Taking Stock of a Sobering July 1 for the Dallas Stars

Well, things have Certainly Happened

Update: About 30 minutes after I published this, the Stars signed forward Joel Kiviranta for one year at $1 million.

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I’ve almost entirely ignored the little social media notifications about comments, replies, and Other Types of Engagement today outside of this site. That’s been a result of being quite busy today between writing, press-conferencing, and podcasting.

(By the way, check out AIH’s Free Agency episode today, recorded right in the thick of things. It’s also on Spotify/Apple Podcasts and such, for the audiophiles out there.)

The other reason I’ve mostly avoided the Deluge of Takes today is that, in Dallas Stars world, there is a large amount of frustration from fans. The Stars haven’t acquired a single NHL player besides re-signing Arttu Hyry and Kyle Capobianco. In fact, they lost a popular young player they drafted and developed, and who scored 20 goals last year when they very much needed him to. Losing Mavrik Bourque for a couple of draft picks is a disappointment, even if the Stars wound up in a situation where they didn’t have much choice.

Jim Nill said today, in fact, that the Stars knew that there was a possibility of trading Bourque even a year ago.

“We knew going into this season that it was gonna be a tough decision,” Nill said today. “The numbers, like I said, you get the calculator out, and the numbers don’t add up eventually. When you get the sum of a lot of good players, those numbers have to add up. Tough decision.”

Nill was diplomatic as ever in his usual July 1 comments today, but he did confirm one thing: the threat of offer sheets was a very real consideration in trading Bourque along with Ilya Lyubushkin today.

“Mavrik became a pretty valuable player,” Nill said, “But because of his situation, we were worried about offer sheets. Also, he’s a young player. He’s starting to hit his prime, and teams are trying to figure out, what’s his situation? Where’s he gonna plateau and stuff? So it was what we thought was best for our organization. We had to be cap compliant, and we wanted to get the most assets we could for him, so it was kind of a mix of both, and probably the best situation for us.”

When asked whether the Robertson situation had an impact on decisions like the Bourque trade, Nill was careful not to point any fingers. But he was also realistic about the fact that everything was connected.

“It definitely comes into play,” Nill said of the Robertson negotiations. “Every contract does. Talk about Mavrik [Bourque]. We were looking at that contract situation three months [ago]. We thought, ‘This is what his number was.’ The game is ever-evolving, and those numbers change all the time, and so you make changes. So, does it come into play? Yes, it definitely does. But we have a rough idea where it fits, so when we have to make decisions, we kind of know where it falls into place.”

One way to interpret those remarks is that the Stars had Bourque’s value at a lower number earlier in the year, and that his ask ended up being a lot higher after the season. Combine that with the unresolved Robertson situation, and I wonder if the Stars found themselves pretty stuck. Thus, they had to move Bourque for a price that was pretty close to what an offer sheet would have returned anyway, with Lyubushkin’s contract heading out the door as well.

If you’re a fan, I’d imagine your disappointment about losing Bourque is further compounded by how the acquisitions of Matthew Knies and Zach Werenski(!) turned from imminent deals into never-minds. The Stars have, under Jim Nill, generally been a team that stays quiet right until they’re about to pounce on a big acquisition, and then it comes off with flair and bombast. This week was uncharacteristically frustrating, to say the least. Fans in Dallas are accustomed to seeing their team be the one players force trades to, after all

But Nill was careful not to let any frustration or disappointment creep into his comments today. When asked how they keep an even keel, Nill reminded people that a lot of things are going on that most people never hear about.

“We come here every day trying to, how can we make the team better?” Nill said. “How can we improve the organization? Sometimes, the number of things we talk about usually, I don’t know what the percentage is, but they don’t happen very often. You only see so many trades in sports every day. There’s only so many. But the groundwork that’s going on behind the scenes, it’s never-ending. So there’s lots of discussion, lots of talk. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. I think the message is that we’re just trying to be as competitive and as good of a team as we can be. And we’re gonna continue to do that.”

Here’s what the Stars have to show for the last week:

• Mavrik Bourque & Ilya Lyubushkin were traded to Nashville for a 2027 2nd-round pick and Vegas’s 2028 3rd-round pick.

• Kyle Capobianco was re-signed for two years at $875K

• Arttu Hyry was re-signed for two years at $900K

• Jason Robertson remains in RFA limbo (and in fact could still be offer-sheeted, though I don’t think that’s all that likely now). Nill said there was no update on talks with Robertson’s camp today, reiterating that Dallas still would like to sign him if possible.

• Alex Petrovic left Dallas to sign for two years with the Florida Panthers.

  • By the way: Nill actually confirmed today that Dallas extended Petrovic an offer to return to the Stars right after the season ended, but Petrovic ultimately chose to go elsewhere.

• Texas players like Artem Shlaine, Luke Krys, and a few others have been recently re-signed, but their NHL impact is yet to be determined, if it happens at all this year.

• Jamie Benn talks are continuing, Nill said, and he expects a decision soon:

  • “Jamie’s had discussions. I’m gonna talk to him more once we get through all this. Feeling pretty comfortable with where he’s at, but I want to finalize it with him, yes. That’s coming up.”

If you presume that Benn comes back with something like an $850K base salary plus more incentives like last year, then the Stars’ roster currently looks like this. If you assume Kyle Capobianco starts the year in the AHL for cap reasons, then Dallas would have just under $12.5 million cap space with Robertson still un-signed ($12,489,667 to be exact).

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Steel-Hintz-Seguin
Benn-Duchene-Hyry
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

Oettinger
DeSmith

If the Stars do bring Robertson back, either on a one-year deal after arbitration or (more unlikely) a longer extension, then you can move Steel and Benn down a bit in the lineup. Should the Stars end up trading Robertson, you’d assume they’d be looking for a way to get more winger help in return, directly or otherwise.

And Nill confirmed that he expects more trading to be happening throughout the summer.

“Today is kind of a day where it’s the free agent frenzy. Things will settle down now. We’re gonna sit back, regroup,” Nill said. “I think it’s gonna be a, I don’t know if ‘chaotic’ summer, but a summer of a lot of moves, a lot of trades.”

In a sense, you have to at least give the Stars credit for not making moves just to make moves, as you could argue they did in 2024. But still, there’s no denying that the roster is thinner than it was last year—and it could be far more so if Robertson doesn’t come back.

“It was a very shallow UFA market,” Nill said. “Some players did very well, and good for them, well-deserved. But I think there’s gonna be a lot of movement now within the game over the next couple of months.”

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What is a fair assessment of Bourque’s value, for Dallas?

Yes, he scored 20 goals (three of which were empty-netters) last year. His release is not a strength of his game, but to his great credit, he found a way to score from much closer to the net while playing with top-six players. One of the things that sets NHL players apart from minor-leaguers is their ability to modify their game to maximize their strengths, and you saw Bourque do that this year.

Given his age, Bourque still probably has more to give, and Nashville is likely to bet on just that with a Stankoven-ish contract, if he’ll sign it. It’s important to make a distinction between the vibes of this move and the reality of what Dallas lost. Fans tend to value young players they’ve seen improve over time more than similar players on other teams, and Dallas was forced to trade Bourque away in what feels like the absolute nadir of Vibe Time.

Dallas will hope that they can replace some (or all) of Bourque’s production this year, but especially the following season, when the cap situation gets much easier for them. Sure, they’ll have Lian Bichsel’s first RFA deal to figure out and a ton of forward holes to fill, but they’ll also have $30-40 million in cap space with which to do so.

As for this year, can Tyler Seguin make up for some of Bourque’s production? Well, he kind of has to, now. If his ACL is healed enough to let him do so, Seguin could thrive next to Hintz, or possibly next to Duchene, with whom he has proven chemistry.

Other young players with strong rookie years like Artem Shlaine might get a chance for short call-ups at some point this year as well, if the need arises. But no one in the system has the pedigree of Bourque, and I don’t see a viable replacement for what he did last year in the system right now, even if a couple of the college guys are closer than others.

Dallas’s thin forward depth got thinner today, and you are fully justified in feeling skeptical of how a team that finished the playoffs with two fourth lines is going to look deeper next year after Nashville just poked a hole in the side of the swimming pool. In a weird way, I worry less about the loss of Bourque itself, and more about how Dallas is going to try to make up for it. They may have dodged some of the foolhardy contracts handed out today, but they do need to bring some bodies in—or at least re-sign one of them.

Today was a frustrating day, so perhaps the best way to view it is that this might be the lowest part of the valley the Stars will have to walk through in making their run next season. Some level of surgery was necessary, but todays’ procedure wound up going from arthroscopic to fairly invasive. Dallas will hope the healing process finds them stronger in the long run, but it’s hard to see past the pain, right now.