NHL Roster Battles Coming into Focus as Big Cuts Arrive
It is hard to make the NHL, it turns out
On Sunday in Frisco, the Stars began the day by working on special teams: specifically, the power play. Gulutzan joked in his press conference afterward that the penalty kill “got a little overworked” in Colorado Saturday night, when the Stars had to kill seven different minors while only drawing two power plays of their own.
As far as the power play personnel this morning, Glen Gulutzan and Neil Graham are sticking to their aforementioned plan to use both of their top defenseman on the top power play. Miro Heiskanen was running the top power play with Rantanen, Robertson, Hintz, and Johnston, while Harley was back running the second unit—a group that saw Sam Steel drawing in for the injured Jamie Benn, along with Seguin, Duchene and Bourque.
I’m sure we’ll continue to see both QBs get looks here and there. In the end, it’s less about finding the one perfect combination that they’ll stick with for 82 games straight than about fostering the “Road Hockey” approach Gulutzan has preached, regardless of what personnel are out there.
“Basically, you’re trying to create looks,” Gulutzan said after practice. “And then let them make the plays. That’s what you’re trying to do, is put the opposition in a position where they have one or two options, and then let them just make the play.”
Seeing Steel on the second power play unit isn’t too surprising either, as the Stars’ have relatively limited options after losing power play staples Mason Marchment and Mikael Granlund over the summer. Those options became even more limited after seeing Jamie Benn require surgery for a collapsed lung suffered on Tuesday night against Minnesota.
Steel continues to look like he’s get a shot at playing on Matt Duchene’s left wing, and today was a decent indication that his opportunities this year will extend to getting a shot on the power play, too. Steel only had 13 minutes of power play time across his 79 games last season, but if he’s ever going to become a double-digit goal-scorer in Dallas, this year would seem like his chance to do so.
Big Training Camp Cuts Finally Arrive
As expected, today saw a lot of roster moves, including loans, releases, and three players put on waivers.
If my count is correct, that means the Stars now have 271 players left in camp (or 26 if you leave out Jamie Benn for now).
Players Still in Camp
16 Forwards: Mikko Rantanen, Jason Robertson, Roope Hintz, Wyatt Johnston, Mavrik Bourque, Tyler Seguin, Matt Duchene, Jamie Benn (on IR), Sam Steel, Colin Blackwell, Oskar Bäck, Radek Faksa, Nathan Bastian, Justin Hryckowian, Adam Erne, Arttu Hyry
8 Defensemen: Miro Heiskanen, Thomas Harley, Esa Lindell, Nils Lundkvist, Ilya Lyubushkin, Lian Bichsel, Alex Petrovic, Vladislav Kolyachonok
3 Goalies: Jake Oettinger, Casey DeSmith, Rémi Poirier
If you’re keeping score at home, you’ve realized that the Stars will have at least three more cuts to make before opening night in order to get down to the NHL’s 23-man roster—and in fact, they could even end up making four cuts to get down to 22 players, given their salary cap situation. I believe that will depend on how they end up approaching Benn’s likely LTIR situation before the regular season begins, though.
The most noteworthy names to discuss might be the players who weren’t cut today: Arttu Hyry, Justin Hryckowian, and Adam Erne. All three are still in camp, and it appears they’re battling for the 13th forward spot.
Right now, Hryckowian appears (to me) to have a tiny lead in that race, but these decisions can sometimes involve a lot of other factors—like who benefits more from playing regularly in the AHL vs. getting scratched in Texas, or even whose salary might help Dallas get closer to the salary cap ceiling before putting Jamie Benn on LTIR (in order to maximize their LTIR pool). It can get complicated.
We’ve talked about Hryckowian and Erne a bit, so I was curious what Gulutzan has been seeing from Arttu Hyry in camp. When asked about Hyry today, Gulutzan has this to say:
“I thought through camp, he’s [Hyry] gotten better and better and better,” Gulutzan said. “I thought last night was even his strongest game. Just with all the penalty kills, and even the offense he created, you could see he’s getting a little bit more comfortable. You know, even today, I look at the little things. Look at today’s practice. He had a good practice today, too. He looked sharp today at practice.”
Hyry didn’t strike me as someone pushing for an NHL spot out of camp when it all first started, but his game last night really was that good. Now, like Hryckowian (and Erne), he has to keep that momentum going.
“Now you have lots of NHLers, it starts to resemble more of an NHL [camp], and he doesn’t look out of place,” Gulutzan said of Hyry. “That’s a good sign.”
Moving on from the battles for NHL spots for the moment, Let’s deal with each group of players who are no longer in Dallas’s training camp, starting with the trio on waivers today.
Lind, Capobianco, and Stranges
The Stars put Kole Lind, Kyle Capobianco, and Antonio Stranges on waivers today. This is a required step for those players before re-assigning them to the AHL, and I would be surprised if these three don’t make it through waivers. I’d expect all of them to clear and then be assigned to Texas tomorrow.
They’re all important pieces for the AHL roster, but this move is a pretty clear indication that none of those three were threatening to take an NHL job at the moment, as has become increasingly clear this month. Of course, things can always change if one of them starts tearing it up down in the AHL and Dallas finds themselves needing more bodies, but for now, the big competitions for NHL playing time this year will take place among those remaining in camp.
One more thing on waivers before we move on, actually. There are a couple of other players the Stars would have to waive in order to assign to Texas: Alex Petrovic and Vladislav Kolyachonok, both of whom are still in NHL training camp.
Last year, Dallas managed to get Alex Petrovic through waivers on October 5. They then slipped him through waivers again after the final loss to Edmonton at the end of May in order for Petrovic to join the Texas Stars for the final couple of games of their playoff run.
Petrovic told me last spring that Jim Nill actually gave him the choice of whether or not to head down to Texas after a long NHL playoff run. But for Petrovic, it was an easy decision to join his teammates for a big playoff run, so Dallas made the call, and he cleared waivers again.
“In my mind, it just would have been weird if I was at home while these guys were still playing,” Petrovic said last June. “It would have been tough for me to watch.”
Would Petrovic clear a third time this fall? I’m not sure the Stars are itching to take that chance, given how thin they are on right-hand depth on the blue line.
Vladislav Kolyachonok, on the other hand, was claimed on waivers by Pittsburgh this past February, when Utah tried to send him down to the AHL. He and Petrovic are both still in camp, but unless the Stars decide to carry eight defensemen in the NHL this season, one of them will likely have to go through waivers before too much longer.
If I had to guess, I’d say Petrovic has the edge between the two right now, based on his experience and handedness. If the Stars do end up putting one of them on waivers, though, they’ll probably wait until the end of camp, when NHL rosters across the league are largely set, making waiver claims trickier for teams to do.
For now, however, Kolyachonok is enjoying his time in the NHL. I chatted with him again briefly today after practice, and he said his stretch pass to Antonio Stranges (“Great shot,” he says of his teammate’s goal) wasn’t anything special. Kolyachonok said it was simply the right play, and certainly he is right about that.
Further to that point, I asked Kolyachonok if he expected the Avalanche to be changing lines like they did with five seconds left in the period when he recorded his primary assist to Stranges, and Kolyachonok said his guess is that the opposing forwards just lost track of how much time was left in the second period when they headed off to change. That’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.
Loans to Texas
As for the players loaned to Texas (who are waivers-exempt), the most interesting name to me is Emil Hemming, who at 19 would be the rare teenager playing in the AHL.
To be honest, I was kind of expecting Hemming to be returned to Barrie to see if he could tear it up in his final year in the OHL, but if he ends up staying in Texas to start the year, I’d imagine it’s because the organization wants him to play against tougher, older, bigger competition to see just how viable an NHL career will be for Hemming. Certainly there is something appealing about giving the first-round pick a chance to sharpen his craft against higher-caliber competition, so we’ll see if that’s what ends up happening.
Arno Tiefensee and Ben Kraws were also loaned to Texas, while Rémi Poirier remains in Dallas with the NHL club for now, much like Magnus Hellberg did last fall, when he gave Dallas a third goalie in training camp until finally being re-assigned to the AHL on October 6th after clearing waivers.
At the moment, it appears that Tiefensee and Kraws will be battling for the second goalie spot in Texas along with Poirier, with the other goaltender likely going to ECHL Idaho. The Texas Stars’ training camp starts on Wednesday this week, so I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how that all shakes out, unless something changes.
I talked with Poirier a bit today, and he was very complimentary of Antoine Bibeau (who was released from his PTO by Dallas today—more on that in a moment). Bibeau held Colorado to one goal through two periods despite the Avalanche generating some good looks.
Poirier was more critical of his own game in the third period, saying he wasn’t quite as controlled as he would have preferred to have been on Saturday. But then, coming into the third period cold against a superior Avalanche roster playing for pride is a hard job for anyone, so I don’t think he’s letting it bother him too much.
Players Released from PTOs and ATOs
First, a note on the difference between these two, as I understand it. My pal Stephen Meserve also has a lot more on how these work in the AHL in his site’s fantastic glossary, if you’re curious.
ATOs
Bergsland, Chisholm, Hreschuk, and Shlaine were released from their Amateur Tryout contract (ATO) today. Those four have all signed contracts for this season with the Texas Stars, and they’ll head there now. The ATO was simply the vehicle for them to be with Dallas in training camp, as they don’t have entry-level contracts with the NHL club (as the players who were loaned do).
While Chisholm, Bergsland, and Shlaine all played games for Texas last spring, they did so on ATOs before signing their full-season contracts, as they’ve all done since. So technically, they were still “amateur” players rather than “professional” players, though that will change in their first AHL game this year.
PTOs
Players without entry-level contracts with the NHL club who have played professional hockey on a full-season contract require (you guessed it) a Professional Tryout contract (PTO) in order to join an NHL team for training camp.
Often this is just a matter of routine for players who are expected to play exclusively in the AHL. That’s the situation for Jack Becker, Kyle Looft, Curtis McKenzie, Michael Karow and Kaleb Pearson, all of whom have already been signed by Texas for this upcoming season.
Antoine Bibeau and Cross Hanas were also released today, and those two are not signed to AHL deals yet, as far as we know. Thus, today’s release means that these two players are now free to sign with another club, or for Texas to negotiate an AHL deal with either one.
We talked with Bibeau last week, so you know the situation there. From my perspective, it would be a neat story if his solid play this preseason turned into a solid professional contract after he returned from playing in Europe back home to North America with his young family. But we will have to wait and see how that shakes out, whether with this or another organization.
As for Hanas, you probably know about how he is a Dallas native who grew up playing hockey primarily at the Valley Ranch StarCenter. He also grew up hanging out with the sons of two other former Dallas Stars2 players, so you can imagine how special his appearance for the Stars on Tuesday was for him.
However, that appearance also involved a lower-body injury. and while Hanas was able to come back from that injury in the third period, he hasn’t been skating in practice since then (at least that I’ve seen), so we’ll have to wait and see if the organization ends up signing him to a deal when he’s back to full health, or if he ends up looking elsewhere to continue his professional career—either in North American or Europe.
This count excludes four injured players who will be assigned to the minors when they’re healthy: Cameron Hughes, Kyle McDonald, Luke Krys, and Chase Wheatcroft.
We’ll have a longer piece on Cross Hanas coming out in the near future, so stay tuned for that.
mr. tiffin... will you ever be divulging the cool thing about jason robertson that you teased almost a week ago? I've been on the edge of my seat since.