Friday Dallas Stars Roundup: Sightlines, Power Play Lineups, and a Wyatt Johnston Fun Fact

Let's review all the latest Stars news with old friends

After two weeks off, the Dallas Stars will play an NHL game tomorrow against New Jersey.

The Stars had four practices this week, but in terms of line combos or defense pairings, it’s tough to read too much into them. That’s because they were missing the following players, all of whom will be rejoining the team where they’ll be staying in Manhattan (per Josh Clark):

Esa Lindell
Mikael Granlund
Roope Hintz
Jake Oettinger
Thomas Harley

That list has their current top two defensemen, their top center, their starting goaltender, and a top-six winger. But if you want to guess about their lineup for New Jersey tomorrow, you have to make a few leaps.

Forward Lines

In practice this week, lines have looked mostly like this:

Robertson-Johnston-Dadonov
Marchment-Duchene-Stankoven
Benn-Bourque-Blackwell
Bäck-Steel

There are a few obvious placeholders in there who will move down the lineup when Hintz and Granlund slot in, but we could still see some interesting choices, given what the lines looked like in San Jose right before the break. Just for reference, they were these:

Robertson-Hintz-Johnston
Marchment-Duchene-Granlund
Benn-Bourque-Dadonov
Bäck-Blackwell-Stankoven

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I had a chance to ask Blackwell about playing center after being on the wing for most of the year up to that point, and he mentioned that although he came into the NHL as a center, he hadn’t really been deployed there since doing so for Toronto in the playoffs a couple of years ago.

Blackwell went on to say that playing center vs. wing isn’t as much of an adjustment in the Stars’ system, as a lot of play is dictated by which forward gets to certain areas first rather than who has what position on paper, but there are some added responsibilities at a basic level, in addition to the likelihood of taking more faceoffs.