Report: Miro Heiskanen Not Expected to Return in First Round of Stanley Cup Playoffs

Expectations (and knees) are tricky things

On Saturday afternoon, Dallas Stars lost a game in regulation for the first time in three weeks. You’d think that wouldn’t necessarily cause a panic, but given the way the Stars have been winning games lately, a bad loss on a late mistake just fanned the flames of anxiety that have been smoldering underneath the third-best team in the NHL for a while now.

As the Stars continue to struggle to limit shots and chances against, one obvious cause for those difficulties is the absence of Miro Heiskanen. Without their top defenseman, the Stars have struggled to consistently dictate three periods of a game, and while Thomas Harley has stepped up admirably in Heiskanen’s absence, there’s no denying that Dallas would benefit greatly from other defensemen being able to play down a “slot” on the blue line.

Before the game, when asked for an update on Heiskanen by local media, Pete DeBoer said simply that there was “no update,” saying Heiskanen was still skating and “slowly coming along, but still a long way off.”

Well, it turns out that “long way off” might mean more than just the rest of the season and ‘at some point during the first round of the playoffs,’ as DeBoer, Tom Gaglardi, and others have previously said.

Because the latest update about Heiskanen’s progress came during Saturday afternoon’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins. During the first TV timeout, ESPN’s Leah Hextall reported that she had spoken with Jim Nill earlier that day, who said that the Stars do not expect Heiskanen back in the first round of the playoffs at all.

Hextall also went on to say that with regard to Tyler Seguin, Nill said Seguin “may get one or two regular season games in, and that both players would have usage and minutes managed when they return—though what that means in practice would likely be that, if the player looks good, they’ll play as much as Pete DeBoer asks them to. And with Miro Heiskanen, as Hextall went on to say, DeBoer would likely play him for every minute he possibly could, within reason.

And this morning, someone with a long track record of breaking Stars news confirmed this report: Sean Shapiro.

If you’re looking for some shred of hope to cling to about Heiskanen somehow still returning in the first round, I suppose you could try to do some gymnastics with the word “expect,” which is less deterministic than many other words that Nill, et al. could have used. But overall, it sounds like Heiskanen is likely not going to make a heroic return in two weeks.

The other bit of hope you might find is in a historical comparison, when Derian Hatcher was suspended for the Stars’ first five playoff games of their 1999 Stanley Cup run. Doug Lidster and Brad Lukowich came into the lineup to fill out the blue line in Hatcher’s absence while Sergei Zubov, Mike Modano and even Shawn Chambers played massive minutes—Modano averaged over 28 per night—en route to a 4-0 sweep of the Edmonton Oilers. You know what happened after Hatcher returned in the second round.

As for the present, Heiskanen’s expected absence for all of the first round is nonetheless a big blow to the Stars’ hopes of getting past Colorado (their most likely first-round opponent). And that’s because this would mean the Stars will have to do something this year that they have not done since 2016: win a playoff game without Miro Heiskanen.

Since Heiskanen’s rookie year in 2018-19, the Stars have played 82 playoff games (as well as three round-robin seeding games) in the 2020 COVID bubble. And in every single one of those games, Heiskanen has been there, averaging nearly 27 minutes per night.

With the playoffs just two weeks away, it’s not altogether shocking to hear that Heiskanen isn’t expected to factor into the first round at all. When you break it down, if the Stars think Heiskanen will need even just four weeks of skating and practice to get ready to play significant minutes in the playoffs (managed or otherwise) after being off the ice for two months, then ripping off the bandage now and saying he won’t be back for the first round makes sense. If nothing else, that would avoid letting Heiskanen’s potential return continue to linger over the team in the final weeks of the season.

Remember, Tyler Seguin began skating around the beginning of February, well over a month ago, and he’s still not expect back for at least another week. And while his surgery was in early December and was on a hip rather than a knee, Seguin is still actively working his way back, not yet taking real contact in practice.

Little wonder, then, that Heiskanen is expected to need a similar amount of time at the minimum, if we’re calculating from when he began to skate during the last week of March.

Undoubtedly, a team like Colorado could easily win the Stanley Cup this year, and Dallas’s hopes of getting past them early on look a lot hazier without their best defenseman in the lineup. But on the other hand, Dallas has piled up wins in Heiskanen’s absence, going 18-5-3 with a +31 goals differential despite not playing very well for long stretches in most of those games—even drawing crticism and concern from their own head coach in recent weeks. If nothing else, winning that much when you’re playing this unsatisfactorily is a sign of extremely high, ahem, expectations.

So now, the Stars will have to find a way in their final six games of the season to start looking like the team that they’ve shown themselves to be for much of the first 76: one that has a ceiling at the very top of the NHL, even when they’ve been playing closer to the floor in recent weeks. And it sounds like they may have to win at least four more of those games without their best player. There’s a first time for everything.

Study by John Singer Sargeant (Public Domain)