Wednesday Dallas Stars Roundup: Olympic-Sized Debates, AHL Conditioning, Trophies, Haircuts, and Lindy Ruff

Before the big thing, let's talk a few other

The Buffalo Sabres have won nine straight games, and they’ll be looking for number ten tonight against Dallas in the teams’ final game of 2025.

They’ll also be without goaltender Alex Lyon, who suffered a lower-body injury late in their previous game against St. Louis that head coach Lindy Ruff called “really unfortunate” after the Sabres practiced in Dallas on Tuesday. And today, Ruff confirmed that it’s going to be “a bit of time” before Lyon is back, which means Colten Ellis has been activated from injured reserve to back up Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen for the time being.

The Stars roster will feature Casey DeSmith starting in goal tonight. Glen Gulutzan said this morning that this gives Jake Oettinger an additional “maintenance day” before he returns to game action in Chicago tomorrow, on the second night of the Stars’ back-to-back (a schedule that seems like a pretty raw deal for a team to have to play, if you ask me).

Gulutzan said on Sunday that Oettinger and Nils Lundkvist are both managing “some nagging stuff that’s been going on,” though neither issue sounds too serious for now.

Both players were on the ice for morning skate today, which featured the following lines and defense pairings:

Steel-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Bourque
Hryckowian-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Lyubushkin-Petrovic

Adam Erne and Kyle Capobianco are both healthy scratches. Sam Nestler at DLLS has a good piece discussing recent injuries with Adam Erne and Nils Lundkvist, so give that a read if you haven’t already.

Nate Bastian also played for AHL Texas last night to kick off his conditioning stint, recording an assist on the top line as Texas lost 4-1 to Iowa—something Texas Stars’ play-by-play man John Peterson pointed out extended Bastian’s AHL points streak to five games…if you go back to 2020. Great find by Peterson.

As for the rest of the game, I think this note from Stephen Meserve is a good reminder when it comes to just how talented even bottom-six NHLers are:

Gulutzan said yesterday after practice that the whole idea behind the conditioning assignment (which lasts for up to 14 days) is to keep getting Bastian some games, even if it’s in the AHL.

“You’re coming in, you’re playing eight minutes in a night,” Gulutzan said of Bastian, who played against Chicago four days ago after nine healthy scratches. “So really, you played 8 minutes in a month. That gets hard to keep your skills up.”

Gulutzan praised Stan Tugolukov and David Pelletier for working with players like Bastian who aren’t getting as much game action, but he also said there is a limit to how much that can help in the NHL.

“Nothing sharpens you better than game play,” Gulutzan said. “And 15, 18, 20 minutes, you can take advantage of these things.”

Gulutzan also says this plan is something the Stars have been considering for a little while, too.

“We knew even before [Seguin’s] injury, that if we got everyone healthy, that we were gonna end up with 15 forwards,” Gulutzan said. “So Jim [Nill] and I have been talking a long time about what we would do. We value all our guys, so we’re managing a situation where we’re healthy now. And it helps the player. It just helps the player to play games.”

As for the Dallas roster players for tonight, Gulutzan said the team still isn’t fully through the bout of illness that’s been going around the room, but that Lyubushkin is well enough to return to the lineup.

Lyubushkin said yesterday that he and his whole family were sick throughout the Christmas holidays. We’ve all had at least one of those years, right?

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Seeing Lindy Ruff back in Dallas is always fun. With this year’s Dallas season starting off as successfully as Ruff’s Stars team did in 2015-16, the comparisons are inevitable. And Ruff didn’t mind talking about them this morning, either.

“Just a deep group,” Ruff said of that Stars rteam. “You get three or four lines deep, and you get all the lines contributing. Special teams was good. You gotta have a lot of good things going on. You get good goaltending. I thought we played really well away from the puck, which was important. And I think that’s where we’re at with our team [in Buffalo] right now. We’re playing well away from the puck, and offensively, we’re getting production from a lot of different people.”

After his scrum, I had a moment to ask Ruff a bit more about his time in Dallas. It was only a few seconds, but there was one name I knew he would remember as reporters were breaking up, post-scrum: