More Lian Bichsel or Less Ryan Suter Won’t Fix the Dallas Stars’ Biggest Problem with the Defense

But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock
For she’s worth a quarter million, afloat and at the dock
And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

***

First off, let’s just all acknowledge how insufficiently enjoyable it was to see Edmonton throw everything they had at Florida and come up empty. It doesn’t heal all the wounds of Game 6, but it was a bit of turnabout nonetheless, so fair play to the universe for that.

As for the Stars, their wounds will continue to fester this offseason. The loss of Joe Pavelski stings in every way, and it’s hard to see Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin having another playoff run with both of them contributing as effectively as they did. But those are forward problems for forward thinkers, and we here at Stars Thoughts specialize in backwardness. Or at least, in talking about the only players legally allowed to skate backwards (judging by how Evgenii Dadonov defends 2-on-2 rushes), by which I mean the defensemen.

We all know that Lian Bichsel was going to be the next man up if Chris Tanev hadn’t been able to go in Game 5, which is still absolutely as bonkers a thing in the clear light of the offseason as it was in the throes of an aggravating playoff series.

Lian Bichsel says he’s been told to be ready to play if Tanev can’t go

— Sean Shapiro (@seanshapiro) May 31, 2024

But as we’ve seen with players like Thomas Harley before, one level of trust in exigency doesn’t guarantee that Bichsel will have a spot on the roster when more options are available. One of those options is, the Stars seem to hope, a returning Chris Tanev, who fixed a whole lot of the Stars’ issues on defense. With Miro Heiskanen effectively playing as the top right-side defenseman (and doing an incredible job of it, by the way), Tanev was able to anchor the second pairing with Esa Lindell and Thomas Harley rotating on the left side, with Ryan Suter often spelling either of them.

Heiskanen, by the way, played almost 24 minutes at 5v5 each night in the playoffs. No other skater even touched 22 minutes, though Esa Lindell was the next closest, which is a testament to how quietly reliable Lindell was in this run. When you look at all-situations time on ice, Heiskanen’s numbers get even more insane, with no other Final Four team even having a defenseman within 4 minutes of his average ice time each night. Heiskanen (and Lindell) both came out positive in expected goals at 5v5, too, so it’s not like they were soaking up minutes while hurting the team. If Tanev re-joins the Stars and stays relatively healthy (i.e. the Stars don’t run out of duct tape), then Dallas has an eminently workable top-four, albeit with Heiskanen continuing to play his off side.

But as much as the Stars don’t have a ton of problems to fix with their defense, they do have some. I don’t think anyone could watch that Connor McDavid goal where he danced around Heiskanen and think the Stars’ franchise defenseman was at his freshest. (And no, I’m not going to link that goal here; we’re all going to have to see it far more times before we all die as it is. Go find it yourself, you sick people.)

As for the problems: on their final podcast of the season, Mike Heika and Daryl Reaugh discussed Heiskanen’s playing on the right side, and they agreed that coaches always prefer to have the handedness balanced on defense pairings, but that Heiskanen has also shown he is quite capable of playing the right side. Does that mean there’s less urgency to find him a top RHD partner, as Heika suggests the Stars need to do?

But as much as the Stars appeared to be content having Heiskanen play on the right side, what’s also true is that Jim Nill has long sought to balance the Stars’ defense pairings in handedness. To wit: here is an exhaustive list of the right-handed defensemen that have played for the Stars since Nill’s first full season in 2013-14.

Dallas Stars Right-handed Defensemen to Play NHL Games Since 2013-14:
Chris Tanev
Nils Lundkvist
Alex Petrovic
Colin Miller
Jani Hakanpää
Mark Pysyk
Sami Vatanen (really, I double-checked this)
Roman Polák
Taylor Fedun
Ben Lovejoy
Connor Carrick
Greg Pateryn
Julius Honka
Stephen Johns
John Klingberg
Jason Demers
Maxime Fortunus
Stéphane Robidas

Of those players, here are the ones Dallas drafted and/or developed themselves: Julius Honka, John Klingberg, and Maxime Fortunus. That’s it.

When you consider that Fortunus played just nine NHL games and that Honka only lasted 78 games longer than that, you see the problem: Since John Klingberg, the Stars have failed to develop an NHL-quality right-handed defenseman of any kind.

Nill knows this, which is why he’s traded real assets for players like Demers, Tanev, Lundkvist, Pateryn, Johns, and Lovejoy. Nill arrived to find a team without center depth, and he fixed it in one fell swoop (or perhaps a couple of less-fell swoops). But where Joe Nieuwendyk failed to replenish the Stars’ depth up the middle, Nill has come up short in repairing the Stars’ right side of the blueline, unless one of the three right-handed defensemen taken in the 2022 draft pans out, which I’m not all that optimistic about. David Castillo is higher on Gavin White than a lot of people, as he’ll tell you, and I hope he’s proven right; but I’ll tell you that Gavin White is basically the same size as Nils Lundkvist, so you’ll forgive me for seeing White as just a slightly shorter version of Joe Cecconi until I see otherwise—which wouldn’t be a horrible thing for White in the grand scheme of things, but dreams are always biggest when you’re young.

Teams can be built in different ways, as we’ve all heard said about Vegas ad nauseam. Hey, even this years’ Final is made up of two teams built in two very different ways:

Acquiring players via trade or UFA doesn’t have to tank your team, if you do it well. Right-handed defensemen tend to go higher in the draft because of their scarcity, and that means that unless you tank a season (or many seasons, like Edmonton), you’re not likely to find one that’ll stick in your lineup. Evan Bouchard got grabbed at #10 in 2018, three spots before the Stars picked Ty Dellandrea. Ah, well.

Aside: how miserable was Edmonton for the entirety of the last decade?

This prolonged hangover from their Cup Final appearances in 2006 set the stage for their wealth of top-ten picks that now populate their team. The Stars have only picked in the top-ten three times since 1999, taking Val Nichushkin at #10, Scott Glennie at #9, and Miro Heiskanen at #3 after moving up in the lottery. It’s almost enough to make you want to root for Edmonton’s fans. Almost.

***

If anything, the main reason Nill’s failure to find right-handed defensemen through the draft sticks out is because it’s one of the only things he hasn’t done exceedingly well. The Stars’ forwards are the envy of the league, and going from Ben Bishop to Jake Oettinger was a heck of a transition plan from Kari Lehtonen’s unexpectedly rapid decline in goal. Heiskanen and Harley are both absolute pillars, and Bichsel looks to be the next very good player on the left side.

But right-handed defensemen are a precious commodity, and have been for decades, as we all know by now. That’s what made John Klingberg such a wonderful find in the fifth round of the draft, in addition to the fact that Klingberg is just wonderful in general. Even the 1999 Stars needed to acquire their stud RHD via trade, with Bob Gainey somehow convincing Pittsburgh to part with Sergei Zubov. (Fun fact: Zubov was originally drafted by New York with a pick acquired in exchange for the legend Guy LaFleur.)

But the right side has been a problem for a long time, as we detailed above. I suspect it was that same extended list of short-term spackle on the right side of the defense that finally convinced Nill to part with a first-round pick for Lundkvist, thinking that surely, surely this player would be able to stick, either being sheltered by Heiskanen up top, or as a depth piece in the bottom four. But alas, that isn’t how it’s worked out, to put it lightly.

That’s also, I think, why the Stars signed Hakanpää to a three-year contract three years ago. Not to fix the entire right side, but simply to provide a foundation on which to build. But with Lundkvist being labeled persona non grata by the coaches for two straight playoff runs, and with Hakanpää 32 years old and having an injury so long-hidden that Nill is channeling a 19th-century archeologist unveiling a sabertoothed tiger skeleton, the Stars are likely going back to square one on the right side.

Let’s say the Stars re-sign Tanev (which is not a given by any stretch, as he’s perhaps the top-RHD on the market) and run it back with their RFAs, giving 32-year-old UFA Alex Petrovic a one-way deal (which I think he’ll get from a team somewhere, given his playoff performance). Here’s what they’d be working with:

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Tanev
Suter-Petrovic
Lundkvist(?)

All their potential depth beyond that needs to be re-signed or discovered. The Stars will surely make a qualifying offer to Lundkvist, but where he’s going to play in this lineup is more of a mystery than ever, given Peter DeBoer’s manifest and merited mistrust of the player. At this point, there is a non-zero chance that Lundkvist gets moved for his own good as much as the Stars’.

In any case, adding Bichsel to a mix of four left-handed defensemen seems unlikely, at best. There simply isn’t room in a healthy lineup for a player who is going to be making mistakes and learning the NHL game. Lindell, Heiskanen, Harley, and Suter are all options any coach is going to take over him. So unless you want to go full 2013 and run five lefties in the defense on purpose, I don’t see Bichsel fixing much for Dallas next season, as it stands.

Ah, what’s that, you out there in the violent mob? “Buy out Suter and plug Bichsel in“? Okay, I’ll humor you, even if I don’t see it happening. Let’s say Nill defies all expectations and ruthlessly buys out Suter a year before his presumptive retirement and moves Bichsel into the NHL with fewer than two dozen games of experience in North America. That gives the Stars something like $2.9 million in additional cap space this year (with a $1.4 million dead cap hit the following year), but it also means Nill has to immediately acquire even more defensive depth in the market, and a lot of it, in the event that anyone gets hurt on either side. They’d be rolling with this, with absolutely no cover whateversoever beyond Lundkvist, if he counts as cover at all, these days:

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Tanev
Bichsel-Petrovic
Lundkvist(?)

This is the best chance, I think, for Bichsel finding NHL time this season, and it’s a slim one. But there are a couple of other big problems here. The first is that it comes at the expense of Nill voluntarily removing the reliable-if-aging Suter, giving Dallas almost no safety net. And that’s if you presume Lundkvist returns for a third year of “which mistake are you going to sit for this time” bingo, which I don’t think I’m willing to guarantee just yet. It’s just too think of a margin for Jim “Eight Defensemen” Nill to tolerate, and I can’t really blame him.

The second problem, and perhaps the bigger one, is that Suter would have to be bought out before free agency starts, by June 30 at the latest. There are no guarantees what players will do once the bell rings in early July, which means Nill would basically have to go to a respected veteran player and tell him that the team that chose to play with only five defensemen for most of the playoffs is now choosing to get rid of one of those five without anything close to a backup plan. I have no doubt that Nill is capable of having that conversation, but I’m hard-pressed to see what would motivate him to do so. The Stars don’t have defensive depth right now, with Hakanpää’s deal expiring and Tanev headed for a likely lucrative free agency negotiation, whether with Dallas or another team.

That means there’s a very real chance that Nill won’t be able to guarantee he has anything beyond this lineup when the buyout window arrives 48 hours after the Cup Final ends:

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-???
Suter-???
Lundkvist(?)

So, like it or not, I think Bichsel spends next year in the AHL, because the Stars will want him to be there in case they need him. Taking another NHL-caliber piece out of the lineup before the Stars even know what their reconstituted depth will be just doesn’t make sense, especially when it’s a decision involving a respected veteran player who is still providing NHL-quality minutes, albeit of a lesser caliber than he was three years ago.

Lian Bichsel is an important part of the Stars’ future, but Suter’s viability and reliability is a vital part of their immediate plans. So until they start meeting their short-term goals on defense, Dallas can’t afford to clear a long-term path for Bichsel just yet.

The other reason Bichsel is probably still a season away is because Suter isn’t the only player coming off the Stars’ books in a year. Esa Lindell’s deal is also expiring, and while I think the Stars will want to bring him back, it’s also possible that the conversation will look a bit different if Bichsel is champing at the bit and the Stars have enough right-side depth that it’s a matter of choosing an expensive Lindell (who is loved by teams across the league, as he deserves to be) or a younger, cheaper player who can fill a third-pairing LHD role. If Dallas doesn’t extend Lindell before the final season of his contract begins this autumn, that could be a clue to the Stars’ intentions (with a big ol’ emphasis on the “could” in that sentence).

If he follows Harley’s track, as I’m sure the Stars would prefer, then Bichsel will get a year in Texas to shore up his game and prepare to hit the ground running in 2025-26. As Sean Shapiro detailed in April, there is plenty for Bichsel still to work on. But the real answer to the Stars’ defensive depth issues on the right side will have to come from the same place it always seems to: in the trade market or in free agency. At least we have something to look forward to this summer, I guess.