Jamie Benn Is Back, and the Roster Looks Nearly Set
And he's poised to hit 1,000 points
The Stars announced today what we all figured was bound to happen: Jamie Benn will return for another season in Dallas.
Per PuckPedia, it’s a league-minimum $850K base salary, with another $1.15 in performance bonuses based on games played and playoff rounds won.
As with Benn’s deal last year, any earned bonuses will roll over to the following year’s salary cap if the Stars don’t finish the season with sufficient accrued cap space to cover them. It’s an even more team-friendly deal than last year’s (which saw Benn take home $1 million in base salary and another $2 million in performance incentives).
We talked about Benn at length following the season, so for a more in-depth recap of his year, you can give that a read:
As for next year, this deal is even more of a no-brainer than it looked like in May, following the loss of Mavrik Bourque over the summer. The Stars’ winger depth is extremely thin right now, and if Benn does nothing more than give the Stars another 60 games and 15 goals, this deal will already be great value.
In terms of result, Benn’s on-ice work last year amounted to a 57% goals share while he was on the ice at 5-on-5. The Stars scored just over 3 goals per hour during his minutes (fourth-highest on the team) while they gave up just 2.3. Here’s some context for those 5v5 numbers:
Now, there are reasons to temper even modest expectations, too. Benn will be 37 later this month, and his underlying numbers were far from pretty. But with him averaging a career-low 13:17 per night, the hope will be that he can continue to chip in offensively in a bottom-six role with players like Matt Duchene, without being asked to take on heavy defensive duty (which neither of them excel at).
That’s how Glen Gulutzan used Benn last year, and it seemed to work best when Benn was playing on the right side (his off-wing) with Sam Steel on the left. That Benn-Steel duo had a markedly positive xGF% (and plus/minus) when either Duchene or Justin Hryckowian was centering them on a third line, and you could do much worse than that with the Stars’ presumptive top-six group right now. Here’s the forward group we’re looking at right now, presuming Robertson is back to start the season, as seems most likely right now:
Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Kiviranta-Faksa-Blackwell
Hyry, Bäck
That’s…fine? Obviously this is predicated on Seguin being able to do what Bourque did last year, and that’s no guarantee, given he’ll be coming off a long ACL recovery.
(Side note: I’ve wondered if the Stars might even be planning for Seguin to have a slower return than planned this year and not start the season on the active roster, which could put someone like Kiviranta or Hyry or even Benn a little higher in the lineup in the short term. But right now, you’d have to say this lineup needs Seguin to be close to the version we saw at the beginning of last year, and they might not be able to wait too long for him to do so.)
As for Benn, there are some fun rate stats to consider. Despite being 10th among forwards in ice time per game (the equivalent of fourth-line minutes), Benn was:
5th on the team in primary assists per hour
3rd(!) on the team in goals per hour (among regulars)
3rd on the team in shooting percentage (same caveat as above)
8th on the team in ixG/601 (just being Bourque, who was 7th)
You don’t even have to break things down to per-hour stats to illustrate Benn’s production last year: he was 5th on the team in even-strength goals despite missing 22 games. For a league-minimum salary, that’s plenty of surplus value.
Now, Benn’s liabilities at this point in his career are well-known: He was also second on the team in penalty minutes, and his performance in the playoffs last year was forgettable, at best. Numerous injuries led the coaching staff to put Benn into some bigger roles than befit his current ability, including some work on PP1 and some 6-on-5 deployment, too.
But this isn’t Benn-Seguin-Radulov being desperately propped up as a top line anymore. In terms of raw value, Benn’s player profile at that price kinda does make him the “ slam-dunk” that Gulutzan said it was after the season, unless you think he has some other negative qualities that weigh the team down in less directly measurable ways (as I know some folks do). I’m not discounting those concerns at all—when Benn has an off night, it can be one of the toughest watches there is—but if we’re looking at things with cold, computerized hearts, the deal looks more likely to be a good one than not, and that’s kinda what teams want their GMs to be doing.
Right now, if Robertson comes back (for however long) and Seguin stays healthy, you can see a team that still looks like a top-three team in the Central, and even better if Oettinger can bounce back. Jamie Benn is part of that, but only in a complementary sense (though not an uncomplimentary one).
And as I’ve said before, I’m kind of a sucker for these stories, on the narrative level. Bringing back the guy chasing a championship with the team he grew up with on a team-friendly deal is such an easy win, in a vacuum. Benn’s also eight points away from 1,000, so that’s another early (hopefully) season moment that counts for something.
Maybe it won’t go end up going well this season, but that could happen for a variety of reasons. Overstating Benn’s liabilities is just as erroneous as overstating his importance. And on a team with a cloud of uncertainty on either side of the forward group, Benn provides stabilitiy, and he’s doing so while taking as big of a pay cut as he possibly can against this year’s tight cap.
As things stand right now, my math has the Stars with $11.489M2 in cap space if Hyry starts the season in Cedar Park, and they coudl create a bit over $12.3M if they send down Capobianco to start the season (I think he’d very likely clear waivers again, as he did last year).
Without Robertson, here’s where that roster stands, with $12.3M in cap space:
Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Steel-Hintz-Seguin
Kiviranta-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell
Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers
Oettinger
DeSmith
If Robertson comes in around $12 after arbitration (or if they settle for something like that), then you can start the year with 13 forwards and 6 defensemen—and of course, you can do a bit more than that if Seguin starts on LTIR, giving the Stars an extra $3 million or so in temporary cap space until they activate him.
Benn’s deal was always going to be the one Nill fit in after everything else got set. Of course, Robertson’s situation could drag on for another month or two if they go through arbitration, but otherwise it feels like the Stars’ roster is pretty much lined up for now—unless a Robertson trade ends up materializing.
It’s not a better roster than last year’s on paper, and the almost-but-not-quite trades of the last week might make you feel like it’s even significantly less so. For that, you are more than welcome to be critical of Jim Nill or Don Waddell or Andy Scott, or whoever you want. But given all the turmoil of the last couple of weeks, it’s at least a clear plan with some upside, and I think Benn at this contract is more likely to aid that plan than to hamper it.
A year that was always shaping up to be the toughest one for Dallas’s cap post-Rantanen looks like it will indeed be tough. But the funny thing about hockey is that sometimes, the teams that do special things aren’t the ones you would have guessed they were, in July.
As opposed to regular xG (expected goals) number, ixG measures only a player’s direct contributions to offense. A good explainer can be found here.
PuckPedia currently includes Cameron Hughes on their default view, which is why you should do what the cool nerds do and also track these things yourself.