Extended Thoughts: Charting a Path Forward if Miro Heiskanen Doesn't Return during the Regular Season

What do the Stars have to do, now?

Well, it’s official. Miro Heiskanen is going to miss a good chunk of time, and he may indeed be needing surgery, too. Here is how Pete DeBoer looked when he told the assembled throng the news today.

We know even more than we did earlier on Thursday because 1. We are all older and wiser than we were this morning, and 2. Because on the Ticket’s “The Hardline” radio program this afternoon, Pete DeBoer went into a lot more depth about Miro Heiskanen’s injury. You can listen by clicking here.

The long and the short of it: Heiskanen had an MRI, and the Stars’ medical team has reviewed it, and he’ll likely need some kind of surgery. On Friday, Heiskanen is going to travel to New York, where another medical team will review the results of the MRI to determine the best path forward.

Before we dive a bit into where the Stars go from here, let’s touch on a few other excerpts from the interview:

“It’s definitely gonna be a while,” said DeBoer. “I don’t believe it’s year-ending, from what it looks like right now. So I’m optimistic about that.”

That’s also good news, considering the worst-case scenarios when a serious knee injury happens. Of course, what DeBoer is talking about with “year-ending” is debatable, as the remainder of the interview seems to indicate that Heiskanen’s return could come as late as the first week of the playoffs.

“I believe there is gonna be a surgery,” continued DeBoer. “It’s just the extent of that surgery. When you’re dealing with knees and shoulders, some surgeries are six months, and some are 8 to 10 to 12 weeks. So we’re obviously hoping for the latter.”

Any surgery makes the recovery more lengthy, of course, but the good news here is that the Stars and Heiskanen clearly believe this surgery is the quickest way to get him back healthy, and that timeline isn’t as bad as it could be.

For context, ten weeks from today would be April 11. The Stars play their last game of the regular season on April 16, against Nashville. So I think it’s safe to assume the Stars are hopeful that Heiskanen will be back for the playoffs, not necessarily the regular season.

One other thing: DeBoer also reiterated what he had said after the Vegas game: Stone isn’t a dirty player, but it wasn’t a good play, either.

“I have zero doubt that he’s [not] intentionally trying to hurt Miro on that play, going ‘I’m gonna take his knee out,’ I know that’s not going through his mind. But you are in control of your body at that point as you’re falling. I believe you can choose a path, and I think it was a reckless choice that led to a really serious injury to a star player, so you know, tough.”

I’ve said enough on the penalty call, but I think it’s worth noting that DeBoer, who is an avowed believer in Mark Stone’s lack of malice on the play, also maintains that Stone had a choice to make, and he chose poorly. And Heiskanen is the one who paid the price. That’s what major penalties are for, regardless of intent (as opposed to match penalties) and the play probably merited serious consideration of one. It did not get it, but of course, it didn’t end up mattering.

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If you’re the Stars, this is a pretty big moment in your regular season, maybe the biggest you’ll have. How will they respond to the biggest dose of adversity they’ve faced all year?

Well, the first and biggest decision for Jim Nill is: do you have to make a trade to replace Heiskanen? (Not that any one player can really do that, of course.)

Let’s proceed on the assumption that Heiskanen misses all or most of the remaining regular season, and look at what the Stars have do in order get well clear of Wild Card territory. First, you probably need to end the season with something like 100-105 points, at least. With 32 games to play, Dallas is sitting at 65 points, with a .650 points percentage. If the Stars fell to .600 in their remaining games, going something like 19-12-1 over that final stretch, they’d get to 104 points. And I think they would take that.

The Central has been good this year, and Minnesota has stubbornly refused to crumble under injuries. But I don’t think both they and Colorado are likely to fly by Dallas unless the Stars completely crater, and they’ve found a way to refuse to do that in the regular season for three years now, even when key players are on the shelf.

When you look at the schedule after the break, the Stars’ docket gets significantly easier, too. Remember, the final chunk of the season is generally when teams outside the playoffs begin to shut guys down or sell pending UFAs. So, have a look at the Stars’ final ten games of the season:

Outside of Winnipeg and Minnesota, those are not terrifying games. Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Nashville are likely to have sold some pieces by then. Casey DeSmith can take care of Utah at a moment’s notice, so you probably feel good about that one, too. The Detroit Red Wings and the Vancouver Drama Club aren’t exactly Leviathan Incarnate.

So really, it’s about the preceding 22 games, five of which come before the break, and 17 after. Mason Marchment is really close, per DeBoer, and that helps the Stars’ forward depth immensely (at the expense of Brendan Smith’s odds of scoring on a breakaway, given he’s likely the one to miss out when the big left wing returns).

Nils Lundkvist could also return at any time. He was put on IR retroactive to January 21, so he could also be activated at any time, though DeBoer was surprisingly cagey about that today, saying they are still getting more information. But if Lundkvist isn’t dealing with something more serious (and he was working out pretty hard on Monday), then he would also be an option after the break, one would hope.

So if the Stars can get by for five games with Kyle Capobianco in lieu of Nils Lundkvist, that means a blue line looking something like this in the short term:

Harley-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-Lindell
Capobianco-Dumba

(That’s my low-key bet for the defense pairings Friday against Vancouver, by the way. Book it, and give me a large percentage of your foolish gambling winnings.)

That’s not a great defense corps, but it’s also not a disaster. Thomas Harley stepped up big-time last year (check out Sean’s great piece about him from a year ago) when opportunity came, and Esa Lindell played over half of a game earlier this season, even surviving with enough breath to talk to us media rabble after the game. Those players can do a lot, when they’re on the ice.

Ilya Lyubushkin and Lian Bichsel can both play more than they have averaged this year, too. Lyubushkin, in fact, played over 20 minutes against Detroit last week, and nearly 22 minutes against Utah a couple weeks prior. He’s typically lived closer to 17 minutes per night in his career, but he’s also shown an ability to scale up when needed since arriving in Dallas.

Regarding Bichsel, who doesn’t want to see him get a bigger opportunity right now? If the Stars brought him back up recently to see whether he’s really ready to hang in the NHL, this stretch is going to be that litmus test. Players with high ceilings have to turn potential into reality at some point, and what better time for Bichsel to blow the doors off the thing than his team’s hour of greatest need? I am mixing my housing metaphors.

As for the third pairing, you’d expect it to be sheltered, but only to some extent. There isn’t a whole lot more to give at the top at this point. Harley will play a bit more (and run the top power play, most likely), but he’s already been playing heavy minutes as it is. Lindell can scale up a bit more and take a Capobianco shift or three in critical moments (and periods), as he has done for players like Brendan Smith in the past. But they’ll probably need more than 10-12 minutes from that pairing.

If you’re Jim Nill, you’re watching the second and third pairings closely, because the moment DeBoer feels like he can’t trust those players, the Stars are going to be asking for a whole ding-danged lot from players like Lyubushkin and Bichsel, even with them already playing a bit more than usual.

What the Stars will want to avoid is finding themselves in a situation where Thomas Harley and Esa Lindell have both played 28 minutes multiple games in a row. You just can’t keep asking that of them, but most NHL coaches including DeBoer are going to decline to send guys over the boards regularly if they aren’t meeting expectations. That means more work for others to do, and that’s not sustainable in any business over the long term, let alone in an industry where you regularly get punched in the face.

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But back to our question: Does Nill need to make a trade? As always, that depends on the who (you’re getting) and the what (you’re paying). If you’d like to talk names and faces, then good news: you’ll be hearing some very soon, in another piece!

In general, I think the likely outcome here is that the Stars decline to make a rash trade right now, hoping the next five games don’t all turn into disasters. When they come back from the break later in February, they’ll have 27 games left to get through, and that’s also the point where the trade deadline is close enough that you’re really talking about what your original plan for the deadline was, anyway. If Lundkvist is back healthy by then, here’s what they could roll out:

Harley-Lyubushkin
Lindell-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Dumba

That doesn’t look terrible for the last couple dozen games of the season, does it? And if Heiskanen isn’t going to be out for the most important games, it hardly seems wise to spend assets on a short-term replacement for him—unless it’s also a player who is a significant upgrade to the group even after Heiskanen’s presumptive return.

The thing nobody wants to say, of course, is what the Stars will do if Lundkvist doesn’t come back soon, or if they suffer another injury, or if Bichsel struggles to keep his head above water, or if Dumba and Capobianco can’t be relied upon. That’s where Nill would have to start looking at veteran placeholder defensemen, players just to keep the lineup above water in the short term. And I’m sure he has those names on a list behind emergency glass. But they probably aren’t super fun names to speculate on, if we’re being honest. Alec Martinez is available from Chicago, if you’re interested. Chicago seems to want people to know that.

No, the best thing Dallas can probably hope for right now is that the players in-house who are asked to step up do just that. DeBoer declined to name specific people he’ll be leaning on for now, but the primary ones aren’t hard to guess. One suspects you’ll be seeing Esa Lindell and Thomas Harley with a variety of defense partners for the next little while.

All told, if the Stars can weather the next 15-20 games, then they probably have some light at the end of the defensive tunnel. Miro Heiskanen might not be the one holding up a lantern by then, but that light might not be an oncoming train, either.

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Lastly, I wanted to mention my appearance on the DLLS Dallas Stars Podcast today, which you can watch here:

It was a fun time chatting with a couple of veteran Dallas Stars media folks, so check it out.