets back in such a trade provides a little bit of insurance. Thus, it’s hard to see any of the above teams being willing to add more pieces to a trade for Robertson, even if it came with an extension. In all likelihood, they’d probably want Dallas to be the one sweetening the pot.

Second, Dallas could try to move Robertson for a package similar to what Carolina got for Mikko Rantanen last year, getting back some draft capital as well as a younger player whose upside could make him a potential Jason Robertson replacement down the line. This is a far riskier strategy for a team as all-in as Dallas, because you’d be banking on whatever player you acquire to almost immediately have a more significant impact than he’s having with his current team.

And besides, what younger player is really out there? Matthew Knies and Mason McTavish, for example, simply aren’t giving you anything close to what Robertson does. It’s just tough to look around the league right now and really find a player that fits the bill for this trade. That’s partly because of how rarely such players get traded, but it’s also due to the plain fact that Robertson’s value around the league simply isn’t as stratospheric as Mikko Rantanen’s was a year ago—even if Dallas fans think it should be.

Jake Oettinger

Did you know Jake Oettinger’s no-move clause doesn’t kick in until July 1 of this year?

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Update: The NHL has fined John Tortorella $100,000 for his actions last night, and the Golden Knights will forfeit a second-round pick in this summer’s NHL draft.

Per the NHL’s release today: “The imposition of these penalties comes after previous warnings were issued to the Club regarding their compliance with the Media Regulations and other associated policies.”

John Tortorella made some waves last night for opting not to fulfill his media duties as the head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights following their victory over Anaheim in Game 6. There’s much to be said about how much that decision does or doesn’t matter, but I think it’s important to have the full context: this was clearly a team-wide thing, not just one head coach’s decision, as player availability was also more limited than usual.

I’m sure the easiest excuse for Vegas to make will be that the team’s bus was leaving Anaheim in order to get to the airport for the return flight home. Mitch Marner even began his and Brett Howden’s postgame presser by saying “Bus in ten minutes.”

But to be blunt, those are all just excuses. The team plane could easily have departed a bit later, if need be. Likewise, the game could easily have gone into overtime. Nothing here was unforeseen or unavoidable. Vegas’s coach (and by extension, the organization) simply decided they didn’t want to bother with meeting their obligations last night.

And remember, this is the same Golden Knights club that revoked longtime NHL writer Mark Lazerus’s credential after he asked Noah Hanifin questions about Carter Hart during the preseason. This is the same organization that routinely treats its coaches and even beloved team icons with utter disregard the moment they decide they no longer have any use for them. When it comes to doing right by people, Vegas has not exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.

In hockey, players and coaches are always quick to talk about accountability on the ice. Every player and coach has to be careful to add the caveat “and it starts with me” to any criticism of the team. Rookies are routinely taught to keep their heads down until they’ve learned all the taboos and unwritten rules that allow them to mesh with the rest of the group seamlessly.

But the thing about accountability is that you have to demonstrate it. And like it or not, doing postgame press conferences is part of the job for which a head coach is accountable. It’s the one time fans actually get to hear players and coaches answer questions from independent reporters about the game they just played, and even if some of the questions will be less than revelatory than you’d hope for reasons Sean discussed well the other day, it’s still a vital part of the transparency of professional sports.

You don’t have to go back further than last spring to remember how big this can be, as Pete DeBoer’s own postgame presser following the Stars’ loss to Edmonton led to his pointing the finger at Jake Oettinger. That media availability gave everyone a deeper insight into what DeBoer was feeling and thinking, and obviously a whole lot transpired after those comments. The whole point of the media is to be the media, that connective tissue that brings the wider hockey world as close as possible to the players and coaches and executives of the teams they spend their money and time to follow.

For John Tortorella of all people to decide it simply wasn’t worth his time—whatever the reason—is just flat-out disappointing, albeit not surprising. Tortorella certainly had time to play the media game when ESPN was paying him to do so, but he’s been known for decades as someone who treats press conferences with scorn, despite the fact that he clearly has thoughts and feelings about the game that are worth sharing and discussing, whether or not you agree with them.

I mean, look: Joel Quenneville had no issue doing his postgame media after his team was eliminated last night, and he knows about press conferences better than a lot of people, considering that he and his GM recently went through a tough press conference of their own. Of course, that was a tough presser because of reasons much bigger than hockey: Quenneville’s admitted failure to protect his players and respond adequately to Brad Aldrich’s abusive behavior under his watch in Chicago.

(Aside #1: If you haven’t read the Jenner & Block independent report following their investigation, I’d recommend starting on Page 38, which details what exactly the Blackhawks staff had been told, and how they did (or didn’t) respond to that knowledge. Quenneville’s particularly hazy memories on pages 50-51 about a meeting and a phone call regarding Aldrich’s behavior are notable when compared to those of people like Stan Bowman’s.)

(Aside #2: Before last year’s Western Conference final series, I even asked Bowman about Joel Quenneville after the latter’s reinstatement had become public in recent days. And to the Edmonton Oilers’ credit, Bowman gave a thorough response, and nobody with the team said or intimated a single thing about such questions being off-limits.)

What I’m saying here is that if someone like Quenneville can take his medicine in press conferences, then so can Tortorella or anyone else in far less serious circumstances. It’s part of the game, and it’s part of the job for which coaches are paid millions of dollars a year. I’d love to assume best intent and say that Tortorella was feeling ill or something after the game, but all accounts thus far suggest that one of the most veteran coaches in the NHL simply declined to participate in the most routine of postgame NHL procedures because, as he’s made clear over the years, he didn’t think it was worth his time.

We should certainly hold the media accountable, too. It’s our job to ask relevant questions and to make press conferences more worth everyone’s while, as much as it’s within our control. But after the clinching game of a second-round series, I can pretty much guarantee that at least one or two salient questions would have been posed by the larger-than-normal media contingent in Anaheim last night. This wasn’t some mid-December blowout in front of a small local contingent. It was Game 6 of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

But again, it’s about accountability more than quality of content. All the money that professional sports creates is ultimately there because of the fans’ interest in the team. And for a team like Vegas to repeatedly treat the media (who are paid far less than the coaches and players they cover) with indifference or even hostility is disappointing—particularly after the expansion franchise just advanced to the Western Conference finals for the fifth time in nine seasons.

Las Vegas and Dallas aren’t all that different in some ways. Both are cities filled with transplants, both qualify as “non-traditional hockey markets,” and both see summer temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees. In many ways, the ever-growing (if occasionally fraught) Dallas hockey landscape 33 years after the Stars’ arrival is what the nine-year-old NHL franchise in Las Vegas can aspire to match one day.

But Vegas has gone about their business very differently from Dallas since their inception. An expansion franchise like Vegas kind of has to do things differently compared to a transplanted one like Minnesota/Dallas, as the job of building a team from scratch is generally the toughest one in sports. Just ask the Seattle Kraken1 (or the Minnesota Wild) how tough it can be to go from Day 1 to being a perennial contender.

When Pete DeBoer ill-advisedly joked about how an optional practice on December 26 was not optional for younger players, he ended up incurring a $100,000 fine for the Dallas Stars as a result of violating the CBA. And I can tell you that when I was first looking into that story, the team didn’t push people away or make excuses to try to cover anything up. They answered questions and continued to make everyone available, and DeBoer had to answer questions about the violation multiple times. Fans knew what was going on, why it happened, and how everything was ultimately resolved.

At no point over the past couple of years have I ever been told that something is “off-limits” to ask about with regard to Dallas. Sure, common sense and good taste dictate the way you might ask about certain things, but ultimately, my obligation is to report the truth as responsibly, clearly, and (hopefully) entertainingly as I can. And the Stars, at least for as long as I’ve been doing this, have consistently opted to project transparency and accountability more than defensiveness and indifference.

Heck, even that USA Today piece by Kenny Jacoby acknowledged that the Stars gave both a 35-minute interview as well as some statements via e-mail, despite how critical that piece was of them as an organization. Given what we’ve seen from Vegas, would they even have picked up the phone in a similar situation?

If Vegas wants to be ruthless in how they approach personnel management, that’s absolutely their choice. And given all the success they’ve had in their first decade—including, like Dallas, a Stanley Cup in their sixth year in town—you’d be hard-pressed to argue with that approach.

But it’s one thing to be tough internally in pursuit of a Stanley Cup; it’s a whole other thing to spurn the very people who fly to Anaheim in order to provide fans the very best coverage they can. To treat with contempt the reporters who are there to hold the team accountable for how they honor those fans’ investment is just extremely difficult to defend, from where I’m sitting.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Here’s a member of perhaps the most veteran Vegas media outlet there is saying it even more clearly after he was at that would-be presser:

It’s about doing the right thing, even when it’s not pleasant or convenient. Everyone knows the rules in the NHL, and for a team to flout media responsibilities is a pretty wild stance to take. It’s also hypocritical, considering that every single player knows they will get healthy-scratched if they show up late to a practice or meeting during the season—even when the cause of their tardiness might have been out of their control. Accountability isn’t a real part of your culture if it only matters for some of the people, some of the time.

Again, the media should be held accountable to make press conferences more than sycophantic dog-and-pony shows. As someone in the independent space, I’m particularly aware of this. There’s a real tension between the business/entertainment side of media and the integrity that has to undergird it, if we’re to do the thing properly. But I decided a long time ago that there’s no point Doing The Journalism if you’re not going to try to do the thing honestly. And just as fans expect media coverage to be fair and honest, so also should they expect a similar level of accountability from the teams they root for.

Vegas has bet that their fans’ trust will be vindicated by the organization’s demonstrated willingness to do whatever it takes to win. That can be a very appealing part of their brand when it comes with success, as it largely has for nine years now. It’s certainly possible that players coming from places like Toronto or Buffalo might see the high degree of media “protection” a place like Vegas offers as part of its appeal, too.

Ultimately though, teams live and die because of the fans that pay their bills. And when a team chooses to limit their obligations to those fans depending on the circumstances, they might end up finding out that the cost of those choices is only fully reckoned with when they stop winning and the money stops rolling in. A team in Las Vegas should know better than anyone that you can’t keep beating the house forever.

Let’s get something out of the way first: Yes, the Wyatt Johnston post-to-post attempt in the third period of Game 4 could have given Dallas a two-goal lead, and likely a 3-1 series lead. That’s all a matter of public record, and you don’t need me or anyone else to tell you that.

But today, I wanted to look past that big moment at a couple of shifts in Games 5 and 6. I think these two were indicative of why the Stars couldn’t ever quite grab hold of the series, even after that fateful moment in Game 4. So let’s look at a stretch from each of the final two games of the series, starting with the first period of Game 5.

Shift #1: Game 5 with 9:53 remaining in the first period

(This is kinda two shifts, but we’ll only focus on the latter.)

With Game 5 at home, Dallas had the opportunity to grab a 3-2 series lead, just as they had done in the first round against Colorado the year prior. And despite an early Minnesota goal, Dallas had every chance to take Game 5 over in the first period and put all the pressure on Minnesota down the stretch.

It all begins after Dallas tied the game up on the power play a minute prior, they kept the pressure up with a great shift by their third line. Despite losing Arttu Hyry right after the tying goal, Steel-Hryckowian-Benn and the third defense pairing hemmed in Minnesota for 56 seconds, forcing a (somewhat dubious) icing.

This isn’t the shift we’ll be dissecting, but it’s worth watching just to have the full context:

That Minnesota icing gave Dallas an offensive-zone draw against the same tired group of five for Minnesota: Tarasenko, Brink, and McCarron along with Minnesota’s second defense pairing of Brodin-Spurgeon. So to take advantage of the situation, Glen Gulutzan went to his top guys: Robertson-Duchene-Bourque, and Thomas Harley with Miro Heiskanen.

What ensued is this: another full minute of pressure in the offensive zone. Here’s the whole thing, but we’ll go piece by piece afterward:

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Great news! It’s time for some more fake player grades. Today, we’re talking about two more players who are pending unrestricted free agents: Alex Petrovic and Kyle Capobianco.

Either or both of the two veteran blueliners could be brought back to Dallas next season, but given the salary cap situation after a presumptive Jason Robertson re-signing, such a move would likely entail putting players like Capobianco and/or Petrovic through waivers before the start of the season. So, it’s anyone’s guess what the players and team will decide to do by July 1, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s discuss the season that was, and how both players ended up contributing to a 112-point campaign for Dallas.

Kyle Capobianco - P

Let’s start with some context that applies to both players: how important they wound up being in the first 60 games of the year. Because as you may have heard recently, the Dallas Stars dealt with a few injuries on defense this year. Take a look at the long absences of Harley, Bichsel, and Lundkvist down below, and you’re realize just how heavily the Stars’ blueline was hit in the first half of the season in particular, which all three of the above players missed at least ten games:

Coming into the season, the 28-year-old Capobianco was slated to reprise his role from last year as an AHL stalwart who could play in the NHL in a pinch. Instead, he wound up staying in the NHL after a late October recall, eventually playing in over half of Dallas’s first 57 games—31 of them, to be exact.

It’s not like he was just punching the clock while the team was treading water, either. The Stars’ record in Capobianco’s 31 games before the Olympic break was a sparkling 20-6-5.

You know what happened after that, though: Lian Bichsel finally returned, and the Stars traded for Tyler Myers. As a result, Capobianco played just two of the team’s final 25 games.

Capobianco’s most common partner was the aforementioned Petrovic, and if I had told you that the third-best team in the NHL would play 27 games with both players on the same defense pairing, you probably would not have expected them to be on the ice for a massively positive 9-4 goal-differential that only slightly overstated their expected numbers, which featured sterling expected goal and high-danger shot differentials in the 55-56% range. But they did precisely that in over 135 minutes together at 5-on-5:

Capobianco added strong mobility and consistency on the back end, proving that his one-game cameo in Pete DeBoer’s final season was a fluke. The veteran defenseman stepped up as a key depth player for Dallas, also playing with Nils Lundkvist and Vladislav Kolyachonok when the need arose.

Capobianco’s first goal of the season came in Madison Square Garden during a game that was unfortunately overshadowed by Tyler Seguin’s ACL injury.

His second goal of the year came in a similarly ignominious result, when the Stars blew a 4-2 lead in San Jose despite Capobianco scoring a beautiful goal off the rush on a 2-on-1 with Roope Hintz:

The “P” here is for Perseverance, because Capobianco showed that even after playing one NHL game across two seasons for two different organizations, he was still the same NHL-quality player that the Coyotes drafted in the third round back in 2015.

(I wrote about Capobianco back in January, in case you missed it.)

After watching Capobianco at the NHL and AHL levels for the past couple of years, I’ve grown to really admire how he goes about his business. He’s someone who has clearly found a stable place in his life despite enduring the ups and downs of being on the fringe of the NHL roster at times, and he was very candid about how he’s taken steps in his life to ensure that he can weather the pressure and uncertainty of his role without letting it affect him negatively.

Maybe the “P” is also for Proven, because after watching what Capobianco did in the NHL this year, I think he proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he can be a quality addition to any NHL team’s blue line. He demonstrated the ability to play smart, quick hockey without giving up bad chances the other way, while also embracing whatever role he had. He had the same positive approach as a player for five games to start the year in the AHL, as a role player, an every player when injuries hit the roster, an occasional PP2 quarterback, or eventually a healthy scratch.

I’m not sure you could ask any more of a depth defenseman than what Kyle Capbianco gave Dallas this season. Here’s hoping he gets another chance to show why he spent most of the year in the NHL, whether with Dallas or another club.

Alex Petrovic - E

Like Capobianco, Petrovic also scored two goals in a season where he featured heavily in the first half. Petrovic began the year as a healthy scratch for two games, but he drew in against Minnesota in Game 3 for what looked likely to be a season-long rotation between Petrovic and Ilya Lyubushkin before injuries largely derailed that plan.

Petrovic was quickly pressed into full-time duty after Nils Lundkvist’s early injury, when Ilya Lyubushkin was moved up onto the second pairing with Thomas Harley. Petrovic slid up next to Lian Bichsel, until further injuries necessitated a heavier mix of Petrovic, Capbianco, Lyubushkin, and Kolyachonok.

Earlier in the year, Petrovic was a stabilizing force next to Bichsel, but as his minutes increased out of necessity later in November, his performance dipped. After Bichsel went down, Petrovic played next to Thomas Harley and Lyubushkin (playing on his off-hand side), and he never really found good chemistry with either of them. He and Capobianco had a good couple of four-game sets together (as we mentioned), but when Lundkvist finally came back, the Stars had three RHDs for two bottom-four RHD spots, and Petrovic struggled to regain his early-season form.

Still, it was a season with some very good moments for Petrovic, who finally got to spend an entire year in the NHL rather than waiting until the playoffs to parachute in. I saw Petrovic’s first goal in Montreal back in November, which was the sixth goal in a 7-0 slaughter. Radek Faksa pulled off a gorgeous spin move to set up an onrushing Petrovic, who nailed the far corner with ease:

His second goal came in Winnipeg, as Petrovic continued to haunt the Jets after his crazy goal that bounced in thanks to Connor Hellebuyck in the playoffs last year. This one was more conventional:

However, the moment from Petrovic’s season that stuck with me the most is probably from the third game of the year, when Matt Duchene got concussed by Jake Middleton.

Petrovic stepped up for a fallen teammate, gamely going up against Middleton (who had six fights last season) and taking some additional punishment as a result. But it was a moment early in the season that called for someone to step up, and that’s precisely what Petrovic has been doing for this organization for three years now.

(Petrovic’s glove throw-down before that fight was pretty great, even if he did wind up with an instigator penalty as a result.)

Petrovic’s “E” is for Exceeds Expectations, because that’s what he’s done each time Dallas has asked him to step up. This season, unfortunately, featured a bigger ask than usual when the blue line was decimated with injuries, and the ask might also have exceeded what was reasonable to hope for from Petrovic (or any third-pairing defenseman). Petrovic was asked to play 20+ minutes in November when the Stars were severely shorthanded, and he was then asked to step into a rotating cast of defense partners during the team’s twelve-game winter swoon.

Through all that, Petrovic still wound up finishing the year at plus-two, averaging 15:21 per night—the highest NHL workload since Petrovic’s 2018-19 season. In over 280 minutes together at 5-on-5, the Bichsel-Petrovic pairing saw Dallas outscore the opposition 12-9 when they were on the ice, though it’s worth mentioning that the duo also outscored their underlying numbers by a significant margin:

It’s also worth pointing out, however, that this defense duo was absolutely buried in the defensive zone in terms of where they started their shifts, so in that sense, perhaps results were more important than how they were achieved.

Petrovic wound up playing 54 games in the regular season, his highest NHL total in nearly a decade. And despite some struggles in the middle of the season when he was asked to play a heavier and more complex role with a rotating cast of partners, Petrovic finished his campaign with a moment of redemption, once again being asked to come into the thick of a playoff series after very little recent NHL action.

After Tyler Myers played his way out of the lineup earlier in the Minnesota series, Petrovic was asked to reunite with Bichsel in Game 6. And in ten minutes together, the duo held serve. Like they did back in Petrovic’s first game of the year when he dropped the gloves with Middleton, the Stars’ third defense pairing did what was asked of them, giving up no goals and allowing the top half of the lineup the opportunity to win the game.

Unlike in October, the Stars’ top players wouldn’t be able to do that. But Petrovic finished his third straight Dallas playoff run in the lineup, playing in a role that suited him well. Coaches keep going back to him when the stakes are at their highest, and Petrovic has shown for three straight years why that’s no fluke at all.

Watching the actual Western Conference Final Colorado/Minnesota series so far has been fascinating, both for entertainment purposes and for comparison with the Stars. There’s no real way to know how Dallas would have fared against Colorado, because they’ve always seemed to have their number in crunch time even when they’re getting outplayed for large stretches.

But litigating a hypothetical matchup this year isn’t worth your time or mine, so let’s cut to the chase: all four goaltenders have gotten starts in a series that is now 3-1 to Colorado. For two of the best teams in the league (and the two best remaining teams in the West) to have already gone to two different starters is a bit shocking, but maybe it’s indicative of where we are now. The old saying was that when you have two starting goaltenders, you actually don’t have any starting goaltenders, but I called it an old saying for a reason: we live in a brave new goaltending world.

Or at least, most teams do. The Stars, on the other hand, do things differently, which is to say how they’ve usually been done. Like Tampa Bay—another great team to lose in the first round—Dallas has their go-to number one goalie, and they’ve gone as far as he’s been able to take them in every series they’ve played for half a decade now.

Often, that’s been quite far indeed, including Oettinger’s work to outduel Mackenzie Blackwood and Connor Hellebuyck behind a defense that was without Miro Heiskanen for the first half of the playoffs last year. I mean, do you remember Oettinger’s third-period save to keep Game 6 tied, allowing Thomas Harley to eventually win it?

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