Vladislav Kolyachonok on Waivers as Dallas Stars Look to Regain Rhythm against Los Angeles Kings
The blue line is taking shape
With Adam Erne getting closer to being activated from LTIR, the Stars were always going to have to make some tough choices to clear a spot on the 23-man roster. And today, the tough choice was revealed: Vladislav Kolyachonok is being placed on waivers. If he clears, he’ll be assigned to AHL Texas tomorrow.
I do think Dallas was always going to bring Erne back onto the NHL roster rather than waive him upon his return from LTIR, given that he only had to come out of the lineup in the first plae due to an injury in Ottawa. The work he’s put in to come back from his own hip surgery last year as well as the work he’s done since making the NHL roster this season speaks for itself. And with the Stars’ wing depth thinner than it’s been in a long time, you can see why they’d value having an extra bottom-six winger over two extra defensemen.
The tricky part is that Kolyachonok and Kyle Capobianco have played 10 NHL games since clearing waivers back in October before the season, which means each of those defensemen would have to go on waivers if the Stars wanted to re-assign either to Texas again. (Remember, any team that claims a waived player has to keep him on their NHL roster or else put him back on waivers themselves.)
Nobody with the team would say this, but I wonder if the Stars were initially hoping that they’d be able to re-assign Kolyachonok back to Texas before he hit the 10-game mark when a player’s waiver clock resets (he’s at 11 now), only for Lyubushkin to get injured a second time and Lundkvist’s recovery to take a bit longer than planned, forcing the Stars to keep Kolyachonok up past that point.
And I can guarantee you that if another team does claim Kolyachonok, the Stars will have nothing but good things to say about the player, being happy that his NHL shot continues. But of course, they would always prefer to keep an asset, if they can.
In any case, if we assume the Stars are hoping to activate Adam Erne for their upcoming road trip this week to bring a 14 forward/7 defensemen lineup, here were their options to do so:
Waive Capobianco (who was the first recall for Dallas early on, and who outplayed Kolyachonok in AHL Texas early in the season)
Waive Alex Petrovic (who made the NHL team right out of training camp after two straight playoff runs with Dallas)
Waive an NHL regular like Nate Bastian, Nils Lundkvist, or Ilya Lyubushkin
Send down Justin Hryckowian (who is waivers-exempt)
Quickly, let’s go through these points:
Capobianco has been a steady, smooth-skating addition who has had a strong year as a depth defenseman. Sending him down before Kolyachonok might have been the “safer” move in terms of his lesser likelihood of being claimed, but the Stars seem to prefer him with the big club right now in Lian Bichsel’s absence as the seventh defenseman.
Petrovic is not being waived. I think Gulutzan has more or less confirmed this in how he’s used Petrovic this year, as he hasn’t been scratched since the first two games of the regular season, after which Lyubushkin was scratched twice to bring him in (both players’ only scratches of the season have been for each other).
Nate Bastian is an ideal 13th forward for this team, both in terms of his speed and his size. He’s a player you want on the team, even if it’s only for 40-50 games.
Putting Lundkvist on waivers would be a massive blow to his confidence, and remember, his playing in the AHL was part of what soured things between him and the Rangers years ago. This year, Lundkvist has barely gotten a chance to play this year due to some unfortunate injuries, so the right thing to do by the player is to give him some more runway to see if he can take a big step in the NHL and become a core part of this defense. He very well might do that.
Lyubushkin would almost certainly make it through waivers, given the extra year remaining on his $3.25 million salary. But doing so with an NHL veteran of almost 500 games could impact the relationship between team and player significantly (speaking generally here, not about Lyubushkin specicially). Given how much season the Stars still have to play, there is every chance they are going to continue to need Ilya Lyubushkin to play regular minutes for them, and you want him playing his best in order to do so.
I had wondered if there was at least a chance the Stars would waive Capobianco before Kolyachonok, since older players tend to be less appealing waiver claims. But this move pretty clearly signals that the blue line depth chart is still the same as it was a month ago, even after Kolyachonok played some pretty strong games in the last week or two after having some initial struggles. His skillset is, frankly, an appealing one as a player who can play on either side of the ice, and whose reach and skating can making him an asset in transition as well as the offensive zone. But he is also ninth on the depth chart, and a few strong games early in the regular season haven’t changed that fact.
There’s a chance that having two other pretty decent players on waivers today in Jonatan Berggren and Laurent Brossoit will make it slightly more likely that Kolyachonok makes it through waivers. With that said, Kolyachonok is the only defenseman of the three, so I don’t know that it really helps all that much. Probably, he will either clear or not based on the needs of the teams out there, rather than anything else. (I wonder about teams like Utah and New Jersey.)
Waiver claims are relatively rare in the NHL, but we have seen more happen in the last four or five weeks, including Sammy Blais, John Beecher, Troy Techer, and Cayden Primeau:
All told, we’re probably overanalyzing a move that isn’t going to make or break the Stars’ chances of winning a Stanley Cup this year either way. Even if the Stars were to lose Kolyachonok, Lian Bichsel’s return in January still gives them four left-shot defensemen along with the right-hand shooting Lundkvist, Lyubushkin, and Petrovic. It’s hard to make a case for Kolyachonok jumping over two of those three right now, given the costs involved with doing so. Contracts do tend to make rosters (until the playoffs roll around), but Jim Nill has been clear in the past that the coach is the one who has the final say over the lineup. We’ll find out tomorrow afternoon if Kolyachonok will continue to be an option for the Stars down the road, or not.
Gulutzan said over the weekend that his preference would be for the blue line to develop some “rhythm” rather than rotating a lot of defensemen in and out of the lineup, so you could argue that he even telegraphed this sort of move ahead of time. But now that it’s happened, the Stars have another interesting situation tonight: a right-hand defenseman may be playing on his off-side.
It’s a surprising situation for a team that has struggled to find regular right-hand shooting defensemen in the draft or free agency over the last few years, but with Kolyachonok on waivers and Capobianco being the healthy scratch tonight, the Stars will probably be looking at something like this (though Gulutzan didn’t confirm defense pairings, and we didn’t see any at the Stars’ optional morning skate today):
Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Petrovic
Lundkvist-Lyubushkin
Of course, the easiest option in terms of “balance” here would be to just split up Lindell-Heiskanen in order to pair the three lefties and righties evenly together. But given that Heiskanen and Lindell have played every game together this season as one of the better defense pairings in the league, I have a hard time seeing that as a realistic option.
That means one of the righties will have to play on the left side, and Lundkvist’s mobility makes him the most logical option to do so, albeit far from a guarantee. From the Stars’ perspective, facing an incredibly stingy team like Los Angeles might be as good a time as any to tinker with the blue line, though.
In their last matchup against the Kings, the Stars scored two power play goals en route to a 3-2 overtime loss. You might remember that game on account of Darcy Kuemper or Cody Ceci or “Horns Down,” but here the highlights just to refresh your memory:
In any case, it should be a good chance for Dallas to break through offensively after getting stifled by Florida.
Oh, and lest I forget to mention it: Casey DeSmith will be in goal for Dallas. The forward group will remain the same, with Bastian being scratched.
Odds and Ends
I believe the Kings are wearing their chrome domes (silver helmets) tonight. Personally, I prefer the standard glossy ones to either shiny or matte, but they don’t ask me about these things.
Jason Robertson didn’t record a shot on goal against Florida—his first such game this year. Last season, Robertson only had three games in which he failed to record a shot on goal: Game 82 against Nashville (when he was injured early on), and two other games against the same opponent. So I was curious: did Robertson remember that opponent?
“Philly,” Robertson replied instantly (and correctly) today, when I asked him this question. But when asked if that opponent played him differently in order to limit his shooting, Robertson pointed to this season, when he recorded a hat trick against the Flyers. Safe to say it was just “one of those things” last year.
On Anton Lundell’s goal last game, Alex Petrovic was initially trying to close down the shot—only for Lundell to make a really nice move and get past him, Steel, and Oettinger for a highlight-reel goal. A shot block gone wrong makes sense when you watch the replay, too. Lundell is in a good spot to shoot, so Petrovic tries to extend his stick to block it while turned at an angle, only for Lundell to drag it through and find a seam between Petrovic and Steel before faking around Oettinger, too. Really nice play by Lundell to see that option and take it.
Sam Steel says the freeway series rivalry between Los Angeles and Anaheim was really good when he was with the Ducks, even though he arrived in Anaheim in the first year of the Ducks’ prolonged playoff drought. The healthy sports hatred between those two teams is very real, regardless of the stakes of any individual game, and that’s coming from someone from Alberta.