What the Stars Saw and Hope to See from Radek Faksa for the Next Three Years

Stats can be fun, if you let them

PC: Amanda Spielberger

With the departures of Mikael Granlund, Evgenii Dadonov, and Mason Marchment, the Stars will be needing some additional production from their lineup this year.

That lineup is a familiar one indeed, as one of just two newcomers to the 2025-26 Stars roster is actually an old friend: Radek Faksa, the 2012 Stars first-round pick who played over 600 games in green before the final year of his $3.25 million-per-year contract was too rich for last year’s team to keep. He was summarily shipped to St. Louis for nothing before being brought back to Dallas this summer for a three-year contract at $2 million per season. You probably have Thoughts And Feelings about that deal.

Here’s the thing: Faksa isn’t a goal-scorer, per se. As we discussed last week, Faksa and Nathan Bastian (the only true newcomer to the roster unless Vladislav Kolyachonok ends up making the team) only combined for nine goals last year. So the question many asked when Faksa was re-signed was: How does he really help cover the 61-goal gap created by the absence of multiple 20-goal scorers like Marchment and Dadonov?

The obvious answer was that you don’t win games solely by piling up a lot of goals (though it’s a lot of fun to do it that way), but ultimately by winning the overall goals battle. Limiting your opponents’ scoring is, in a sense both mathematical and narrative, as effective as scoring them yourself.

Well, almost as effective. As Marty Turco in 2007 could well remind us, you do actually have to score goals to win, no matter how fantastic you are at limiting them. “Defense wins championships” is a nice theme that evokes something intuitive, but not entirely accurate: Responsibility at your own end is what leads to victory against the best teams, but someone has to reventually turn the lights on to avoid the dark times.

That defensive focus is a bit of a relic from the dead puck era as well as a narrative reaction by hockey fans against popular sentiment: the most glorious thing you can do is score a goal, becuase that’s what sets off the lights and the music. Preventing a goal simply, ah, prevents the lights and the music, which is why more avid fans often feel the need to point out the crucial importance of what players like Esa Lindell do to prevent goals from happening. Lindell may not get the glory of the goal-scorers, but coaches know that you you need a cohesive whole to build a winning hockey team.

That’s where Faksa’s return to Dallas is so intriguing, particularly on a three-year deal. A player whose best season probably came in 2017-18 under Ken Hitchcock (17 goals points and a sparkling +21 plus/minus) is certainly someone who you’d exepct to help shore up the Stars’ defensive issues from last season, but is betting another three-years on a player the Stars gave away last year for making just a bit more than that really the way to fix what ailed them?

In fact, I’ve heard from a vocal minority of folks who think the new Faksa contract was a “disaster” the moment it was signed, a misguided effort to replace crucial offense with nebulous defense by a player already 31 years old. How does a player who only scored 15 points last season merit three times the salary of Colin Blackwell (who scored more points in fewer games), let alone for three years? Isn’t this sort of deal that can wind up hamstringing your team’s salary cap?

Any time a player gets three years of term after age 30, it’s worth asking how the player has such leverage. Matt Duchene, for example, got four years in his mid-thirties, but that looks like a pretty clear way to keep his annual cap hit down. But when you lead a team in scoring, that’s the sort of equation you get to control a fair bit, especially if you’ve done your team a solid for the last two seasons by taking way below market value.

Similarly, Casey DeSmith got three years from Dallas last summer in order to replace Scott Wedgewood for a slightly smaller annual salary. Both players’ past performance merited those deals. Even the Ilya Lyubushkin three-year deal that took the place of Faksa’s previously identical cap hit was a surprise in the summer of 2024, and one I criticized at the time. But as Lyubushkin was an unrestricted free agent in the always-small pool of physical right-shot defensemen, supply and demand dictated that he could set his price accordingly, and his agent did so, as did Cody Ceci’s with Los Angeles last month.

But we’re getting more general here, so let’s get back to Faksa. Don’t the Stars have a lot of players like him already? How is he meaningfully different from Sam Steel, Blackwell, or even Oskar Bäck, all of whom can play center in the NHL, and have done so? This apparent redundancy is, I think, where a lot of the misunderstanding or frusrtation might be coming from.

This is also is where I feel obligated to remind you all that Sam Steel is making more than Faksa for the next two seasons, despite scoring fewer goals per game than Faksa over their careers thus far.

Steel: 49 goals in 418 NHL games
Faksa: 94 goals in 718 NHL games

I think it’s not entirely unreasonable to say that if you’re going to criticize the Faksa contract in terms of dollars per goal, you probably need to point that same judgmental finger at Steel’s $2.1 million deal over the next two years as well. For my money (though it’s really Tom Gaglardi’s), both deals are pretty fair, though.

The fact is, Faksa has pretty much always been deployed in a highly defensive role over his career, and he’s still managed more goal-scoring on the other end than many other comparable defensive players. Each of Nathan Bastian and Sam Steel has both hit 10 goals in a season just once, whereas Faksa has done so five times. We’re not talking about huge margins here, but in terms of goal-scoring ceiling, Faksa has shown a higher one than a whole lot of other players in the bottom-six mix, right now. But that’s not where his value really lies, as we well know.

By the way, this is also why I’m not sold on the idea of moving Steel up the lineup to fill Marchment or whoever’s spot on the left wing. Yes, Steel is a bit quicker than Faksa, but that speed hasn’t turned into significant goal-scoring so far in his career across three different teams. At a certain point, players tell you who they are. Steel is a strong defensive player who can play a smart game in a complex and dynamic system. He’s a good NHLer who can effect similar results to Faksa despite going about it in different ways, and that’s worth a competitive NHL salary these days.

As for Oskar Bäck, the fact is that his lack of offensive contributions nearly cancel out his defensive solidity to a far greater extent than Faksa, let alone Steel. Rather than viewing Faksa as a more expensive version of Bäck, I think the more accurate assessment would be that Bäck is a noticeably less-effective Faksa. On last year’s team, without a Radek Faksa, that meant Bäck still played a role the Stars valued. But I do wonder how much room there will be for both players this year, particularly at playoff time. Faksa just has a much stronger track record with more upside, which is what you’d expect of a first-round pick and NHL veteran of ten years.

The metrics are pretty consistent for Faksa in this regard, too. Faksa’s defensive impact is outstanding, to the extent that he’s even outperformed his expected goals-against numbers in recent times.

In the playoffs for St. Louis last year, for example, Faksa’s xGA was slightly below 50% (with a per-60 xG of 2.1 against and 1.9 for according to NST), meaning you’d expect Winnipeg to have scored a bit more than St. Louis during Faksa’s time on the ice, during which he was deployed very defensively.

Instead, here’s what happened: in Faksa’s 87 minutes at 5-on-5 against the Presidents’ Trophy Winnipeg Jets in the playoffs, the Blues scored seven goals, and allowed none.

That’s right: Faksa’s line (he played mostly with Nathan Walker and Alexey Toropchenko) shut out the Jets entirely in the seven-game series, while putting up seven goals of their own.

Sure, “Connor Hellebuyck on the road” and all that, and any player can have one great (or even lucky) series. It’s a flattering number with a lot of goaltending and defensive work going on, too. But when it comes to deploying specialized defense weapons, Faksa is a player that multiple coaches have used in very similar ways, with only Rick Bowness experiencing Faksa at less than the height of his powers, on what were not terribly great Stars teams. Otherwise, he’s been very, very useful.

No, Faksa doesn’t score a ton of points, but he also wasn’t a first-round pick by accident, and his career has borne that out. He isn’t Nathan Bastian with a bit more emotional history for Dallas fans, but rather a big, effective defensive center in the NHL who can do a lot of important work with net-positive effect. That’s kind of the goal, particularly when you were bleeding chances against for too much of the season.

Faksa’s regular-season numbers last year for St. Louis show that his playoff performance wasn’t a fluke, either. Despite getting the fewest offensive-zone starts of any player on the Blues roster, Faksa solidly outperformed his expected goals numbers across 70 games, winding up on the positive side of the ledger there, too. Faksa’s 1.8 GA/60 during the regular season was among the best on his team, despite a coaching change on a team battling at the margins of of the playoff picture all year.

Faksa was similarly holding opponets to around 2 GA/60 in DeBoer’s two years before Faksa was traded, even as DeBoer slowly edged him down the lineup. But Jim Montgomery knew what Faksa could do well, and he put him in a role for the Blues that Faksa thrived in, most of all in the biggest games.

Last year, it was fair to ask whether a player like Oskar Bäck could fill Faksa’s role for less than half the price. Both players brought size and responsbility to their roles, and aging curves would tell you that Bäck was the better bet to give surplus value on his deal than Faksa.

After a season of watching Bäck get moved largely to left wing under DeBoer, Jim Nill opted to bring back Faksa for the next three years, with Nill saying that they “really missed” Faksa last season. So if you’re wondering about internal evaluations, I think that tells you quite a bit.

What we know is that the Stars’ defensive metrics all took a big hit last season. HockeyViz had the 2024-25 Stars allowing their worst expected goals-against number since the calamity of 2016-17, and you can’t put all of that on half a season of a missing Miro Heiskanen. The Stars even earlier on were not as defensively stout as they’d been the previous year, even before adding Chris Tanev. They needed to do something, and they did something.

Radek Faksa isn’t the sort of player who can fix everything, but Glen Gulutzan has hinted at changing some things about the team’s forecheck, as well as some other things he’s chosen not to mention at all. Adding a player the Stars know as well as any in the NHL—and for the next three years—seems like a pretty obvious bit of roster shaping with a specific goal in mind, and Faksa is the sort of player who can do specific things really well.

Here is where I will also mention faceoffs, where Faksa is outstanding, having been a 55% guy for the last half-decade, including 57% on the dot for St. Louis last year, tied with some guy named Sidney Crosby at 14th in the NHL—even better than Aleksander Barkov.

Faceoffs on their own can be vastly overrated—see Luke Glendening, who also won a ton of draws last season for Tampa Bay but was far more of a liability for his team otherwise. But Faksa’s on-ice numbers all show that he’s more than holding his own in heavy defensive usage. So when you consider that Faksa also takes an inordinate amount of D-zone draws, where he has the disadvantage of putting his stick down first, that faceoff number becomes even more impressive. And when you pair it with his underlying defensive metrics as a whole, you can start to guess about the Stars’ vision for perhaps a redesigned checking line, rather than DeBoer’s focus on rolling four lines with more offensive inclinations.

I still have a lot of love for that approach, to be honest. The old cry of the Analytics movement last decade was “Goals over roles,” and it’s one that I still subscribe to, generally speaking. Ultimately, a player’s impact on your team’s winning the goals battle is what matters most, no matter how well they seem to perform in the role they’re given. In baseball, it doesn’t matter how good your swing looks if you’re making more outs at the plate (or missing more plays in the field) than your team can afford. And in hockey, you might work really hard and check really viciously—or even win a lot of faceoffs—but if your time on the ice is costing your team goals, a smart team needs to accept that and adjust accordingly.

Faksa is a bit of an uncommon type of player, these days. He’s not Adam Lowry, whose incredible defensive work is complemented by above-average offensive impact as well. Instead, Faksa’s offense is league-average, at the very best—though his first-round pick-caliber NHL shot is still there.

If I have any big reservations about Faksa, it’s that his work on the penalty kill might not measure up to the rest of his defensive reputation. Alain Nasreddine has been pretty shrewd in deploying Stars’ skaters on the 4-on-5, however, so perhaps the Stars will continue to lean on the strong PK work from players like Steel, Johnston, Hintz, Blackwell, Bäck, and Bourque while saving Faksa for defensive matchups at 5-on-5, where he’s shown much more ability to bring positive results.

All up, Faksa is still a very useful NHL player, if he’s used properly. Over the course of a regular season, that might not look very flashy, but Faksa has shown that he can win the toughest minutes coaches can give him over both the long haul and in a short series against a great opponent, which can save some of their more dangerous offensive weapons for more advantageous minutes. To continue the baseball analogy, Faksa at this point might be akin to a fantastic defensive second baseman, someone who saves enough hits with his glove to more than make up for his relatively mundane bat. Sure, you’d love to have All-Stars at every position, but sometimes you have to settle for simply getting a little bit better.

There’s risk with any contract, and more than usual with three years given to a player in his thirties. But for a player making just over 2% of the salary cap, the Stars see a lot of rewards in Faksa’s game to outweigh the risk. And if that means they see just “one degree” more success as a result, they’ll count that deal as a win.