Jamie Benn's Goal, and Jamie Benn's Goals

Benn begins the ninth playoff run of his career today

For the ninth time in Dallas, Jamie Benn is leading the Stars into the playoffs. But this year’s version is a very different one than the first eight Jamie Benns.

It is true that being 36 years old is not the same as being 25, as Benn was when he won the Art Ross Trophy. In fact, Benn’s stats this year—15 goals and 21 assists in 60 games—are much less similar to his own peaks than they are to a different 36-year-old player from that 2014-15 season: Erik Cole, who scored 18 goals and 33 assists in 57 games before being traded to Detroit at the deadline for draft capital and Mattias’s Janmark and Bäckman.

But comparing Benn to Cole is like comparing Jason Robertson to James Neal, which is to say there is no comparison. You don’t stick around as the captain of a team from 2013 to 2026 without meaning something very special to a whole lot of people. And Benn is also different, this year, for less chronological reasons.

He’s a husband and a father now, which anyone will tell you Changes Things. But then again, Benn has, for most of his Dallas career, been elite in his ability to focus obsessively on the goal at hand, blocking out noise and eschewing media pleas to open up and display more personality, even when the person or people in charge of his team have a lot of things to say about his performance in a given year. Benn just isn’t that sort of guy, anymore.

Instead, the Jamie Benn Stars fans have known since 2019 is the one who has stoically watched beloved teammates end their careers while sitting next to him on the bench, watching that last chance at Stanley Cup immortality slip away as the other team flings sticks and gloves in the air when the clock reaches zero.

Every athlete craves the perceived eternity of those jubilant moments, when the number of back-slaps and hair-tousles exceeds the human memory’s ability to track. But in eight tries so far, Benn’s Stars have yet to summit the mountain, because all but one team fails to do so every year, no matter how good you are. It’s not enough to be good, or consistent, or dedicated, or even passionate. You also have to be lucky enough to be great, and to be great enough when you get lucky.

This year’s Benn has also encountered something very unusual, for him: two freak injuries to his lung and his face that caused him to miss 22 games—nearly as many games as he’d missed to injury in his 16 prior seasons combined. Jamie Benn simply doesn’t let anything stop him, if he has any say in the matter.

This year, Jamie Benn still wears the “C” on his sweater, though the Stars will be wearing different ones at home than in any playoff run he’s had before, sporting the ‘99 sweaters whose design harkens back to the same one a teammate from Benn’s rookie year wore when he hoisted the Stanley Cup for the first and, shockingly, only time in his career. Even the very best to do it get no guarantees, in this game.

Benn is playing fewer minutes than in past years, but his production has still been strong, and his defensive game has even become much less of an issue in Glen Gulutzan’s system than it was last year in Pete DeBoer’s. He isn’t the top guy anymore, but he’s also not a “checker,” as he half-jokingly referred to himself when talking to Wayne Gretzky last year in the locker room. On Gulutzan’s team, Benn is a leader on the third line, and he’ll be expected to do what he’s done all year: contribute.

That contribution could look a lot of different ways, particularly in a series where you’d expect to see a ton of scuffles, big hits, and even fights. Such is the way of things against the Minnesota Wild, who will once again try to channel an entire state’s resentment into an on-ice morale boost. More than ever, this Minnesota team could do just that, too.

But personally, I think this series might have been designed for precisely this Jamie Benn, who will turn 37 in July. Rather than toiling away on the fourth line against Colorado as he did last year, Benn could very well find himself quite at home against a Wild team he’s led the Stars past twice before.

Only two of Benn’s current teammates were around for that first series against Minnesota in 2016: Radek Faksa and Tyler Seguin, the latter of whom won’t be playing in this series, or any others this spring. But you can bet Benn remembers, like all elite athletes, his first taste of just how badly Minnesota always wants to beat the Stars. And you can bet he’ll take an extra bit of joy from whatever ways he finds to help the Stars hold off their northern opponents once again.

I always have a lot of time for aging superstars in any sport, because their acclimation to the realities of aging are just a super-sized reflection of our own. At some point during these playoffs, if you’re in a rink for a game, you’ll almost certainly hear a fan sulk about how at least one formerly great player now isn’t what he used to be, how he should be “cut,” or how he’s “washed up.” In the playoffs, fans like to play the hits.

Maybe it’s my own aging process taking its toll, but when I hear those sorts of complaints, I tend to think it’s more about people shaking their fist against time itself, knowing they also are not what they once were, and will not, in some years, be what they are now. Anyone who has watched a parent grow old knows the unsettling nature of this realization, that time has the insolence not to spare us and the ones we love from its ravages.

So today, I wanted to tee up the playoffs by remembering just how special players like Jamie Benn were, and still are, precisely because of what he’s done, and might still do. So before the game kicks off tonight, here is one goal from every single one of Jamie Benn’s playoff runs. Whatever he does in this series and any that might follow, it’s worth remembering that he, perhaps more than anyone else on the Stars’ bench, deserves to be wearing the only NHL sweater he’s ever known.

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2013: Game 4 vs. Anaheim

The first year of Lindy Ruff, Tyler Seguin, Victory Green, and Jamie Benn’s captaincy ended in a surprise playoff berth against the division-leading Ducks. But after going down 2-0 in Anaheim, the Stars bounced back at home with a 3-0 win in Game 3, and they looked to even the series in Game 4 before heading back to Anaheim.

Instead, the Ducks scored two early goals, and Dallas was facing the reality of a 3-1 series deficit midway through the game. If you remember watching this game, then you’ll recall that Dallas just didn’t have much going on. And when Benn, Seguin, and Val Nichushkin lined up to take a neutral zone faceoff early in the second period, nobody expected to see Benn win the faceoff forward, and do what he did to spark the Stars’ comeback win to even the series.

(Start at 3:36 if the video doesn’t take you there, which it should.)

2016: Game 2 vs. Minnesota