What Jamie Benn's Milestone Season Proved

The Stars' captain scored 15 goals in 60 games this season

Jamie Benn gets a C for his performance this year, and the C stands for Captain. There’s your grade. If that’s all you came for, then take you filthy report card and go have a nice summer. But if you really want to dig into the coursework from this season, then stick around.

I’d encourage any Stars fan pondering offseason moves to go back and watch Benn’s milestone goal early in the season. In his fourth game of the season after recovering from a collapsed lung, Benn scored his 400th goal off a feed from (who else?) Wyatt Johnston in what wound up being a blowout win over the Edmonton Oilers back in November.

The team would put out a tribute to Benn’s achievement soon afterwards, complete with a career goals montage that will make you feel things. Benn’s goal coming as it did while Mikko Rantanen was serving an automatic one-game suspension for his pair of recent match penalties, it was a pretty memorable night against Glen Gulutzan’s former team. Jamie Benn getting A Moment in the midst of it felt like a good sign of things to come after a long wait.

Because yes, that goal was a long time coming after Benn ended the prior regular season stuck on 399 goals for 17 straight goal-less games to end the 2024-25 season. Aside from his goal in the first round against Colorado last year, Benn wound up waiting 262 days between scoring goal #399 (also against Edmonton) and goal #400.

When the dust settled on Benn’s season this year, he wound up with 60 games played, 15 goals scored, along with 21 assists. That came without much power play time either, as the Stars leaned more heavily on their top unit this year. Benn only featured on the first unit for a brief stretch after the Olympics, when both Roope Hintz and Mikko Rantanen were out of the lineup. Benn tallied two power play goals and one power play assist as the PP netfront guy from February 25 to March 28, when Rantanen returned and took his spot back.

Otherwise without a ton of power play time, Benn still found a way to keep scoring. He was fifth on the Stars in both 5v5 goals and 5v5 points overall on the team this year, trailing only the usual top-six guys. In fact, Benn’s 15 goals were tied with Roope Hintz¹ (who played 53 games) and just one short of Matt Duchene (who played 57). Benn even outscored Justin Hryckowian’s 14 goals, despite Hryckowian’s featuring in 81 of 82 games this year.

In a year where the Stars’s forward depth was constantly under pressure from key absences, Benn was productive in limited minutes. Playing a career-low 13:17 per night—two minutes less than his 15:18 last year under DeBoer—Benn was useful in his role. The captain’s defensive work was noticeably improved this year as well, which meant the coaching staff didn’t have to give him primarily offensive-zone starts, as DeBoer had done the last couple of years.

So for $1 million (plus $2 million more in performance bonuses that will hit this year’s cap at a less convenient time), the Stars got a forward who played on both the left and right wing, who scored at a 20-goal pace over 60 games, and who was also top-five on the team in 5v5 production. That’s perfectly decent value even before you add whatever intangible benefits a longtime captain and franchise icon provides behind the scenes. Cromulent, even.

In the playoffs, Benn’s scoring dried up, but the underlying numbers were still quite solid. He played 35 of his 46 minutes at 5-on-5 with Arttu Hyry and Sam Steel (from Games 2-5), and that line posted the following numbers per Natural Stat Trick:

• 41-24 in shot attempts

• 15-9 in shots on goal

• 63% expected goals

• 18-8 in scoring chances

• 7-1 in high-danger shot attempts

They still found a way to be outscored 0-2 during those 35 minutes over four games, however. And that wasn’t always bad luck, as this goal in Game 3 caught Benn (and some of his teammates) just a bit too defensively passive:

In Game 6, things came to a head with Benn’s giveaway for the series-clinching empty netter. That needs no reintroduction to your memory, but it does illustrate a point we discussed shortly after the end of the season: when injuries have necessitated Jamie Benn’s taking on a bigger role than necessary, it hasn’t usually worked out terribly well for him or the team. Depth is important, as we’ve discussed.

The 2025-26 season was the first season Benn missed time due to injury since January 2021, and that meant we only got eight games featuring both Benn and Tyler Seguin in the lineup together this year. Seguin joked after the season that Benn has to come back for at least another year, because Seguin still has another year left on his contract, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Benn does just that, though I don’t profess to know what he’s thinking. There’s clearly a need for scoring depth on the wing for this team, and both Gulutzan and Jim Nill have said they want Benn to return. I think they’re both being entirely sincere in saying that, too. It really is all up to Jamie Benn.

Given everything Benn has meant to this franchise, he’s always going to be viewed with higher levels of scrutiny than other players. He’s earned that scrutiny through both poor decisions and heroic moments alike. When Jamie Benn makes a mistake, it hurts fans a little more than if a journeyman player does the same thing. And conversely, when he’s done something great, it has always been a little greater for the captain’s having done it.

Should Jamie Benn come back? In all honesty, I really do believe it should be up to him.

It would be one thing if he were taking a roster spot that a younger and better player would otherwise fill, but the Stars’ dearth of winger depth right now means Benn was and probably still would be one of their best eight winger options on any given night. His willingness and ability to move over and play on the right wing this year—a move Gulutzan probably deserves more credit for trying—means he comes with some flexibility, too. If you can sign him for another $1 million plus a bit more in incentives that won’t hit until next year when the Stars have more space, then I think it’s worth doing.

But the conversations around Jamie Benn have always been emotional ones, so I can understand why this one has been, too. I’ve watched all but a tiny handful of Benn’s nearly 1,400 NHL games, and it’s impossible to forget some of the moments in that highlight reel we linked at the top of the piece. When you’ve seen a player pull off some of the moves Benn has, it’s hard not to hold that up in contrast with the player he’s become well into his thirties.

Heck, even back in early 2019—over seven years ago!—this was an ongoing conversation: What happened to Jamie Benn? Sure, the profane criticism from ownership via Jim Lites didn’t exactly help, but Benn’s game has never been one that is easy on the eyes, for better or for worse. Even some of the prettiest goals of his career came with dekes that were almost understated, so when those dekes stopped working as often, it could look to fans like² Benn wasn’t trying. As a prospect who had to overcome early criticisms of his skating, Benn has always been the sort of player who is either blowing you away or leaving you wanting a little bit more, with little room in between. It’s not a fair standard for anyone to be held to, but nobody ever said an NHL career would come with justice.

Benn has been a throwback player for practically his entire career, and he still is. From a one-game cameo with a visor after a concussion to getting fined for cross-checking Ryan Hartman (who received no such discipline for taking out Arttu Hyry’s knee), Benn has always refused to adhere to your expectations of him. Early in his career, he was dragging Stars teams into the fight, almost singlehandedly evening the playoff series against the Ducks in 2014. (Just read what Brandon wrote about Benn’s first playoff series if you don’t believe me.)

Jamie Benn was everything to this franchise during a time when they were trying to shed the demons from the dark days of bankruptcy. Nowadays, Benn usually isn’t the one carrying this team, and they’re at their best when he doesn’t have to be.

The captain has earned the right to decide how to end his time in Dallas. If it’s another season on the ice, then this year proved that he can make it count, so long as the Stars can deploy him in roles where he’s most effective.

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I sometimes think athletes are where we most honestly betray our fear of mortality. We don’t want to see stars age, to see them slow down. We want to see their primes, and then we want to see another player’s prime, to forever live in the apex of speed, strength, health, and glory. If we’re really lucky, we’ll even get to see a late-career revival, to get a chance to praise the ol’ gunslinger for how “he can still go out there and give ‘em a great shift or two,” before he finally gets to go out on his own terms. In a perfect world, Mike Modano would have finished his time in Dallas like Joe Pavelski did.

Seeing Jamie Benn at 36 years old this year was very different from seeing him at 21, but isn’t that true of all of us? Time can’t be rewound, but we can adjust our perspective and find a way to do our best. We spend the vast majority of our life way past our physical prime, but those latter days can still end up being the ones that matter most. Because the thing about sports, and about life, is that there’s always more to appreciate, so long as you’re looking in the right places.

1. This is not intended as an implicit criticism of Roope Hintz, just to be clear.

2. What was the old line from his draft days Erin always used to throw out? Something about “I’m not sure if he’s really that slow, or if he’s just refusing to move.”