Ilya Lyubushkin's Injury Uncertainty Is Only One Piece of the Stars' Puzzle Right Now

We also received a minor update on Tyler Seguin

When the Dallas Stars took the ice in Irvine, Califonira for Thursday’s practice, Ilya Lyubushkin joined the rest of the team. Everyone was skating around, some shooting loose pucks into the net, and eventually things coalesced into some basic skating drills. Players went up the ice two-by-two, with Peter DeBoer occasionally whistling for a faster pace or shouting instructions to turn and skate backwards in the neutral zone.

Lyubushkin skated for a bit, but he left the ice before the Stars regrouped and shifted into more explicitly hockey-centric drills.

After practice, DeBoer said Lyubushkin "didn’t skate today,” but it’s a fair interpretation of that statement to say he “didn’t really practice” today, I think. DeBoer did say “we’ll know more tomorrow” about Lyubushkin, and I think that fans will also know more tomorrow, for a couple of reasons.

First, because the Stars are on the cusp of a long break, with the 4 Nations Face-Off starting next week. Dallas has just two games remaining, a back-to-back in Los Angeles and San Jose this weekend,

Injuries are always a topic of great concern for fans, and never moreso than this season. Miro Heiskanen and Nils Lundkvist were lost in a span of days, with Lundkvist out for the entire year after shoulder surgery.

Matt Dumba, Mason Marchment, and Mavrik Bourque all suffered head injuries at different times, though we still don’t know the cause of Dumba’s, which necessitated a full-face shield. Roope Hintz also missed some time last month, while Jason Robertson, Bourque, and Wyatt Johnston all dealt with lower-body injuries or the related recovery to begin the season.

And of course, Tyler Seguin was lost for what we can conclude is the entire regular season, as the Stars used a good chunk of the space created by putting Seguin on LTIR to add Cody Ceci and Mikael Granlund. That means the earliest the Stars could activate Seguin and be cap-compliant without making any other major moves would realistically be the first game of the playoffs.

DeBoer said today that Seguin’s original 4-6 month recovery timeline from his early December surgery “hasn’t changed,” adding it’s “too far off to even be talking about that.” He did acknowledge that Seguin has “started to skate,” but that the star forward still has a “long, long road ahead of him” when it comes to the recovery process.

But when it comes to injuries like Lyubushkin’s, I think you can put a few pieces together even before we see whether he plays tomorrow night in Los Angeles. And here’s where the second reason comes into play: When Lyubushkin came on the ice this morning, he went over and started talking to DeBoer for a bit.