Lian Bichsel Talks Injury Rehab, and Gulutzan Gives Optimistic Update on Radek Faksa as Stars Ramp Up in Practice
Both players are likely to play for Dallas when the season resumes next week
It’s been a fantastic 48 hours of hockey, culminating on Thursday afternoon with Megan Keller’s overtime goal1 to win gold for the USA women’s Olympic ice hockey team.
When you throw in all the thrilling action on the Men’s side during the quarterfinals, it’s a bit surreal to see the Dallas Stars (well, a good chunk of them anyway) back in action practicing this week. As hard as it is to believe, the Stars will resume their NHL season next Wednesday against the Seattle Kraken, which means they can’t afford to wait before getting back into game shape.
Thursday marked the team’s second straight practice since returning, and Gulutzan certainly pushed the team a bit harder than he did on day one. And that was all part of the plan.
“Looking at these next four days, we have four full days of practice,” Gulutzan said on Wednesday. “So we work with Troy [van Biezen] and Donny [Mike Donaghue] to see how we want to structure these practices, from hard-, medium-, light-flow.”
Gulutzan described Wednesday as a more “medium” day, while he planned to “ramp up” on Thursday. And to my untrained eyes, that’s exactly what happened, as today’s workout ended with a good bit of skating that had a couple of players bent at the waist to catch their breath towards the end.
The Stars’ head coach said the team has ways to monitor players during practice, and the coaches and training staff can then look at the individual players’ performance after practice to see how hard they’re able to push them while staying within a safe threshold.
“It all boils down to building the athlete up,” Gulutzan said. “Building the resistance up of the athlete, and doing it the right way, with all the sport technology that we have.”
(By the way, I spoke with Donaghue before the team left for the break about what goes into all those plans, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t already.)
Two players that probably require some additional monitoring for game-readiness are Lian Bichsel and Radek Faksa. We spoke with Bichsel in detail about his injury below, but let’s touch on Faksa’s status briefly before we get to that conversation.
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