Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin Are the Underrated Storyline of This Year's Playoffs
Can new dad strength get them to the top of the mountain?
He wept and swore he’d never lose again
And so he laid his seasons end to end
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Over the last 12 hours or so, Stars fans have gotten to read great features on the two longest-tenured Stars: Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin.
If you haven’t see them yet: check out Sean Shapiro’s piece on Seguin today in D Magazine, and Mike Heika’s feature on what it’s like to cover Jamie Benn. They are well-worth your time. Because Seguin and Benn’s playoff run, this year, is kind of an all-timer of a story, when you step back and think about it.
Benn, who recently became a new father a few months after Seguin, is a thousand stories wrapped up in one semi-inscrutable (semi-scrutable?) personality.
Because of how reluctant he is to open up to the media—the birth of his son wasn’t made public until his wife announced it on Instagram nearly two weeks later—those stories usually have to be told in the third person. We guess at what he must feel by interpreting images like the all-too-famous one from the 2020 Cup Final run in the bubble.
At the peak of any giant narrative arc, Benn tends to withdraw from the cameras. He’s long been reticent to pour out his feelings, whether heartbreak or jubilation. What’s your favorite Jamie Benn quote, sixteen years into his Dallas Stars tenure? I’d wager nothing comes to mind.
It’s a shame, really. Benn has the dry sense of humor so common to Canadian hockey players, but he’s loath to let it show on camera. What his teammates see off camera is someone who loves to joke around as much as he ever did, who is more than happy to mess with people for a laugh.
I’m sure you remember this video a decade ago, which features one of the worse images to post out of context I can think of:
He’s a hockey player, and hockey players love pranks. But he’s also a captain, and that’s the persona you’re much more likely to see.
You can’t really blame him for being hesitant to let his hair down the way he did in his first years with the team either, given the backlash he and Seguin received for making inappropriate jokes a decade ago in a radio segment known for pushing the envelope a bit. The jokes went too far, but the fallout was as much a result of the timing and target (the highly respected Sedin brothers on a franchise whose owner had a notable rivalry with the Stars’ Tom Gaglardi) as it was the comments themselves.
Still, those comments would pale in comparison to the profane ones their owner (via the team president) labeled them with (to Shapiro) a few years later. Benn, from everything the public saw, simply took the comments in stride as a captain, less concerned with responding to the people writing the checks than with leading the ones cashing them.
And later that same season, with Seguin battling just a few feet away, he came mere inches from sending the Stars to (what I think would have been) a very winnable Conference Final against San Jose.
That was a crushing, crushing loss, both because of how close the Stars came to avoiding it, and because of how good that 2019 team was. Mats Zuccarello had been acquired at the deadline, Miro Heiskanen and John Klingberg were both in excellent form, Jason Spezza’s game had found life again in the playoffs, Roope Hintz was coming into his own, and Ben Bishop, perhaps the best goalie Benn will ever play in front of, was at a world-class level from night to night. It really should have ended differently.
I’m no professional athlete, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Benn has wondered if he could have waited a bit longer and just shot the puck into the net from further away, with Binnington struggling to get over. Just one tiny difference in decision-making, and there are so many ways it could have ended differently. But it didn’t.
And then the next year, without Bishop, Benn led the team within two wins of ultimate glory in what felt like a lifetime later. Joe Pavelski became indispensable, Jamie Oleksiak was incredible, and hat tricks from Denis Gurianov and Joel Kiviranta were, somehow, only part of the incredible story that was the team that refused to go home.
But again, things ended differently, and this time, it gutted Benn, as Jeff Toates’ marvelous documentary showed. And the Stars captain ended that loneliest of playoff runs lonelier than anyone.
I genuinely believe that he needed that time to himself. Toates even confirmed that Benn was okay before including that clip in the documentary, given how personal it was. Surprisingly, Benn agreed.
I wonder if that’s because that moment was completely honest, completely representative of how much it has meant to be the captain of this team, and how really lonely it is when you don’t have that same kind of leader to put their arm around you in the depths of despair. I wonder if Benn, though he’ll never say it, wanted people to have a glipse of what it costs him to always be the one to offer comfort but never receive it.
Benn hasn’t been perfect in his tenure. But he is committed to continue being the stronger one, the one who sets the tone on the ice and with the media, for better or for worse.
I’ve heard a lot of folks discount that 2020 playoff series because of the lack of a crowd, the shortened season, and the whole post-apocaplytic nature of a tournament held in a bubble where even a player’s wife has to watch. But to the players, that tournament was everything. Zero distractions, very little media duties whatesoever, and almost nothing but cavernous hotel hallways filled with the same off-day and gameday routines for two months. It was truly nothing but the games.
I think that tournament was tailor-made for a player like Benn, who thrives behind the scenes as a leader of men, and is by all accounts a loving uncle and a close brother who now gets to get his life "turned upside down in the best way possible,” as Seguin described it. That tournament gave him a chance to channel every bit of his captaincy into the most surreal and distilled hockey experience those players are ever likely to have.
“He’s got such passion,” Seguin said of Benn back in February. “He’s an emotional guy, but he’s quiet about it. We all know how much he cares. He’s a guy that’s gonna score a big goal or set up a play or fight the biggest guy in the league. He’s scared of nothing.”
Fearless is a pretty good word to encapsulate Benn, too. At times though, a healthy fear can be a good thing, which Benn learned the hard way in 2023, when he chose not to speak about his series-altering penalty on Mark Stone in Game 3, leaving other to answer for his actions until he spoke the following day.
But something that gets forgotten about that sequence is what Pete DeBoer said after Benn’s two-game suspension was handed down in that series: “I think everybody wants to see Jamie Benn play again. I think we all want to make sure his season doesn’t end on a note like that.”
And despite a 3-0 deficit to the eventual Cup champs, the Stars did just that. After a Joe Pavelski overtime winner in Game 4, the Stars won Game 5 thanks to a goal from Luke Glendening, a goal from Jason Robertson, and two goals from Ty Dellandrea.
So Benn returned for Game 6, at which point the Golden Knights finally stamped out the brushfire that was the Stars’ valiant comeback attempt. But I still think those two wins meant something to Benn and his team. They didn’t crumble the minute he left.
Before Benn’s first playoff run in Dallas, in 2013, he was forced (I presume) to give an awkward speech to the crowd from the ice with a microphone, announcing an end to the five-year playoff drought. But his play on the ice meant way more, as he grabbed the series back from Anaheim after a 2-0 deficit, starting with a Game 3 goal with both Shawn Horcoff and Vernon Fiddler on the ice with him.
This week, Horcoff and Fiddler have been back in town, with their respective sons Will and Blake playing for Team USA in Frisco at the Under-18 World Championships. But over a decade ago, they were helping Jamie Benn take the number one seed in the West to overtime in Game 6.
A lot of time has passed, is what we’re saying here.
Benn may be the last player to play without a visor. He’s the last player left on the team who wore the Stars’ old logoless uniforms. He’s the last Dallas Star who played for Glen Gulutzan and Marc Crawford, who played with a roster dictated more by bankruptcy than by a GM or an owner’s wishes.
Benn is the last Dallas Star who played with Mike Modano and Brenden Morrow, the captains that preceded him, and who link Stars fans back to the earliest days of the Dallas era of the franchise.
And on Wednesday night, Jamie Benn played an outstanding, vintage came that was capped by a power play goal to send the team to overtime.
That’s when Tyler Seguin showed up.
Tyler Seguin also had his hiccups early on in Dallas, leading the team in goals and points in his debut season, and leading the Stars to the playoffs, with Benn and Valeri Nichushkin on his line.
That first playoff run wasn’t ideal, though. Seguin had just one goal and two assists in six games, and the Stars fell short of forcing a seventh game against the Ducks after a late collapse in Game 6. There was more to prove, and Seguin would do so in the playoffs—though he wouldn’t get the chance to do so until that 2018-19 run five years later.
By far, the cruellest part of Seguin’s time in Dallas has been injuries, which Bob Sturm briefly reviewed yesterday during Seguin’s return to the same radio station that he and Benn got in hot water on a decade before.
In 2014-15, the team’s offense exploded, but the goaltending imploded, and the team didn’t make the dance despite earning 92 points to the prior season’s 91. Seguin also got low-bridged in the right knee by Dmitriy Kulikov in a hit the result of which was not dissimilar to what Mark Stone did to Miro Heiskanen earlier this year.
Seguin missed nearly a month before returning, but the year ended with more disappointment when he was scratched for Jamie Benn’s Art Ross Trophy miracle night thanks to a misstep of his own by being late for practice, perhaps the one time he showed even a shadow of the persona Boston thought they were shipping out. But even bringing that up feels almost disingenuous, given what Seguin has given to the team since then.
In Seguin’s third season in Dallas, everything was shaping up well. The team set records while finishing atop the Western Conference, only for Seguin to end up missing all but part of one game of the Stars’ 2016 playoff run—the OG St. Louis letdown—because of a freak Achilles injury when Anton Stralman’s skate sliced the back of his leg. (Warning: Seguin tweeted a graphic closeup of the cut at the time, if you want to see it.)
While Seguin didn’t get too down about the injury at the time, the hard truth of the matter is that he hasn’t been quite as explosive a player ever since that injury, in his 23-year-old season.
You can find a lot of charts that look similar to this one, from HockeyViz, showing a notable dip in Seguin’s play after that year.
But to Seguin’s credit, he didn’t let that change crater his game. His body may have changed, but his elite hockey gifts allowed him to continue to score, even putting up 40 goals under Ken Hitchcock, when the team again got submarined by injuries and goaltending.
Seguin also put up excellent scoring in Jim Montgomery’s first year in 2018-19, his first real playoff run as a Dallas Star. He put up 11 points in 13 games, and you could tell he was relieved to finally be helping his team make a real playoff run, even though it ended sooner than it ought to have. It was also the last time Seguin has played 82 games in a season.
But it was the next season where Seguin really left it all on the ice. After a horribly slow start to the 2019-20 season that saw basically everyone searching for answers before a fabulous winning streak, a fired coach, and a Winter Classic all but erased the memory of the harrowing early days of that year, Seguin’s numbers were below his standard. The Stars were scuffling, and they lost game after game until the world stopped.
That playoff run came in the weirdest of circumstances for everyone, but Seguin’s body was fighting more than most. He scored only two goals and 11 assists in the 26-game gauntlet, and Seguin would talk later about how he knew something was wrong before the real games even started, when he felt his hip “pop” in late July during the first exhibition games in the bubble.
Seguin fought through it for his team, and it cost him something. We didn’t find out what that something was until the after the season, when Seguin went under the knife for what ended up being a couple of surgeries.
First, Seguin was in a wheelchair for a month after his right hip operation. As Saad Yousuf reported at the time, Seguin had a labral tear where the hip labrum was completely separated from the bone.
But after slowly beginning his recovery, things got worse. What could have been a routine knee surgery required more work than expected, and that led to his quadricep muscle atrophying completely.
The recovery continued, and it led to a quote I don’t think enough people have read, from NHL trainer Matt Nichol, who worked with Seguin during his recovery from that time. Again, from Yousuf’s great piece:
“People see this public persona. He’s a good-looking guy, he’s a fun guy. They make lifestyle judgments, but ever since I’ve known him, he’s always worked hard in the gym…he’ll still shoot pucks until his hands are bleeding.”
In other words, it was downright miraculous that Seguin came back during the 2020-21 season (another without a playoff run) at all. He scored two goals in three games at the end of the season, but his next season would be another tough one.
In the final year of Rick Bowness’ tenure, Seguin continued grinding his way back into his old self, and his body wasn’t entirely there. He put up 24 goals, but the team as a whole was in transition, and Seguin ended up a -21 (by far the worst mark of his career). That year saw the Stars scratch their way into the playoffs before Jake Oettinger dragged them to a Game 7, and Seguin added two goals and four points in those seven games. But it wasn’t enough, and big changes were on their way.
Pete DeBoer’s arrival has seen much more success three years hence, though Seguin hasn’t had to score 80 points to sustain it. But in the playoffs, Seguin has been a key figure, putting up five goals in both 2023 and 2024, and scoring 13 points in 19 playoff games last year. Those 13 points are the best total in his playoff career. Or perhaps I should say: the best total in his playoff career so far.
I qualify that statement because Seguin has already scored twice in just three games this playoff run, after having his other hip surgically repaired back in December, and after Seguin set records in his recovery time, turning a six-month recovery into a four-month sprint.
Seguin and Benn are now both married, both fathers. And on Wednesday night, they were both goal-scorers. But it was Seguin who had the final word, when he scored, at last, a playoff overtime goal for the Dallas Stars.
So, how did Jamie Benn celebrate that achievement? He wasn’t the first into the pile to smother Seguin—Mason Marchment was the one lifting Seguin off the ice entirely—but instead, Benn went first to his goalie, Jake Oettinger, whose heroics were the only reason either player’s goal was enough to get them there in the first place.
And when Benn finally did greet his longtime buddy, Benn congratulated Seguin with the uninterested glove pat reserved for friends who don’t need to say anything to say everything.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. There was one other thing Benn did to congratulate Seguin a little bit after that.
Make no mistake: Benn knows what this postseason means for Seguin, who has battled off the ice in order to be on it for the biggest moments of the year. And Seguin couldn’t be happier than to be helping Benn to finally get two wins beyond that photo from the bubble.
Neither Benn nor Seguin is really supposed to be the biggest part of the team’s offense anymore, but they’ve stepped up when their team has needed them. Without Miro Heiskanen or Jason Robertson, the two fathers have picked up the slack and turned the series around.
There’s still a lot of time left to see what happens. But in hockey terms, Benn and Seguin know better than most that you never have as much time as you think you do. It only remains for them to do the most they can with the time that has been given to them, and that they’ve given to their teammates.
“You pinch yourself sometimes with where our lives are these days,” Seguin said in February. “Now we’re just missing one thing, and that’s a Stanley Cup in Dallas.”
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Gorgeous writing as always. Making me weepy!