Cold and Flu Season Has Arrived for the Dallas Stars

At morning skate today, Pete DeBoer said the Stars “have a little bit of flu going through” the lineup. It was also the first media availability he’s done in the last few days in which his voice hasn’t sounded a little hoarse, making you wonder whether the players have been the only ones dealing with the bug.

That sickness is why Thomas Harley wasn’t out there for morning skate today (DeBoer called him a “game-time decision”). And with the best team in the NHL rolling into town, that’s no small obstacle to overcome for a Dallas defense that has already had so much required of it that Lian Bichsel was called up “earlier than the organization planned,” according to Jeff Marek’s latest column.

It’s also why Magnus Hellberg was called up to backup Jake Oettinger on Saturday, with Casey DeSmith having been out of the lineup for a few days. I believe DeSmith also felt under the weather even during the Nashville game on Thursday, which means the Stars might have been in a position to use their emergency back-up goalie Chris Dudo if Oettinger had needed to leave that game for any reason.

Hellberg was sent back to Texas yesterday, and DeSmith was good to go after morning skate as a full participant for tonight’s game against the Washington Capitals, though Oettinger will get the start again tonight. DeSmith hasn’t played since he got the win against Utah two weeks ago, so it wouldn’t shock me to see him face either Toronto or New York this week, just to give Oettinger a bit of a breather. But Jeff Reese and the rest of the coaching staff will, I am sure, do what they think is best.

Nils Lundkvist was also back today, and he says he’s feeling much better than he was Saturday, when he started feeling ill after morning skate and was scratched for Brendan Smith that evening against St. Louis. And it’s a good thing, too, with the Stars’ defense corps needing all hands on deck right now.

From talking to a few folks around the team, there are some realistic things to consider here. The first factor is the fact that, as much as everyone wants to be careful not to infect anyone else (and DeBoer mentioned DeSmith being kept away from the team last week for that exact reason), it’s also the case that with bugs like this in cold and flu season, you often can’t really know who’s sick until they start showing symptoms, at which point they’ve likely already spread the bug to someone else. Hockey players eat together, practice together, dress together, and some even carpool together during homestands like this one.

The other thing to consider is that a lot of players with milder symptoms might not say anything in an attempt to “play through it,” as so many hockey players are trained to do. Rightly or wrongly, that’s the mentality most players have had for decades in professional sports, and hockey not least among them. No coach is ever going to say that the team lost because they were sick, but it’s also silly for anyone watching not to take that into account during lackluster performances like, say, the game against Nashville last week.

One person I talked to today said that for one player, it looked almost like food poisoning at first, with the body trying to expel whatever was in it, in whatever direction. It can hit suddenly, and all you can do as a team is react to what you know, when you know it. But the games still have to be played.

The Stars also aren’t the only local team dealing with illness right now, as any Dallas Mavericks fan knows. And as for the NHL, the Vancouver Canucks have likewise been hit with a team-wide illness. ‘Tis the season, after all.

Odds are, despite the off day on Sunday, the Stars will continue to have players fighting through whatever bug has already arrived. From my experience in an educational setting, I can tell you that in a classroom, you would see what must have been the exact same virus manifest itself in different ways, and along different timelines, for each of the dozens of students and teachers who came down with it. It’s really tough, if not impossible, to halt the progress of a virus in those smaller, well-populated settings.

Back in 2020, the school I worked at had strict COVID protocols (as most did back then), and infectious diseases of any kind were pretty rare, given the distancing and sparsely populated classrooms compared to the Before Times. But the next year, with most schools returning to largely in-person learning, we began to see not just COVID, but the flu, colds, and other illnesses sweeping through the classrooms just like you would have back in winters long before.

You try to handle it as best you can, but all you can really do is tell people to wash their hands frequently, pay attention to minor fevers and heaches, drink lots of water, and get lots of sleep. All of those things (minus the hand-washing) are already drilled into NHL players, but that doesn’t mean you can hope to completely stop a virus once it’s arrived in a dressing room any more than you can a classroom. Mitigate, yes. But stop altogether, probably not.

The Stars haven’t had to play many of their AHL forwards this year, with just Matěj Blümel playing in one game early on in the year. Otherwise, the 13 forwards they broke camp with (and now 12, with Tyler Seguin out) have been the go-to guys. And with Matt Dumba’s status still a bit uncertain—DeBoer called him someonwhere in between week-to-week and day-to-day—the Stars effectively have just one extra defenseman. But I would not be shocked to see one or two AHLers get recalled up front before the New Year, if the illness continues to spread.

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If Harley is indeed out tonight, the Stars may have to run a blue line of something like this:

Lindell-Heiskanen
Bichsel-Lyubushkin
Smith-Lundkvist

Brendan Smith, by the way, played only a tick over 8 minutes on Saturday, while Heiskanen and Harley played nearly 28 minutes apiece. Granted, going to overtime added a bit to each of their totals, but you can see why the Stars would hesitate to rule out Harley altogether when you look at how top-heavy their blue line has been this year:

Well, on the bright side, this means Lian Bichsel is getting a very real test 50 games before you even have to talk about the playoffs. The Stars will absolutely get to see what they have in the young defenseman.

Pete DeBoer mentioned that Bichsel had a bit of a Welcome to the League moment against St. Louis in his first shift, when Jordan Kyrou beat him one-on-one. “But he adjusted,” said DeBoer. “It didn’t happen twice. That’s the key with young guys; they’re gonna make mistakes. It just can’t be repetitive, and he’s shown a good ability to adjust.” We’ll see if Bichsel can continue his adjustments against an excellent (but Ovechkinless) Washington team.

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One final note here is about a weird little question that maybe only I was still wondering about. But thankfully, I got an answer.

I forgot to ask DeBoer after Saturday’s game against St. Louis about his late-game timeout in a 1-1 tie before a defensive-zone faceoff, after which he put out Matt Duchene, Jamie Benn, and Wyatt Johnston with around 90 seconds remaining. All three of those players take faceoffs, but it stuck out to me that they were drawn from three different lines.

DeBoer explained today that to the best he can recall, they wanted to have multiple centers out there, and that one of the other players was a bit tired (I think Hintz, who had been out there for a while just before the whistle). DeBoer also said they wanted to give Heiskanen and Harley some extra time to rest, and that also makes sense, as that pair played every other shift for the final five minutes of the game.

So, putting the pieces together as best I can, I think the idea was that they wanted to go with the Benn line, but since the face-off was on the right side of the ice, they also needed a right-handed faceoff option, given where the face-off was. And without Seguin in the lineup, the right-handed faceoff options are Mavrik Bourque, Colin Blackwell, Logan Stankoven and Wyatt Johnston. Of those options, I think they realistically would have only put Stankoven or Johnston out for a crucial late-game shift like that one (and the fourth line only had three shifts in the third period anyway). So, the timeout gave them time to get their best option (Johnston) a breather, allowing him to go back out even though it had been his line out there for a bit before Oettinger froze the puck.

Here’s a chunk of the shift chart from HockeyViz where you can see the oddity that was Benn and Duchene being on the ice together with Johnston.

Why Duchene went out there as a center instead of Sam Steel is an interesting question on its own. Perhaps it was just to have another center, albeit a left-shooting one, in case Johnston got kicked out. Perhaps Duchene lobbied for the shift successfully during the timeout. But as we saw in overtime, it’s never a bad idea to put Matt Duchene on the ice.

As for that faceoff: it ended up working out perfectly, as Johnston won the draw. The Stars were then able to send Hintz out there in Duchene’s place for the last shift of regulation, and the Stars secured the point before heading to overtime, where Duchene secured the other one. Thanks for following me down this little rabbit hole.