Miro Heiskanen and Roope Hintz Out for Regular Season, May Return in the First Round of Playoffs
Hope springs eternal, especially in the spring
The injury news today has not been rosy.
Friday afternoon, we learned that Miro Heiskanen may not be ready for the Stars’ first game of the playoffs, according to Glen Gulutzan. The Stars’ head coach was on the Ticket for his weekly radio hit Friday afternoon, and he confirmed that the Stars’ number one defenseman will not play in any of their final three games of the regular season.
“He did have an MRI this afternoon,” Gulutzan said. “We won’t have him for the rest of the regular season, but we’re certainly hoping to get him in the first round.”
No more details were provided by Gulutzan, though it’s noteworthy that he said “in the first round” rather than “by the first round” or “during the first round.” You can interpret the preposition he employed a couple of different ways, but we probably won’t get anything more specific until Heiskanen is participating in a morning skate before or during the playoffs. ‘Tis the season.
As a reminder, here’s where the injury appeared to have occurred last night.
Gulutzan will surely answer more questions about Heiskanen tomorrow before the team’s 4pm game against the Rangers—the Stars’ final home contest of the regular season—but we’re at the time of year when injury details tend to be doled out sparingly, and even the ones we do get tend to be murky at best.
For example, remember last year, when the word “hope” was used by the team in an eerily similar situation?
As we know now, Heiskanen would indeed wind up missing not only the entire first round last year, but the first three games of the second round as well, eventually returning in Game 4 of the second round against Winnipeg.
This year is not last year, of course. For all we know, Heiskanen could wind up being ready to go by next weekend, and the Stars are simply being cagey and cautious in the meantime. With a four-point lead on the Wild as well as the tiebreaker in regulation wins, Dallas has almost no reason to risk anything before the playoffs begin.
Still, Heiskanen is undoubtedly the player Dallas can least afford to lose. Once again, the Stars are facing the prospect of starting yet another grueling playoff run without their top defenseman.
Heiskanen averages the fourth-highest minutes per game in the NHL. That’s a huge workload to spread around, even if Thomas Harley proved he could handle a lot of it last year. Depth is everything in the playoffs, and every player who has to step up because of injuries leaves a vacuum that another player lower on the depth chart has to fill in their stead.
Worse yet, Heiskanen is far from the only Stars player who might be unavailable for the start of the playoffs.
Lia Assimakopoulos of the Dallas Morning News spoke with Jim Nill this morning, and you can read her story here for those details. Hintz actually started skating before Radek Faksa, but Hintz’s progress has apparently not been as positive, and it sounds like he’ll miss at least the next seven days, according to Nill.
As for Glen Gulutzan, we spoke with him this afternoon after a lightly attended optional practice for Dallas, and he provided a few more injury updates, including a surprise one for Tyler Myers, who only recently returned from an injury he sustained in Philadelphia on the Stars’ recent road trip.
“When [Myers] first came here, I thought he was just excellent,” Gulutzan said. “And then I think the injury slowed him down a little bit, and he’s off the ice again today. So still kind of dealing with something there.”
As a result of what he’s “dealing with,” Myers’s availability for Saturday is now in doubt.
“We’ll see if he’s in tomorrow,” Gulutzan continued. “We’re trying to manage that a little bit here. Just kind of a little aggravation of the same injury yesterday. So he hasn’t really got traction under him … he’s just kind of dealing with something that’s bugging him right now.”
When asked if it was the sort of injury that would linger throughout the playoffs, Gulutzan said that it was something that should be able to be cleared up. It just hasn’t been, yet.
“We thought we had it, but he kind of re-aggravated it,” Gulutzan said. “So we’ll see where he is tomorrow.”
The hope will be that a clean bill of health will allow Myers to get back to the form he showed early in his Dallas tenure, when he and Lian Bichsel looked like an enviable third defense pairings.
In the meantime, Dallas will likely have to call upon Alex Petrovic and/or Kyle Capobianco for Saturday’s game. Nils Lundkvist was still ill as of Friday afternoon, so it’s at least possible the Stars could be without all of Heiskanen, Myers, and Lundkvist tomorrow. In theory, those absences could lead to a blue line that looks something like this:
Harley-Lyubsuhkin
Lindell-Petrovic
Bichsel-Capobianco
Again, the Stars’s magic number for home ice in the first round is down to two, so it wouldn't surprise me if all the depth defensemen get some decent runway in the final six days of the season.
As for the forwards other than Hintz, things are more mixed. Sam Steel, Gulutzan confirmed, skated this morning with assistant coach David Pelletier. Gulutzan said the final game of the regular season in Buffalo next Wednesday is the earliest Steel could possibly return from the hip flexor/groin injury he suffered on Long Island.
“I would say now he’s almost day-to-day,” Gulutzan said, “No Saturday, and I wouldn’t think he’ll be in the Toronto game either. So we’re hoping for Buffalo.”
It’s the first confirmation we’ve gotten that Steel is indeed skating, but I’m not sure I’d be terribly confident that he’ll play in Buffalo as things stand right now. (That’s just a hunch, to be clear, not fact-based reporting.)
As for players who should play before Game 82, Michael Bunting and Radek Faksa both skated this morning at an optional practice, including heavy workouts with Stars’ head strength and conditioning coach Mike Donoghue. Both players did some strength skating exercises, as you’d expect from players trying to get into game-ready shape after missing extended time.
Bunting suffered a lower-body injury in Philadelphia—the same game in which Myers was hurt initially. Gulutzan said earlier this week that he could potentially play this Saturday, so we’ll see if he ends up returning tomorrow.
Faksa, meanwhile, is working his way back from an injury suffered in practice. He could play on Monday in Toronto.
Nate Bastian is still projected to be out another three weeks or so after blocking a shot with his hand in Pittsburgh on March 28. And of course, Tyler Seguin is already done for the year after tearing his ACL (or more accurately, having it torn by another player falling on him) in New York earlier this year.
Until we know exactly who’s going to be ready for Game 1 and who isn’t, it’s tough to project all the implications of the various injuries. But the good news for Dallas is that a ton of hungry depth players have stepped up this year, including Arttu Hyry, Colin Blackwell, Oskar Bäck, Adam Erne, and even Cameron Hughes.
On defense, it’s a similar situation, as Petrovic has shown for two years in a row that he can come into big games and face the toughest of playoff opponents—which he also did last weekend against Colorado. Kyle Capobianco has been similarly solid this year as a surprise full-time NHLer, and Gulutzan said today that he expects at least one of that pairing to play tomorrow.
Alex Petrovic talked today about what it’s been like to stay ready during long periods of game inaction, and it’s nothing new for him. Good soldiers are invaluable when the stakes go up.
Winning on Thursday came with a heavy cost for Dallas, but the upshot of the two points is that the Stars can afford to be a little cautious down the stretch here and give some other players a chance to get back into a rhythm. Depth is a big deal at this time of year, and it’s always good to see deserving players get rewarded. Nobody stays in the NHL by accident.
