Tuesday Tidbits: Brendan Smith and Nils Lundkvist Return to Face the Rangers as Texas Freezes Over

Brendan Smith played three games in December for the Dallas Stars, the last of which came on December 18. But as my press box neighbor Sam Nestler reported today from New York, Smith will be back in the lineup against his former club at Madison Square Garden tonight, with Matt Dumba being the healthy scratch and Jake Oettinger starting in net.

Additionally, DeBoer also said that Mason Marchment required surgery of some kind (we would presume on his face, given where the puck hit him), and is not on the road trip. Marchment was still described as “week-to-week,” so whether that means his recovery timeline will end up being longer than the estimated three weeks remains to be seen. I would expect we will have a better idea once Marchment begins skating with the team again after they return.

As far as Smith’s return to the lineup, I think it’s a good thing to get him in more regularly. Smith was honest when he came into training camp about what stage of his career he’s in. In fact, when I asked him in September where he saw himself fitting into the Stars’ lineup, he corrected me and said he was primarily focused on trying to make the team to begin with.

I’ll admit, it caught me off guard for a veteran of almost 700 NHL games to use the same “trying to win a job” response that a recent draft pick might use, but it showed a lot of self-awareness by the veteran defenseman. Smith has played for five NHL teams across 14 seasons, and he’s seen enough to know how the league works. He’s played fewer than half of the Stars’ games so far this season, and that’s despite a heavy schedule amid multiple injuries to Dumba and a flu bug that hit the team hard.

I have no doubt that Smith would have preferred to play more than just three games in December, because all hockey players want to play every game. But even when the 20-year-old Lian Bichsel was called up and played every game, Smith remained his same, sanguine self. Being a seventh defenseman is not a job he’s done in the past, but he’s adapted (Pete DeBoer used the word “embraced”) to the role with all the professionalism you’d expect, and it’s nice to see him back in the lineup in a game a little more special than others.

In fact, one thing Smith (or “Smitty” to his teammates) mentioned a few weeks ago is how much he’s grown to appreciate things like being in the league at the same time as his brother, Reilly, who was drafted by Dallas in 2009. Reilly now plays for the Rangers, so you wonder if the decision to play Brendan tonight by Pete DeBoer took that familial connection into consideration.

That said, Smith has also been serviceable when called upon this year, for Dallas. In those three December games, Smith played eight minutes in the overtime win against St. Louis, 11 minutes in the great 3-1 victory over Washington, and 16 minutes in the defeat to Toronto, when the roster was so depleted with the flu bug that Alex Petrovic was called up to play alongside Smith, and Miro Heiskanen played 29:50 in regulation. Smith played the 3rd-most minutes on the Stars in that game almost three weeks ago, but hasn’t played since. So to get back in the lineup against his brother and his old team is surely a nice way to start the road trip for the veteran.

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As we’ve said before, the decision to scratch Dumba is pretty telling about where DeBoer thinks his blue line is at. The summer free-agent signing hasn’t worked out how anyone was hoping for, but for the time being, all the Stars can do is hope he rebounds a bit until they find a plan the coaches like better before the trade deadline. Whether that plan will include Dumba is tough to say right now. There’s no doubt that he’s got some work to do to earn any such spot by the time April rolls around.

We will also say, once again, that this is an encouraging sign for Nils Lundkvist, who is also facing his former team (from whom he requested a trade before Jim Nill acquired him back in 2022). Lundkvist was the player who would have been scratched for a player like Smith to get into the lineup in the past two seasons, but he’s largely held a spot down this year, to his credit. The underlying numbers continue to love Lundkvist, but when it comes to earning his coaches’ trust down the stretch, the 24-year-old defenseman has made some good strides.

One such sign might be that Lundkvist has not been Dallas’s most sheltered defenseman this year when it comes to offensive vs. defensive zone starts. Not even close to it, in fact. Here are last season and this season’s Stars teams, for comparison:

Last year, Lundkvist was heavily protected, starting averaging nearly 14 offensive zone starts for every 9 defensive zone starts. This year, he’s almost exactly even, averaging about 9 OZ/9 DZ, as you can see above. All the offensive zone starts the Stars can spare are being given to Harley and Heiskanen, who profiles as the ones most likely to capitalize on them. That’s preferable to using offensive zone starts for players the coaches don’t trust in the defensive zone, as seemed to be the case at times last year with Lundkvist.

It’s not like Lundkvist has been turned into Esa Lindell 2.0 or anything, but it is telling that both Lian Bichsel and Brendan Smith have averaged fewer defensive zone starts than Lundkvist this year. And Lundkvist, to his credit, has not sunk under the weight of that trust. He’s a +8 in raw terms of goals that happen when he’s on the ice, and the underlying numbers like expected goals rank him second on the team’s blue line behind Thomas Harley.

Obviously that isn’t intended to say Lundkvist has been more valuable than Lindell or Miro Heiskanen, but that’s not the measuring stick for Lundkvist. He’s not those players, even though he’s played with Lindell quite a bit this year. DeBoer has said he’d like to see more offense from Lundkvist, and that will really be the key to his longevity with Dallas, now that the defensive side has improved.

If Lundkvist can continue to show that he is not a liability while also creating a bit more offense, then I think he has a chance at making the playoff roster in a more meaningful way than his first-period cameos last year. He’s on his way to doing so, but I still think he has more to do before he’s really seen as an integral part of the playoff group by Deboer. As they say, it will be up to the player to take the decision out of the coach’s hands.

Of course, what Jim Nill does before the trade deadline will also have a big impact on these decisions, too.

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Finally, I wanted to caution everybody about the cold weather with a story from my past in Texas.

In December of 2022, Dallas temperatures dipped as low as 10 degrees Farenheit, before rising again starting on Christmas Eve. And that same December 24, I was getting ready to leave my apartment in north Irving to head to a Christmas Eve service, only to hear a sound from my closet. I walked over and opened the door, and I saw a trickle of water dripping from the ceiling access panel to the crawl space. I put a trash can underneath it, and then started to send an e-mail to management.

I then heard a sound from the bathroom, where water was also leaking through the light in the ceiling, which is not how lights are supposed to work. I suppose hydoluminescence might be something other, more modern apartments have embraced, but my first thought was that water and light sockets are generally kept separate, and for good reason!

About ten seconds after that, I heard a crash from the closet, and I returned to see that the leak had turned into a deluge, while the access panel in the closet ceiling had turned into a giant hole. The fire alarm started sounded moments later.

I would later discover that it had been a fire sprinkler line that was currently unleashing its lovely mixture of fire retardant and acrid water mixed with drywall and fiberglass insulation from the flooded crawl space, into my apartment. The closet was trashed, complete with most of my clothes. The water poured out into my bedroom, and I quickly realized that the living room and bathroom were next.

After about 15 minutes, the fire department showed up and turned off the sprinkler system. A couple of maintenance folks from the apartment complex turned up to give the wry expressions and shakes of the head that are all you can expect in the midst of a disaster. By then, all but my kitchen and a corner of the living room had standing water. It was not my ideal way to spend Christmas Eve.

The good news is that my former boss commanded me to come and live in her spare room across town in order to stave off the worst of the misery. Her hospitality still touches me to this day, long after she’s moved across the country. Kindness lurks around every corner, and especially the worst ones.

But the main reason I’m writing this isn’t just to reminisce, but to warn you: Before any such disaster befalls you, take pictures of what you own, in case it gets damaged. Take a video of your belongings for insurance purposes. Save receipts, which will make it much easier to claim full value on your insurance (renter’s or otherwise). And know what is in your policy. Take pictures of your thermostats and open sink cabinets to prove you’re doing your part to prevent burst pipes.

For my part, my apartment complex directed me to my renter’s insurance while attempting to continue charging me rent for the next month, when I was unable to inhabit my apartment due to their insufficient maintenance of their sprinkler system. I did a lot of research and talked to some folks, and thankfully I was able to push back a bit to avoid the worst of the costs really hitting me. It still wasn’t a fun experience, but I’m wiser for having gone through it.

For instance, I learned that landlords are responsible to ensure that wet sprinkler systems are in areas that maintain temperatures above 40F degrees, per the Fire Marshal’s notice in March of 2021. And I’ve learned that by demonstrating that you know how the justice system works, you can often convince even a landlord/corporation that it is in their best interest to make some good faith gestures rather than exposing themselves to public scrutiny. Most corporations, it turns out, do not prefer public scrutiny, or scrutiny of any kind! “The truth will set you free” has never been good news for the people making money off the prisons.

So, protect yourself this winter. Everyone loves to talk about how Texans don’t know how to drive in ice and snow, but you can’t always anticipate the negligence of other drivers, or other landlords. Hopefully you’re staying warm this week. There is a hockey game on tonight.