Saturday Dallas Stars Roundup: Roope Hintz Good to Go, Matt Duchene Returns to Center as Stars Search for More 5v5 Offense

So long, QueBäck line

The biggest news out of morning skate today is that Roope Hintz is good to go for tonight, which means he hasn’t suffered any serious injury after taking a Miro Heiskanen one-timer to the boot in Minnesota on Thursday.

Gulutzan called it a “big relief,” which is a sentiment surely echoed by the whole fanbase. That meant that the top six forward group remained the same, but a couple of other changes showed up during line rushes, which looked like this:

Steel-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Benn
Hryckowian-Duchene-Bourque
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell
Bastian, Erne (scratches)

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Petrovic¹
Capobianco-Lyubushkin
Kolyachonok-Lundkvist (scratches)

Oettinger (starting)
DeSmith

After talking to Gulutzan today, we learned the following about the lineup:

• Ilya Lyubushkin is coming back into the lineup after missing a week with a lower-body injury he picked up against San Jose on December 5th.

  • “He couldn’t have played Thursday, but he was starting to feel better,” Gulutzan said of Lyubushkin. “Three more days, and we had a good skate, so he’s good to go.”

• Nils Lundkvist is not quite fully healthy yet after missing the Minnesota game with an illness, so he is still out.

• Vladislav Kolyachonok is a healthy scratch tonight.

Adam Erne and Nate Bastian skated, but neither will play tonight. Erne is still on LTIR, but his recovery is going better than expected.

• “He’s getting very close, too,” Gulutzan said of Erne. “His timeline has accelerated a little bit. He’s not ready to play yet. I would say he’s day-to-day, but he’s certainly progressed quicker than we thought with this surgery.”

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As for the people who are playing, a couple of things jumped out about the forwards in particular—most notably, Matt Duchene’s moving to center, pushing Justin Hryckowian over to left wing.

And Gulutzan confirmed that part of the rationale for that move is to help the Stars’ 5v5 offense, which he says has been “below average” (as the underlying numbers would agree with).

“[Duchene] can drive play up the middle,” Gulutzan said. “He’s got speed up the middle. And every team needs a bit of that driver up the middle. So, we wanted him to get his feet underneath him. He’d been out for a long time. We got three games in, three practices, and now a day off. And that day off is as important as the other stuff, too, because it allows him to regroup and get on this moving train.”

Gulutzan reiterated that there was a plan for Duchene’s return to happen gradually, much like Jamie Benn’s did, before slotting him back into more of a long-term spot. So after playing on the wing for a few games, it looks like Duchene will once again be looked to for bringing more 5-on-5 offense up the middle—which is something he acknowledged the team very much needs right now.

“Casual, passive, I don’t know what it was,” Gulutzan said. “We’ve won with great goaltending, we’ve won with great specialty teams. Have we won with great 5-on-5 play? No, we haven’t. We’ve been passive or casually winning for a long period of time.”

Gulutzan said that it’s still good to see the Stars can win with heavy lifting from their goaltending and special teams, as those parts of the game are critical to making a good team a great one. But it’s the core foundation of play at even-strength that he’s focused on improving right now—especially offensively.

“Five-on-five, I thought we’ve been average,” Gulutzan said today. “Defensively, we’ve been above-average, offensively, we’ve been below average. When all things get equal, you need that part of your game. So that’s where we’re putting our focus in.”

And as the Stars’ coach pointed out, Florida is a great team to use when testing out your five-on-play, as they generally don’t let teams beat them with “casual” or “passive” play.

So we’ll see if Duchene can help boost the Stars’ offense more regularly now that he’s back at center. But was breaking up the QueBäck line a tough decision for the coaching staff, given their steady play so far as the team’s most-used 5-on-5 line?

“Yeah, it always is,” Gulutzan acknowledged. “But I hope you guys are getting to know me a little bit here. It’s on paper. You get into the game, and you’re coming out of power plays, if it’s a heavy power play game, then you’re gonna be able to put that line back together. I mix and match pieces a little bit here and there depending on the energy of the group. It’s on paper, it’s a paper move.”

In other words, don’t be surprised if we see the line come and go throughout the course of a game, or even the season, when Gulutzan is looking for (as he called it) a “little kick” for players. Whether it’s putting Robertson with Johnston and Rantanen or Duchene up on a top-six line, such situational moves are always on the table.

“Will you see them together? Absolutely, I can almost guarantee it,” Gulutzan said of the Hryckowian trio. “But maybe not as much.We’ve got a star player in [Duchene], who’s got his game speed up to par now, and this is just part of it.”

Still, it sure sounds like it’s a lot more enjoyable to be looking for growth and improvement when you’re second in the NHL rather than on the bubble of a playoff spot.

Minutes Managed

Another trend that has been noticeable lately is that Wyatt Johnston and Roope Hintz’s time on the penalty kill has decreased markedly, as they’ve been passed up by players like Justin Hryckowian and Oskar Bäck at 4-on-5:

HockeyViz.com (Note Esa Lindell breaking the chart up there)

Certainly you’d be hard-pressed to argue with the recent results, as the Stars are nearing their franchise record in consecutive penalty kills. (From my research, I believe they’re still a ways from the NHL record, set by the 1999-2000 Washington Capitals who killed 53 in a row.)

But is the idea of limiting Johnston and Hintz’s minutes on the PK to save them for more offensive situations?

“100%,” Gulutzan confirmed. “Our conversations in the room have been, I wanna make sure I don’t get them too off [the PK], because they’re elite penalty-killers. But we have a good rhythm going right now with five². We haven’t been ahead in all of our games that we’ve played, so now you’re saving those two top centermen for a little bit of offense coming out of a kill. So that’s the reason for the drop in their numbers.”

Gulutzan’s Oilers used to do the same thing by putting McDavid and Draisaitl out together right at the end of a successful penalty kill in order to take advantage of a team whose top guys had just spent a good chunk of time on the ice.

Still, Gulutzan said they are going to need Hintz and Johnston on the penalty kill at some point, so they may look to get them back up to playing more regular time on the PK before too long.

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Interestingly, Gulutzan said they don’t approach Miro Heiskanen’s time on the penalty kill with similar reserve.

“We don’t care about Miro,” Gulutzan deadpanned. “We just play Miro as much as we can play Miro.”

Gulutzan then smiled a bit and explained about how they’ve tried to manage Heiskanen’s usage.

“No, we just monitor Miro with his days off and stuff, too. Now that [Harley] is back too, it’s gonna relieve some minutes for him and [Lindell]. But he’s [Heiskanen] an elite defenseman. You get behind that bench and you’re trying to win a game, and it’s 4-3 or 3-2, you’re not worried about Thursday. you’re in the moment.”

Aside #1: Speaking of Harley, he is most certainly back in action, as he let fly a wrist shot during the last stages of power play practice today that shattered a pane of glass behind the net, forcing the residual action to the other end of the ice:

Aside #2: it’s worth listening [as it always is] to Mike Heika and Daryl Reaugh’s most recent Podman Rush podcast, because Heika goes into good detail about how you perhaps can see some of the truly elite elements of Heiskanen’s game most clearly when he’s on the penalty kill. Highly recommend it.

So getting back to Heiskanen’s usage on the penalty kill, it boils down to this: the Stars have one of the best defensemen in hockey, and they’re not going to worry about leaning on him too much in critical moments if he’s holding up all right. And thus far, Heiskanen has taken it all in stride just fine from everything they can tell—even if he occasionally hits an absurd number, like 30+ minutes in a regulation game.

“We’ve done a good job with Miro, resting him the days in between,” Gulutzan said. “And what player doesn’t wanna keep playing? In all these TV timeouts, and he’s sitting there with a 70 heart rate 'cause he’s an elite machine—you’re gonna use him.”

Lingering Questions

• Is Hryckowian moving to the wing going to make it easier for the Stars to send him down to the AHL when they have Erne back healthy? Certainly Hryckowian’s waivers-exempt status makes his re-assignment a painless move if it needs to happen short-term to clear a spot on the 23-man roster, but he’s clearly been one of the team’s 12 best forwards so far this year, particularly after holding down that third-line center spot. But given the team’s need for offense at evens, he might have to show he can be similarly significant on the wing if he wants to force the Stars to consider sending a player like Erne through waivers instead.

• With Lyubushkin coming back and Lundkvist nearly healthy, the Stars are about to have eight defensemen in the lineup. Cap space isn’t an issue, but something will have to give when Erne is ready to be activated. My money is still on Capobianco probably being sent down before Kolyachonok, as he seems more likely to clear waivers. But I have been wrong before, at least once (I’m told).

• The Stars need another scoring winger. If they want to run Johntson-Hintz-Duchene down the middle, then that means you can have Jason Robertson on one line and Mikko Rantanen on another (or occasionally put together in emergent situations), but I don’t think Sam Steel and Jamie Benn can be the other top-six wingers for this team in the playoffs, and probably not even the entire season. As always, I am open to being proven wrong, but Seguin’s absence really has made the wing a bit too thin for this team to ignore, post-deadline.

1. For those who care, the Harley-Petrovic pairing actually rolled out fourth in line rushes, but they’ll be the second pairing tonight for all intents and purposes.

2. Those five forwards being, I believe: Steel, Blackwell, Faksa, Bäck, and Hryckowian.