Tyler Seguin's ACL Injury Is Devastating on Every Level

The NHL needs more players like Tyler Seguin.

That fact was even more apparent this season than most, when the Stars began the season without Jamie Benn. Seguin filled visible captain’s roles like waiting for the team to leave the ice after games or being the de facto spokesman for the room after a tough loss. He’s a strong presence in any room he’s in, someone who’s intensely competitive nature meshes perfectly with his affable personality and quick wit.

It’s unfortunate that Seguin’s leadership has often had to manifest itself more in the tough times than the good ones. Go back to June of 2024, for example, and you can hear the emotion and perspective mixed in Seguin’s voice after a really tough elimination in Joe Pavelski’s final season.

Seguin was similarly honest this past summer, when the Stars flamed out against Edmonton for the second year in a row, with Seguin leading them to their only victory of the series in Game 1. But the one line that sticks with me is something Seguin knows all too well, right now:

“Playoffs and hockey don’t care about what you deserve,” Seguin said.

That statement was never truer than Tuesday night in New York, when Vladislav Gavrikov fell backwards onto Seguin’s knee, resulting in the most devastating three letters any athlete can hear: ACL.

“He’ll be out for months,” Glen Gulutzan said Wednesday morning. “We didn’t get great news today. I haven’t spoken to Tyler yet, but just letting everybody know that he’s gonna be out for a significant amount of time. Probably the rest of the season.”

“This is tough news for our whole group,” Gulutzan said, summing up what the entire fanbase is feeling today.

There will be time to talk about what the Stars can do in response to Seguin’s absence, just like there was at this exact same time last December, when Seguin underwent hip surgery before returning in the final game of the regular season.

If Seguin’s timeline for recovery is anything like Aleksander Barkov’s 7-9 months for his own ACL injury, then Gulutzan is probably right about Seguin’s being done for this season. And that is absolutely devastating news for the Stars, their fans, and most of all, Seguin himself.

As Dallas fans know, a freak injury to Tyler Seguin has become far too commonplace in his career. And in just about every case, it’s been something completely out of his control.

Back in 2014-15, Dmitry Kulikov was suspended four games in March after taking out Seguin’s MCL with what was properly called Clipping.¹

Seguin would return from that injury by doing something he would become unfortunately familiar with: Working really hard to recover.

The next year (2015-16) was the most promising Stars season in over a decade, but Seguin’s campaign was once again derailed when Anton Stralman’s skate cut his Achilles tendon in the spring. So Seguin again had to bear down for midterms, only to injure his calf muscle in his first and only playoff game for Dallas after coming back that spring.

Seguin would also miss the World Cup of Hockey later in 2016 in what was a big personal disappointment for an elite center at the top of his game, especially after NHL players never went back to the Olympics until (hopefully) 2026.

A few years later, in what would end up being the Stars’ best playoff run since 2000, Seguin opted to play through serious knee and hip injuries that began with a blocked shot right before the world stopped in March of 2020. The hip injury followed right before the round robin games in the Edmonton bubble, and he played through serious pain and injury as the Stars finally came up short against Tampa Bay.

The cost for doing so: His entire right leg ended up looking like it belong to another person, and Seguin would almost all of the following season.

In May of 2021, Seguin would nonetheless complete that most grueling comeback of all—which you should read about here—and it clearly tested him, as he said afterward.

You may not remember it by now, but Seguin nearly suffered another disastrous skate cut against Buffalo in 2023. Thankfully, that one required “only” dozens of stitches, rather than major surgery. This is what counts as good luck, as far as Seguin is concerned.

In the fall of 2024, Seguin and the Stars went into the season knowing that his hip might end up needing some attention as the year went on. But Seguin pushed as far as he could before it was agreed that Seguin needed to have surgery, so Seguin did a lot of what he had done back in 2020-21, this time investing in specialized recovery equipment for his house in order to accelerate his rehab process as much as he possibly could.

And it worked. Seguin got back in time for the playoffs, and boy oh boy, did the Stars ever end up needing him.

That’s the thing about Tyler Seguin: Despite how Bruins management labeled him, Seguin has proven year after year that he’s tougher than anyone ever seems to give him credit for. Because it turns out that the truest sort of resilience isn’t based on how big you are, how loudly you hit, or how violently you punch; real fortitude has to come from a deeper place than that.

Because every time you talk to Seguin about what it’s like to do long-term injury rehab, the same theme is always underneath it all: It’s very lonely work. And loneliness is the polar opposite to what it’s like to be in an NHL locker room, where brotherhood and bonding are baked into almost every single day of the season.

Seguin reflected a few weeks ago on how much he wound up missing even the negative parts of playing while he was recovering last year, such as a tough loss or extended travel. It has been a long time, in other words, since Tyler Seguin has taken any part of playing hockey for granted.

I don’t expect that to change any time soon, and it’s why you’d be foolish to think he’s not going to attack his ACL rehab the same way he’s faced down every other injury: He’ll do whatever it takes, because he always has.

Look, I’ve watched basically every minute of hockey Tyler Seguin has played for the Dallas Stars in his career. Even when I was just watching games on TV back in 2013, it was obvious even from thousands of miles away just how massive Seguin’s presence—and occasional absence—was. When Seguin arrived, so did a new era of the franchise.

To put it plainly, July 4, 2013 is when the extended renaissance of the Dallas Stars began in earnest. Because while Tom Gaglardi, Jamie Benn, and Jim Nill were all in place before then, it was the arrival of Tyler Seguin that signaled the true arrival of what the Stars were planning to become: An exciting, fast-paced team with an elite center.

In the years after that, the Stars have ebbed and flowed like every team does. But rarely have they waned when Seguin has been present.

Put it this way: the Stars missed five straight postseasons from 2009 to 2013. But since Seguin’s arrival, the Stars have only missed four, and they’re second in playoff wins in the NHL since that time, trailing only Tampa Bay.

After missing out for five years straight, the Stars have only missed the playoffs four times since Seguin’s arrival over 12 years ago. And when you look at those four playoff misses, injuries to Tyler Seguin correspond to almost all of them.

His MCL injury came in February of 2014-15, a year when the Stars’ offense was let down by its goaltending. But something easy to forget is that the team was actually hanging on at that point, sitting at a respectable 26-22-8 when Seguin got hurt. But his injury was too much for that team to handle, and they lost seven of their next eight games without him.

Before 2016-17, Seguin was coming off his achilles and calf injuries (not to mention a rash of other injuries throughout the roster), an the Stars cratered that season. He played every game, but he wasn’t at his best, finishing below 30 goals for the only season in any of his first six years in Dallas.

In 2017-18, an injury to Ben Bishop once again cursed the Stars, but what was probably Seguin’s best season of his career nearly dragged the Stars into the postseason anyway, as Ken Hitchcock asked more of him than any coach ever had, and Seguin delivered, putting up 40 goals as he made big strides in his journey towards an even more complete player.

And of course, in the weird season that was 2020-21, Seguin missed all but the final few games.

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Now, Seguin’s right ACL will need to be repaired. Most of the medical literature out there says that any ACL recovery timeline earlier than nine months risks significant re-injury, though of course most any doctor will also tell you that it’s a case-by-case thing, as all bodies ultimately are. And we’ve seen Tyler Seguin’s dedicated work defy recovery timelines more than once.

Seguin turns 34 next month, and he has one more year remaining on his contract with Dallas. I’d expect the Stars to explore every avenue for allowing him to return this season before making the decision to shut him down, but it’s hard to see whether there’s a reasonable possibility of that happening. But it’s a difficult decision with even a slim chance of his return, because you just can’t replace someone like Tyler Seguin.

“He’s a great leader for us,” Gulutzan said today. “He’s a great pro. And he’s been a guy that, quite frankly, I’ve been maybe the most impressed with his leadership ability when I’ve come in here.”

Even if Seguin managed a miraculous six-month recovery, that would put his return no earlier than the Stanley Cup Final, should the Stars make it that far. That means the Stars are duty-bound to explore whether the better option for Seguin and the team is to shut him down for the season in order to have his full salary cap allowance in LTIR to provide reinforcements down the stretch. That final decision won’t be made, in all likelihood, until the Stars have a corresponding move that would require that extra cap space.

There will be time to talk about all the implications and potential targets of such a move, but today is a little too early to get into trade speculation. Because the bottom line is that this Stars season just got a little bit less delightful, no matter how it ends. Sports are fundamentally compelling because the stories and struggles of every individual member of a team make them so, and this team just lost one of the most compelling players on the roster.

Watching a great play is entertaining, because elite athletes can do things most people can’t. And knowing everything that led up to that great play gives it exponentially more meaning.

On some level, every athlete’s struggles, successes, and disappointments are shared with their fans, both in the building and watching thousands of miles away. Because who hasn’t had a freak accident derail their plans? Who hasn’t spent blood, sweat, and tears in pursuit of something you dearly want, only to have it elude your grasp at the last moment? There are entire books written about that sort of experience.

This is why we watch, and it’s also why we sigh. Nobody deserves what Tyler Seguin has endured in his career, but he has also given this town and this team an abundance of memories that were equally un-looked for, and you can bet he’s dead-set on making some more of them.

Sports, man. They will surprise you, but there is never a guarantee which direction the surprise will come from.

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Back in the fall of 2024, Tyler Seguin told a few us in a media scrum that he has come to believe that playing all 82 games in a season is a more impressive accomplishment nowadays than scoring 30 goals. And when Seguin played his 1,000th NHL game the other night, that quote was in the back of my mind all night, knowing how much this milestone in particular must mean to Seguin.

That’s what makes this latest and cruelest twist of fate for Seguin so particularly painful, as he suffered yet another freak injury in the time between playing that game and the scheduled silver stick ceremony to celebrate it, which was going to be held on December 13.

I’m not sure if the Stars will still plan to hold that ceremony in the near future or postpone it until Seguin’s return to the lineup, whether this year or next. But the fact that we have to contemplate that reality is more than enough bummer on its own.

Today is a tough day, as Seguin’s coach said. But if there’s any consolation to be found in the most devastating of this season’s unending stream of injuries on the Dallas Stars, perhaps it’s that it may have happened to the one player who has persistently proven he can come back from anything, time and time again.

1. Which, you know, is the same penalty that Mark Stone probably would have been given when he did the same to Miro Heiskanen back in January, if not for the mitigating factor of Hintz’s skate impacting Stone’s before the hit.