Dallas Stars Monday Roundup: Day 1 of Development Camp, the Eve of Free Agency, and Jordie Benn's Journey

We also continue to await a coaching announcement

Cameron Schmidt is very good at hockey.

Two things before getting into the good stuff today.

First, please check out my piece in D Magazine earlier today on the purported Glen Gulutzan hiring that broke on Sunday afternoon. I have been fascinated by people who see the choice as either too radical (“Should’ve stuck with DeBoer!”) or not nearly bold enough (“Should’ve gone with a rookie coach!”).

I think the Stars are in a very interesting spot right now. With the limited cap space they have, it’s going to be tough to make any more huge moves that feel like the Mikko Rantanen or Chris Tanev trades did. That means they’ll need to look for smaller, incremental improvements in other areas, as well as hoping other younger players like Nils Lundkvist take big steps forward next season and beyond.

We’ll see what free agency brings, but with the coaching hire being one obvious route to a better playoff fate for Dallas, the other one will have to be some internal growth from players they already have.

Second, let me tell you a story about how dumb I am.

Today was the first day of development camp. That means there are 35 young players, a bunch of coaches, and all the other equipment folks and support staff you’d expect to be around Frisco today. Lots of people are meeting players for the first time, or seeing them for the first time in a year. In my case, I’m meeting most of these players for the first time.

For instance, I haven’t met Emil Hemming before, but I knew he was slated to speak in the media scrums after practices wrapped up today. So when I saw a roughly 6-foot-1 player walking through a dim hallway into the press room to speak while I was finishing a conversation in the hallway with another player, I was very pleased that the timing had worked out perfectly for me to jump right from one interview to another.

So, I sat down with the other media members just in time to ask a very Emil Hemming-specific question about his season with the Barrie Colts.

You can probably see where this is going.

The player in question turned out to be Very Much Not Emil Hemming. Still, he was extremely gracious, rather than being offended, and he simply corrected me about where he had actually played last year, and we moved on.

After the presser, I managed to track him down and apologize, and hopefully it’ll be something to laugh about down the road. But man, it is not a fun feeling when you realize you’ve made an erroneous assumption about a player in front of a lot of people, including the player himself. It’s a tough spot to put them in, and I should’ve done better.

Anyway, it’s a good lesson about double-checking player’s headshots in the future, if nothing else.

Let’s move on to some more notes about development camp and the Dallas Stars as teams prepare for the opening of free agency Tuesday morning at 11am Central.

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• The Stars elected not to buy out Matt Dumba today, which would have saved them $2.3 million in cap space for next year. The guess here is that the Stars believe they can move Dumba’s contract, giving the lack of great options remaining after a crazy day of re-signings around the NHL.
  
  For instance, the San Jose Sharks might see Dumba as a low-risk way to get closer to the salary cap floor of $70.6 million. In fact, Dumba would immediately become their highest-paid defenseman with his $3.75 million contract. Would such a trade require an additional incentive to be added by Dallas, though? It’s hard to say at this point. But personally, I don’t think Nill would have bypassed the buyout window without some kind of solid plan in place.
  
  Let’s say no trade materializes for Dallas. The Stars would have to put a player like Alex Petrovic through waivers this fall just to have enough room to add two players from Texas making close to league-minimum, just to get them up to 12 forwards on the roster.
  
  Maybe Petrovic would clear, and maybe the Stars are confident that adding (say) Justin Hryckowian and Arttu Hyry would be sufficient to start the season. But that just doesn’t feel like the way Nill runs things, leaving so much to chance.
  
  Nill also alluded to knowing some things that we media members didn’t when he spoke with us after the draft on Saturday, so my hunch is that there is a plan in place that they’re just waiting to execute after the opening bell of free agency.