Dallas Stars Saturday Roundup: Vladislav Kolyachonok on Waivers, Other Roster Decisions, and Reading Recommendations
Almost There
As had begun to look likely in recent days, the Stars officially put Vladislav Kolyachonok on waivers Saturday afternoon, per PuckPedia.
If Kolyachonok clears, he will presumably be assigned to AHL Texas.
Cameron Hughes is also on waivers today, but he is more likely to clear than Kolyachonok, who has already been claimed on waivers once: by Pittsburgh back in February.
It’s always hard to know exactly how other NHL teams view bubble players like Kolyachonok, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say there’s around a 50/50 chance that another team claims the lanky, 24-year-old defenseman before tomorrow’s deadline. (This is technically referred to as “a wild guess” according to math folks.)
Ultimately, the Stars appear to have decided that Kolyachonok didn’t do enough to win a roster spot, and that meant tough choices had to be made. And while we didn’t know Kolyachonok was going on waivers this morning when speaking with Gulutzan, the Stars’ coach was asked about the Belarusian defenseman, and here is what he said at the time:
“We thought he’s had a good camp,” Gulutzan said of Kolyachonok on Saturday morning. “He’s not in the lineup [tonight]. He is a good, young player, young defenseman, who has a lot of really good attributes. And I thought if you look at his camp, he’s created some good chances. He does that a little bit naturally. I think he’s got a really good future.”
Given that Kolyachonok was put on waivers today, it’s pretty clear that the Stars had already decided on their seven NHL defensemen as of Friday evening. And that means Alex Petrovic is all but certain to make the opening night NHL roster for the first time since 2018. (More on him below.)
As for Kolyachonok, the young defenseman made a couple of pretty costly mistakes across his three preseason games that led to great scoring chances against. And while his skating and passing are decent tools, the Stars always had four other left-shot defensemen with locks on their NHL roster spots.
That meant that Kolyachonok would not only have had to displace a right-shot defender with more NHL experience to grab a spot, but that he would also have to do so while playing on his off-hand side. That was always going to be a tough ask, and in my view, he never quite did enough to make that a serious competition. Practically speaking, the Stars could probably find another comparable defenseman without too much trouble, should they have the need to do so later in the year. And with Kyle Capobianco and even the emerging Trey Taylor down in Texas, the Stars do have options in-house, should their blue-line depth get tested severely as the year goes on.
To go down a rabbit hole for a moment: By my rough math, the Stars could have put Jamie Benn on LTIR to make enough space to carry a full 23-man roster, which would have allowed them to keep Kolyachonok and Petrovic in the NHL for a little bit of time. That would have given the Stars a limited window to see what all eight defensemen could do in the NHL before waiving one of them when Benn returned.
However, going the LTIR route also has a couple of downsides that probably made it unpalatable to Jim Nill and Mark Janko.
First, that would have required Benn to be out for at least 10 games and 24 days, nixing any possibility of an early return (though I don’t know that such a thing is terribly likely anyway).
Second, it basically requires the coaching staff to rotate eight defensemen into the lineup regularly, decreasing the ability to build chemistry and stability early in the season. And when the games start counting in the standings, coaches tend to prefer chemistry and consistency over experimentation—especially when the player in question has always shown themselves to be capable of costly lapses.
A third downside of that move would be that the Stars wouldn’t have been able to bank extra cap space during that eighth of the season—extra cap space that tends to come in handy at the trade deadline.
While Gulutzan wasn’t divulging any final roster decisions this morning, he did confirm that Mark Janko, Jim Nill, and himself had all discussed the different factors that go into finalizing the NHL roster. And it appears that Kolyachonok’s spot in the NHL was a casualty of that discussion after he wasn’t quite able to make the statement he would have needed to in training camp.
Now, it’s still possible Kolyachonok makes it through waivers (as Petrovic himself did in years past) and stays in the organization, potentially even earning a call-up later on (as, again, Petrovic did).
Players are generally most likely to get through waivers unclaimed at the start of the season, when every team is finalizing all their offseason plans and has limited flexibility. But it’s never a guarantee that decent hockey players will clear, as we saw just the other day, when Colorado claimed Ilya Solovyov off waivers from Calgary.
Still, conventional wisdom dictates that if a player is going to make it through waivers, early October is when they’re most likely to do so, as opposed to later on in the season, when injuries and other factors can make the prospect of adding another player to your team for free a lot more appealing.
In any case, by this time on Sunday, we’ll know whether the Stars will have anything to show for the Matt Dumba experiment other than a missing draft pick and a lesson learned.
Okay, let’s talk about the game at hand.
The Dallas Stars play their final preseason game tonight at 5:00pm (note the early start) against the Colorado Avalanche.
While the NHL roster doesn’t get finalized until Monday, the picture is coming into clearer focus each day. Here’s the roster Dallas will be bringing against a notably not-NHL lineup for Colorado, who are bringing a typical sort of Preseason Road Game lineup:
Dallas’s scratches for today are Roope Hintz, Miro Heiskanen, Mikko Rantanen, and Oskar Bäck.
Heiskanen, Rantanen, and Hintz did all skate this morning despite not being in the lineup tonight, in case you’re tracking such things. Aside from the unfortunate injury to Benn, the Stars’ lineup looks to be largely intact through five of the six games of the preseason.
The most notable thing for Colorado’s lineup might be Samuel Girard, who is slated to play in his first preseason game after managing a lower-body injury for the last few weeks.
Brent Burns, despite not being in tonight’s lineup and now being the oldest player in the NHL, still chose to skate this morning with a sparse Avalanche group (which also included Val Nichushkin). And I can confirm that Brent Burns is still very big, with video evidence:
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