The Story of the 2025-26 Dallas Stars Begins Tonight

Unless it already began on Thursday. Or unless it doesn't begin until opening night. Otherwise, tonight!

The Dallas Stars play an NHL game tonight against the St. Louis Blues in what will be the first preseason game for the entire league.

Of the six preseason games Dallas will play, I wouldn’t expect to see something terribly close to the opening night lineup until the final warmup against Colorado on October 4. But that doesn’t mean these games don’t still matter a great deal to the players and coaches involved.

Speaking of Those Involved, here’s what we saw at American Airlines Center this morning, where Neil Graham ran morning skate (though Glen Gulutzan will be the head coach tonight). The line trios were a little tough to pick out (we’re all rusty right now), but these seem like the most likely combinations from what I saw (though the fourth line crossed me up at first, so take that one with two grains of salt):

Blackwell-Steel-Bourque
Erne-Faksa-Bastian
Bäck-Hryckowian-Lind
Stranges-Hyry-Hemming

Kolyachonok-Lundkvist
Taylor-Petrovic
Capobianco-White

Remi Poirier and Antoine Bibeau (much more on him below) are in net for Dallas tonight, with Poirier likely starting.

Here are the Blues lines and pairings, courtesy of someone vaguely familiar:

A Word about Gameday Coverage at Stars Thoughts This Year

My goal last year was to chronicle the story of the 2024-25 Dallas Stars as fully as I possibly could. My hope for Stars Thoughts has been, since day one, that readers can come away from this work with a fair, comprehensive, insightful, and (most importantly) enjoyable impression of what the journey of that year’s team was, good or bad. I want to keep loving what I write, even if I make mistakes. And I hope that translates into something folks keep wanting to read.

I dare not ask if I actually accomplished that last year, but by the growing number of supporters I keep seeing, I’m willing to accept that I might not have completely botched the job. Thank you all for your support.

Still, we’re always looking to improve. So with that said, here’s my plan for what gameday coverage will look like this year:

1. For games I’m covering in-person (which will be all but one or two home games and a few road games), I’ll usually have a Morning Skate Update of some kind (which is kind of what this is). Those will feature exclusive conversations and interviews that you can’t find anywhere else, and they’ll be for paid subscribers.

   1. Immediately after the game ends, I’ll start a postgame chat thread for paid subscribers. That’ll give y’all a place to discuss the game and vent/revel while Exciting Media Things are happening.

   2. I’ll have an AfterThoughts piece typically up an hour or two after that. I’m planning to move away from the Game Beats-style blow-by-blow stuff in order not to flood your inbox or clog up postgame pieces with 4,000 words of minutiae. AfterThoughts will be analysis, along with some salient quotes, video clips, thoughts, and commentary. Those will remain open for everyone to read.

2. For games I’m covering remotely, I’ll write an AfterThoughts story after the game. Usually that will go up pretty shortly after the final buzzer, unless life dictates a bit of a delay until later that night or the following morning (at absolute latest). Y’all are more than welcome to use the chat during the game, too, though I’ve turned off e-mail notifications for anyone other than myself starting a chat thread to hopefully keep your inboxes a bit clearer.

As always, please continue to let me know if you want to see more or less of something, and I will take it into account (which is a nice way of saying I’ll ignore you if it’s a dumb idea).

When I finally decided to risk the switch to Substack last January in order to continue doing full-time beat coverage, I couldn’t have imagined how much support I would get. You all have made this happen, so any direct messages, e-mails, comments, or in-person comments are more than welcome, good or bad.

(And by the way, thank you to all the folks who have tracked me down to say hello over the past week. That has been an unexpected bit of encouragement, each and every time. Y’all are just great.)

Okay, let’s get to the fun stuff from this morning, including some chats with Vladislav Kolyachonok, Antoine Bibeau, Remi Poirier, Antonio Stranges, and Kole Lind.

• It was neat to have Neil Graham conducting what I believe is his first NHL media availability after morning skate today (prior prospect tournaments notwithstanding, of course). While we often got to speak with assistant coaches last preseason during Pete DeBoer’s recovery from his appendectomy, that was more of an anomaly. This year, with Graham speaking to the assembled media, I couldn’t help but think of what Glen Gulutzan has said is his belief in hierarchy. He trusts people to do their jobs, and it seems clear he has no issues with deputizing another coach to speak on his behalf, as Graham did this morning.
  
  I asked Graham what the plan is for the goalies tonight, and he did what I imagine a good deputy is supposed to do: He said that was Gulutzan’s call to make, so he didn’t want to speak out of turn. But after some conversations with other folks (not coaches), it seems like the plan is indeed for both goalies to play (as usually happens earlier in the preseason), with Poirier starting.
  

• I happened to be at the Texas Stars game on March 19th in which both Antonio Stranges and Kyle McDonald suffered injuries. Stranges took a big hit into the boards that kept him out for two months, though he did make it back into the lineup for the Stars during the Milwaukee series on May 21.
  
  I spoke with Stranges this morning in Dallas, and he confirmed that he injured both his collarbone and his sternum in that hit. Stranges also said the toughest part for him was that his entire upper-body had to be immobilized during the weeks after the injury, which meant he had a lot of catching up to do after he was finally able to start working out again just to get back into shape. It remains incredibly impressive that he scored two goals in the nine playoff games he got back for, given what he went through to return. Stranges put up 43 points in 55 games during the regular season before his injury.

• Kole Lind sounds excited to have so many returning players from last year’s Texas Stars team. We were chatting this morning about how uncommon it is for AHL teams to bring back so many of their key players, as seems likely to happen in Texas this year, and Lind corrected me when I said it hardly ever happens. “It never happens,” was his response.
  
  Texas did lose some big players for them last year, like Magnus Hellberg, Matěj Blümel, and Emilio Pettersen, and they’ll also be dealing with a few injuries to start the season, including ones to Luke Krys and Cameron Hughes. But overall, this roster looks like one that could be, yet again, a force to be reckoned with in the American Hockey League.

• Vladislav Kolyachonok was not overly enthusiastic about speaking with me today, but I give him a lot of credit for tolerating our conversation. Kolyachonok looks like he’ll be playing on a pairing with Nils Lundkvist to start the game tonight, and that should be a fun pair to watch, as both players are mobile with puck-moving abilities (as they say).
  
  Kolyachonok is already 10th all-time in NHL games played by Belarusin players. I asked Kolyachonok if there were any players he grew up modeling his game after, and he responded by asking me if I knew any Belarusian players (a fair question). We talked about a couple, including Ruslan Salei (whom longtime Stars fans certainly remember), as well as Mikhail Grabovski and the late Konstantin Koltsov.
  
  Kolyachonok declined to describe his own game in detail, but his reputation is one of being a hard-working player with a good amount of skill, and while he’s more lanky than outright “big,” his skating is noticeably smooth. Being a left shot could make finding a lineup spot a bit of a challenge for him on this NHL roster with four left-shots already pretty firmly planted on the team, but it never hurts to have good hockey players on your roster—wherever they end up playing.

• Remi Poirier said today that last year felt like almost two different seasons for him, and that some of his struggles to be consistent early in the season felt really strange, especially in retrospect. But Poirier said that once he was able to string a couple of good games together in the second half, everything started to come together, and of course, Texas Stars fans saw how much Poirier’s game came on later in the season, including the playoffs.
  
  Poirier also praised Magnus Hellberg, saying his former goalie partner was someone you could talk to about anything, which is really ideal for any partnership. (Hellberg’s friendly and open demeanor is something I also found to be very apparent, though my conversations with Hellberg were limited to his time in Finland with the Dallas club and some goalie coach chats last year in training camp. So, probably take Poirier’s word for it more than mine.)

• Finally, I got a chance to chat with Antoine Bibeau, the goaltender who is with the Stars in training camp on a professional tryout contract (PTO), along with a couple of other players like Anthony Cristoforo, Adam Erne, and Cross Hanas.
  
  It’s not entirely clear where the 31-year-old Bibeau will wind up to start this season. He has four games of NHL experience over the last decade, but he’s also backed up for a few NHL teams as well. So, whether he will end up partnering with his fellow Québécois Remi Poirier in Cedar Park or going somewhere else altogether isn’t quite certain. But Bibeau isn’t focused on the long-term right now.
  
  “I just thought it was a good opportunity for me,” Bibeau said on Saturday. “My wife’s pregnant, I’m getting older, and I was more patient this season as far as where I was going to play next season. I thought it was a good opportunity to just give myself a shot at coming back.”
  
  Bibeau’s career is a fascinating one. The Quebec native was drafted by the Maple Leafs in 2013, and after playing a couple of NHL games and backing up a few other times, he was eventually allowed to hit free agency in 2017, after which he signed with San Jose as a free agent. on a two-way deal, where they would assign him to the AHL.
  
  In 2019, Bibeau was traded to Colorado, where he got two more NHL games in November, only to end up needing season-ending hip surgery later that month after returning to the AHL.
  
  (I didn’t ask Bibeau about this today, but for those who remember just how deep into their goaltending depth Colorado ended up having to go during that bubble playoff run, I do wonder whether a healthy Bibeau might have wound up facing the Stars in that second-round series, when the Avalanche went to their third-string starter in Michal Hutchison, who played one fewer NHL game than Bibeau prior to the latter’s injury. It seems at least plausible that Bibeau could have been there to stop Joel Kiviranta, right? We will never know.)
  
  Since then, Bibeau has played for minor league affiliates of Carolina, Seattle, and Ottawa—inlcuding a brief stint with the Allen Americans in 2021-22. But after leaving to play in Europe for what was surely better pay than the ECHL, he’s ready to give his career another go back on this side of the Atlantic.
  
  “I always said that if something came up in North America that I thought made sense, and that I was excited about, I was open to coming back,” Bibeau said. “When Dallas came up with the PTO, I thought it was a great opportunity for me.”
  
  The Bibeaus had their first child, a three-year-old son, right before they left for Europe a few years ago. With another one now on the way, Antoine knows nothing is for sure, but he’s just focused on playing his game right now. And he says that’s been the same message from Dallas, too.
  
  “Obviously I bring some experience,” Bibeau said. “I’ve been around. But they just want me to be myself, have fun every day. And that’s what I’ve been doing so far, and it’s been good. At the same time, I understand that I’m a bit older, and I have some experience. So I try to do my best to help out a guy like Remi as best as I can.”
  
  Bibeau knows firsthand how valuable good mentorship can be, listing Alex Stalock and Jonthan Bernier as veteran NHL goalies who helped him when he was in Toronto, with Bernier in particular drawing his gratitude.
  
  “He was tremendous with me,” Bibeau says of Bernier. “Always there, supporting me […] I’ve had a lot of good goalies, and a lot of good humans around me. It’s always tough when you’re this young. It’s the first time you’re away from home, living on your own, just things like that. Sometimes it’s hockey-question related, but I’m also there for really anything.”
  
  However long Bibeau is the organization, and wherever he winds up, he sees it as his duty to help his fellow goalies right now—whoever that may end up being.
  
  “It doesn’t matter whether it’s hockey-related or just life,” Bibeau says of Poirier, his goalie partner for the day. “He is going through things I went through a few years ago. So, whatever I can do to help him.”