Mikael Granlund, Mitch Marner, or Neither: Doing the Math on the Dallas Stars' Free Agency Budget after Jamie Benn's Extension

Whomstsoever can they afford to add, or to keep?

Thursday morning, we found out that Jamie Benn had been re-signed by Dallas.

The base salary of $1 million was about the biggest favor Benn could have done for his team, given how tight the Stars’ salary cap situation is this year. By taking even less than Jonathan Toews extracted from the Winnipeg Jets ($2 million base salary), Benn gives the Stars basically room to sign another player similar to Colin Blackwell, who made the league minimum last year.

Benn’s $3 million in performance bonuses will likely roll over to next year, unless the Stars finish this season under the salary cap. In that (fairly unlikely) event, any accrued cap space (which the Stars get by spending any given day under the NHL’s salary cap) could be put towards those bonuses, with only the remaining balance carrying over to next year.

And given how durable Benn has been in his career, you can expect the $2 million in those games-played bonuses to be pretty much automatic.

In fairness, Benn has made a ton of money in his NHL career, over $100 million so far. So he was always going to take a pay cut after making $9.5 million for the last eight years. But for him to go all the way down to a guaranteed salary less than Evgenii Dadonov was making last season or Nils Lundkvist will make this season is a pretty clear sign of his priorities: he’s willing to take less to help the Stars achieve more.

One other thing worth noting is how, in the Stars’ announcement of the Benn extension, they also emphasized his captaincy quite a bit. Thus, no captaincy transition looks imminent for Dallas, which isn’t altogether unsurprising. Benn’s leadership—particularly with a coaching change—is something the organization values very highly.

Benn’s signing was always something of a foregone conclusion, given what both sides had been saying about their desire to continue Benn’s tenure in Dallas.

Math Party Time

Someday, I’d love to hear what Mark Janko’s salary cap plan for this season would have been before the Mikko Rantanen trade.

Because as much as that’s a trade the Stars would absolutely do again ten times out of ten, Rantanen’s addition definitely threw a spanner in the works of the Stars’ cap situation for this year, with Mason Marchment’s departue being the first such consequence of that move.

Anyway, I wanted to do a quick and dirty rundown of just what flexibility the Stars do and don’t have right now when it comes to adding players, given all the rumors that are sure to be flying around.

Okay, so: with Benn taking a team-friendly deal like this one, it more or less solidifies the Stars’ position going into the draft and free agency in the next couple of days. That position is that the Stars have only 10 forwards signed, and they only have enough salary cap space at the moment to sign one more.

Per PuckPedia, the Stars have $94,519,916 in current salary cap obligations. The NHL’s salary cap for 2025-26 is $95,500,000.

With Benn signed, the Stars currently have 10 forwards, 2 goalies, and 8 defensemen signed, if you include Alex Petrovic on the NHL roster to start the year.

Thus, right now, the Stars have just $980,084 in cap space. The NHL minimum salary this year is $775,000. The math is pretty clear here: they need to move more salary cap.

Specifically, Dallas needs to clear enough space to add at least one more league-minimum player just to get to 12 forwards at the start of the season. And they’d probably prefer to have space to carry 13 forwards, really.

The options that have been floated most frequently are:

Matt Dumba’s cap hit is $3.75 million this year.
Ilya Lyubushkin’s cap hit is $3.25 million for the next two years.

So, moving one of those players would allow the Stars to fill out their roster with at least a couple of replacement-level players and/or AHL promotions like Blackwell, Justin Hryckowian, or Arttu Hyry.

The Stars have all but publicly signaled that they’d like to move on from Dumba. But whether they can find a trade partner for a player who was benched for the entire playoffs (and occasionally the regular season) is a question that has yet to be answered. If the Stars can’t find a taker for Dumba, then they have two other options, as I see it: buy out Dumba (which would save them $2.3 million in cap space this year), or trade Lyubushkin, who might have a bit more value on a market where right-shot defensemen are coveted.

Moving Dumba in trade without retaining any salary seems like Plan A for Dallas. That would give the Stars about $4.7 million in cap space, which makes it a lot easier to fill out the margins of the roster. If they did that, I think the Stars would like to add a Brendan Smith sort of player if they can, effectively swapping out Dumba’s cap hit for something closer to league minimum for a depth defenseman, as well as a couple of forwards.

Maybe you can move Dumba and retain some salary, but get an asset of some kind in return. But personally, I don’t see it. The best-case scenario for Dallas, barring Jim Nill wizardry, is to move Dumba for “future considerations,” like the Stars did with Radek Faksa last summer to St. Louis. And the Stars would probably have to add some kind of late draft pick just to incentivize such a trade, one would think. After all, why would a team spend an asset to get Dumba when they could just wait for Dallas to buy him out and sign him as a free agent for a much smaller cap hit?

Anyway, that’s enough on Dumba. The Lyubushkin situation seems like this, from where I’m sitting: he’s a useful player the Stars would only move if it meant bringing back an apparent upgrade like Rasmus Andersson or Aaron Ekblad.

Ekblad is a free agent who has just won two Stanley Cups. He also wants to stay in Florida, by all accounts, and is willing to take less to do so. But if Florida still can’t find a way to do that (and I think they brought in Seth Jones with an eye towards Jones replacing Ekblad to begin with), then I would think Ekblad would be looking for full value on a market where he’d be perhaps the best defenseman available. It’s hard to see the Stars having the space to do that.

Because even if the Stars found a way to move both Dumba and Lyubushkin (giving them another $7 million in cap space in addition to their $980K right now) to add Ekblad (which they would have to do), that contract would then surely take up nearly all of that newfound space. And then you’re back to trying to add three forwards at league minimum—and without any room for a depth defenseman.

Moving two defensemen just to add one—even one like Ekblad—really puts the Stars in a precarious spot with regard to defensive depth. And at this stage of his career, I’m not convinced the improvement you’d get going from Lyubushkin to Ekblad would be worth hamstringing your forward group.

Getting Andersson would be cheaper for one year—though he’s dipped in quality recently, including sustaining a broken fibula late in this most recent season. Maybe he rebounds from that, but there’s definitely a bit of gamble involved.

Also, acquiring Andersson would require the Stars sending a pretty decent package to Calgary to get him out of there. And the Stars are pretty asset-poor right now, as we all know.

Yes, you say, but what about Jason Robertson? Would the Stars move his $7.75 million deal in some kind of bid for Rasmus Andersson (who makes $4.55 million for one year before hitting the free agent market himself), for instance?

Well, here’s the other thing: Dallas kind of has a left wing problem.

This is also why making a Jason Robertson trade to try to get Mitch Marner doesn’t make much sense to me. Losing your only top-six left wing to add another right wing might feel like an improvement on paper, but you can already see how the salary cap makes it nigh impossible. You’d have to get rid of Robertson, Lyubushkin, and Dumba just to make room for Marner—and then you’d have basically no space to fill out your top-six left wing spots. It’s just not feasible.

You can move the puzzle pieces around yourself, but here’s how I see it: the Stars’ most likely path is to move Dumba in order to fill out their forward group. But to fill out that group, they’ll still have to shop on a budget. And that means Mikael Granlund—who probably makes at least $6 million per year on the open market as one of the better centers left after John Tavares—is likely out of their price range.

Granlund deserves to get paid. As much as he fit well with Rantanen and Hintz on the top line in the playoffs, that was more of a luxury the Stars enjoyed by virtue of being able to exceed the salary cap by around ten million dollars thanks to their LTIR situations with Miro Heiskanen and Nils Lundkvist last year.

Granlund was meant to replace Seguin, at least on paper. But he ended up being a complementary piece after the Rantanen trade, and I just don’t see the Stars being able to afford him, even at a 50% discount from his market rate. Even a $3 million one-year deal for Granlund (which the Stars probably still couldn’t afford) seems foolhardy for him to take at 33 years old. Now is the time for him to cash in, and he deserves to do that.

The Stars were always going to feel “worse” compared to last year’s roster, because they actually have to get back within the salary cap to start this year. Marchment and Granlund are probably two of the casualities of that reality, but it doesn’t meant the Stars aren’t still sporting one of the very best rosters in the Western Conference.

It just means that math is going to have to dictate some tougher decisions in the short term, much as it did last summer. Even if one or more of those decisions involve reversing course on one of the players they brought in last year—or more than one.

So, you tell me. What creative math can you find to fill out the Stars’ left wing and forward group while also improving the defense? Because from where I’m sitting, the Stars might just have to bet on their new coach to give them the biggest improvement of all. According to the numbers, at least.