The Options (or Lack Thereof) for a Dallas Stars Defense without Lian Bichsel

Nils Lundkvist and Thomas Harley would be really great options right about now

At morning skate in New York today, Glen Gulutzan revealed the bad news: Despite some initial cautious optimism following Sunday’s game, Lian Bichsel will require surgery after sustaining an injury against Ottawa. He is projected to miss 6-8 weeks.

That means that Dallas will play the Rangers tonight with a blue line that will look something like this:

Lindell-Heiskanen
Capobianco-Lyubushkin
Kolyachonok-Petrovic

For those of you keeping score at home, that means Dallas will have one of the top defense pairings in the league, followed by four other defensemen who have either been healthy scratches for at least two games this season (Petrovic and Lyubushkin) or who cleared waivers and began the season with AHL Texas (Kolyachonok and Capobianco).

Decimated isn’t a strong enough term to describe the state of the Stars’ blue line right now. It’s more like a cannonball has passed through the center of the depth chart—which I suppose means “decimated” is actually somewhat appropriate, given the historical connotations of the term.

I have very artfully annotated the below graph to show this fact:

HockeyViz.com (Annotations by me)

Until his return on Sunday, Ilya Lyubushkin’s name was also crossed out. So while his healing couldn’t have come at a better time, he’s also the only one of the current bottom-four group of blueliners to have started on Opening Night for Dallas.