Matt Duchene's Return Is a Double Steal that Clears Up Some of the Dallas Stars' Remaining Offseason Plans

Now we know a bit more than we did yesterday

“Hey, guess whose got two thumbs and is coming back for the next four years?”

On Thursday morning, Jim Nill and the Dallas Stars announced that Matt Duchene had been signed to a four-year extension with an average annual value of $4.5 million.

“We are thrilled to have Matt back with our organization,” said Nill. “As our team’s leading scorer last season, he helped to solidify our forward group while also providing invaluable leadership off the ice and in the community. The fit with Matt and our team has been seamless from the start, and we’re looking forward to continuing to pursue our shared goal of bringing a championship to Dallas.”

Given the paucity of center options in free agency outside of bigger-ticket players like John Tavares (whom we discussed yesterday) and Sam Bennett, this deal is a good one for Dallas, insofar as it ensures they can have four high-quality centers on the roster in Roope Hintz, Wyatt Johnston, Sam Steel, and Duchene. As much as the NHL has shifted away from strict-position hockey, you still have to have great centers to build a team around, and the Stars will.

Now, this Duchene deal is different from his last two, as he took just south of the $5 million we were ballparking yesterday in exchange for four years of term. After his struggles to score in the playoffs, getting a 50% raise might seem odd, but it’s really not, when you look at the broader picture.

In a very real sense, this is a double steal of a deal. Dallas gets a top-six center (who also happened to be their highest-scoring player last season) for a full $3 million less per season than Brock Nelson took to return to Colorado. And as Corey Sznajder pointed out today, Duchene still does a whole lot of things really, really well.

I really love Corey’s data, because he tracks everything himself and plots those events according to league averages. I think it gives as true a picture about those smaller events that make up a player’s game as any that the public has access to on the regular.

For instance, look at one of the few yellow-ish bars for Duchene up there: the -0.54 line for Shots off HD Passes per 60 minutes. That’s saying that Duchene actually shoots fewer pucks than the average player when he receives a pass that sets up a dangerous shot, and that matches up with what Stars fans remember about Duchene: he tends to defer on a lot of those shot opportunities, looking for that extra dagger pass even if he has a Grade A chance to fire himself. It can be aggravating, but if you look at his +1.91 High Danger Assists/60, you can also see that he’s an elite passer, and elite passers tend to like passing. And when you have Tyler Seguin on your line, well, passing him the puck is never a bad option. Duchene did not lead the team in scoring by accident.

Now, Corey also went on to acknowledge that Duchene’s performance in the playoffs took a notable dip from his regular-season form both in overt and underlying numbers, and that’s certainly a concern. But honestly, I’ll bet on a regular season horse to figure it out in the postseason every time, rather than hoping that someone who had one good playoff run could repeat that performance without taking on water over the 82 games prior.

Yes, Duchene needs to be better in the postseason, but so do a lot of Stars players. And given Duchene’s skillset, he shouldn’t need to change much to be a big contributor in the biggest games. He’s simply too good to keep coming up short like this.

Duchene can carry the puck up the ice and gain the zone, and he can make plays and passes that few others can. He is, to use a technical term, really good at hockey, and the Stars got him for the same cap hit as Mason Marchment and Nick Foligno are making next season. That’s a win for Dallas.

But for Duchene, it’s also a bit of a coup, as he’ll still continue to get paid a total of $11 million from Nashville spread over the next four years while he gets two years with no-move protection in Dallas and another two years after that with massive no-trade rights.

It gives Duchene the security and term he said he wanted at his end-of-year press conference, and that’s no small thing for someone with a young family who loves living in Texas. Combined with his Nashville buyout, Duchene will take home (on average) over $7 million per year for the next four seasons.

Four years of term would normally be a big risk for a team to take on a player turning 35 in January. There’s an out for Dallas though: the structure of the contract means Dallas could buy him out after just two seasons if things went really sideways and/or his play deteriorated significantly.

Per PuckPedia, here’s what that emergency ripcord would look like, reducing his cap hit in those final two years to just $1.2 million, albeit with two more years of $1.2 million tacked onto that.

That would need Tom Gaglardi’s approval, of course, but even an expensive escape plan is better than none at all.

So, both sides get something they wanted in this deal without absolutely handcuffing themselves should things change drastically down the road. That’s the best sort of contract, though it’s hardly surprising to see Jim Nill put one together with a player as honest about his desire to stay here and adamant about his priorities as Duchene.

And personally, I also wonder if this wasn’t a bit of a make-good on the part of the Stars, after Duchene took significantly below-market contracts for two straight years to be in Dallas. With the cap going up quite a bit in the coming years, it’s hard to see a world where Duchene’s deal is a big problem even if he doesn’t repeat his point-per-game performance this season.

It’s much easier, in fact, to see Duchene’s deal looking great once again. After all, Duchene’s line carried this team’s offense early in the year when a lot of other players weren’t clicking, and banking the points Dallas did early on was the main reason their end-of-year slide didn’t allow Colorado to overtake them before the end of the season.

Duchene’s vocal leadership was also quite noticeable after Tyler Seguin’s hip surgery, when the Stars could have fallen off during stretches off team-wide illnesses and injuries to various players, including Miro Heiskanen. When you can have scoring and transition ability alongside accountability and honesty, that’s a win for any dressing room.

With Johnston and Hintz also locked up for a while, Duchene should continue to get a bit softer minutes, allowing him to use his dynamite offensive talent to take advantage of favorable zone starts and matchups, which is pretty much the ideal way to deploy a player like Duchene in his mid-thirties. And with Duchene’s outstanding work on the power play, this also gives Dallas that added layer of creativity in high-leverage situations that great teams need to have.

This doesn’t change the team’s identity, so it makes that some folks are going to see this as just “running it back.” But it does ensure the Stars don’t lose a critical part of what made them so good last season: offensive depth. And given the landscape of available centers, this always seemed like the easiest way for Dallas to stay dangerous down the middle.

The Stars will still need to make changes elsewhere, though. Duchene’s signing makes something even clearer than it already was: some current Stars will be heading out of Dallas.

The math isn’t hard: with just over $450K left in salary cap space, the Stars can’t fit even one more player at league minimum salary ($775K). That means they have to move players out to make room just to ice a full lineup, as we’ve discussed previously. For those aforementioned reasons, those players are almost certain to be among the Marchment/Robertson/Dumba/Lyubushkin group, though anything is possible when it comes to Jim Nill.

I also don’t think Nill would have made the Duchene signing official today if he didn’t already had a good feel for the market (or lack of it) for those players. In fact, I think Lyubushkin could even have some mildly positive trade value, given the dearth of RHD options in the free-agent market, though I’m not sure the Stars would really want to trade a player who was a key part of an excellent penalty kill last season and who paired well with Thomas Harley for a big chunk of the season. Moving Lyubushkin and Dumba means Petrovic and Lundkvist are your only right-handed defense options, and that would put the Stars in just as precarious a position as they found themselves last spring, when they had to acquire Cody Ceci just to prevent Thomas Harley and Esa Lindell from playing 30 minutes a night.

But the fact is, the Stars have to make room somehow, and teams aren’t going to be lining up to take Matt Dumba after seeing him fall out of favor so quickly on a team that went as far as Dallas did. Perhaps Nill asks Tom Gaglardi to write a check for a second buyout in as many seasons, as buying out Dumba would save Dallas about $2.3 million in cap space next year. Right now, I think I lean towards that happening, if only because Dallas doesn’t appear to have the spare draft picks with which to entice another team to take Dumba’s cap hit.

We’ve talked about Robertson in detail, so I won’t rehash all that here. But given that Mason Marchment makes the same $4.5 million cap hit that Duchene just signed for, it’s easy enough to see how moving on from Marchment (who can give the Stars a ten-team “no trade” list, per PuckPedia) is the less risky option to move, if you can find a suitor.

No matter which of these (or other) players Nill is preparing to move on from, the Duchene signing makes it pretty clear that such moves are guaranteed to happen. And frankly, given how the Stars and Duchene had both said they wanted to make a reunion happen, this deal makes me that much more convinced that Jamie Benn (with whom similarly mutual expressions of interest have been made) will be returning as well, probably on something like a $2 million base contract with another big chunk in performance bonuses that wouldn’t hit the cap until the following season.

One example: if the Stars moved Marchment for his full cap hit and bought out Dumba, that would give them over $7 million in cap space use as following in 2025-26 (this is just an example, not for actual prediction purposes—unless I’m right, in which case I’m a genius):

~$2 million to Jamie Benn (with further performance bonuses)
~$1 million to Mavrik Bourque
$1.25 million to Nils Lundkvist (his qualifying offer)
$870K to bring up Justin Hryckowian
$775K to Colin Blackwell (or a similar player)

If the back of this envelope I’m scribbling on is correct, that would at least give them the cap space to ice an opening night lineup like this (with players like Arttu Hyry able to be recalled as needed):

Robertson-Hintz-Rantanen
Benn-Duchene-Seguin
Hryckowian-Johnston-Bourque
Bäck-Steel-Blackwell

Harley-Heiskanen
Lindell-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Lyubushkin
Petrovic

Now, I don’t think that’s going to be the exact lineup. From all accounts we’ve heard, the Stars will be bringing in at least one or two more new players rather than looking to re-do so much of what they did last year. Nill might also need to reserve a bit more cap space to prevent an offer sheet to Mavrik Bourque, unlikely as that may seem.

But the point is, re-signing Duchene doesn’t take away the options they had before. It simply underlines what was going to be true all along: changes will have to be made. But if you do have to kick some of those changes down the road, bringing back your best scorer is probably not the worst thing to do in the meantime. It might even be the best option they had.