Tuesday Dallas Stars Update: Talking Shootout with Rantanen and Robertson, Defensive Zone Dissection, and No Jersey Surprises...Probably

We have some Reporting for you today

The Dallas Stars host their first home game of the regular season tonight at American Airlines Center against the Minnesota Wild.

Only the Stars skated this morning, as Minnesota played at home last night in a 4-3 shootout win over Los Angeles. So as far as Minnesota lines, we’ll have to wait until warm-ups to see what they bring. And said warm-ups won’t happen until something like 8:15pm, since the game is the second ESPN game of the night, which comes with a playoff-style 8:30 “scheduled” start time that I anticipate being more like an 8:45 puck drop (or perhaps even later, with all the opening night festivities). Playing in the Central Division is never an easy thing.

As far as what the Stars might roll out tonight, we did get a glimpse of lines this morning, and there are a few changes (as there will surely be in-game, too) based on what we saw at morning skate:

Steel-Hintz-Rantanen
Hryckowian-Duchene-Seguin
Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Blackwell-Faksa-Bastian

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Petrovic

Jake Oettinger, of course, will start in goal.

The big change tonight will be Alex Petrovic coming in, as Ilya Lyubushkin sits for his first healthy scratch of this (or last year’s) regular season. But Gulutzan made sure to point out this morning that the only reason for that change was to avoid keeping Petrovic “out too long.” And I think that’s notable, for a couple of reasons.