Looking at Tyler Seguin’s Upcoming Hip Surgery, the Salary Cap Implications, and What It Means for the Trade Deadline

You’ve all seen the press release by now, but let’s go ahead and start with it for posterity:

Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that forward Tyler Seguin will undergo surgery on Thursday, Dec. 5 to repair a left side FAI (femoral acetabular impingement) and the left side hip labrum. Seguin is expected to miss four to six months.

The surgery will be performed by Dr. Bryan T. Kelly at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, N.Y.

Just a note: this is not the same hip Seguin had done after the 2020 bubble playoffs. That operation, which was on his right side, was very different in some big ways, though of course we won’t know any of the real details about this procedure’s results until after Seguin’s operation tomorrow.

The key differences are all covered in Saad Yousuf’s fantastic piece on Seguin’s recovery from a couple years ago, which you should absolutely read. But some basic facts are that not too long after Seguin’s initial hip surgery, he also had to have knee surgery in December of 2020, which ended up immobilizing his quad muscle in the aftermath, which effectively forced him to “rebuild” his leg and re-learn how to walk, skate, and play after the operations. Again, check out Saad’s piece for the gruesome details.

This time, the Stars will be hoping that Seguin’s operation will be a bit more routine—or as routine as any hip operation can be for an elite athlete in his thirties. Again, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but based on the press release above, it sounds like Seguin will once again need to repair the hip labrum (which tends to get torn when impingement is happening), though this time they’ll be hoping the labrum isn’t quite as massively torn as it was when he had his right hip done a few years ago.

By the way, Jamie Benn also had hip surgeries (yes, he had two of them) back in the summer of 2015 to address the same FAI condition. In fact, FAI is extremely common among hockey players, as anyone who remembers the tragically hip (<- new and clever band reference) days of surgery last decade with the Stars can attest. Val Nichushkin, John Klingberg, and even Aleš Hemský all had hip procedures done, and there is increasing research that suggests hockey players are more likely than most elite athletes to suffer from FAI. As Greg Roskovensky writes in his excellent overview of FAI in hockey players:

According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, FAI is a condition in which the bones of the hip are abnormally shaped.  Because of the abnormality, the articulation of the femoral head and the acetabulum rub together and can cause irritation.  FAI  is more common in elite athletes than the general population. 

And to crib from that same American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons:

Even at young ages, ice hockey players have a greater prevalence of α angles associated with cam FAI than do skier-matched controls. Properties inherent to ice hockey likely enhance the development of a bony overgrowth on the femoral neck, leading to cam FAI.

First and foremost, we are all hoping for the best for Tyler Seguin’s operation and recovery, particularly with a newborn baby set to arrive in the Seguin home in the very near future. Any surgery is an emotional, taxing process, particularly when the future of your career hangs in the balance. But given how hard Seguin worked to recover from his last operation, you can bet that he’ll be doing everything in his power to drag his body back to hockey readiness as soon as humanly possible.

But enough of amateur doctor hour. Let’s move on to the less important stuff: hockey.

***

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Seguin went through immense pain and put in countless hours of work just to help the Stars get through a tough first quarter of the season. In those 19 games he played, surely through immense pain, he was as massive a contributor as any player on the team not named Jake Oettinger.

And as someone who has been at the rink consistently this year in Dallas (and Finland), I can say that Seguin has done so while having a consistently positive attitude. I’m sure he wasn’t unaware of this possibility or even likelihood, as we discussed yesterday. But through it all, Seguin played at a point-per-game pace to keep the Stars well ahead of the pack when other, healthier players were still finding their game. If you want to talk about maturity and leadership, being able to put aside your own looming injury in order to gut it out for as long as you can on behalf of your teammates is about as leadershippy as it gets.

Still, the team will have to find a way to pick up where Seguin left off, now. So let’s talk about the implications for the team as they face the remainder of the season without Seguin on the ice, as well as the larger roster-building perspective.

As for the team right now, Seguin has been part of the best line in hockey. I’m not qualifying that statement, though it’s worth noting they’ve gotten a lot more offensive zone faceoffs than other lines. But this isn’t ten years ago, when we just used that sort of thing to dismiss a line as “sheltered” and “defensively suspect.” The Duchene line has been getting offensive-zone usage because they’ve been so dangerous, moreso than the other way around. (I suppose I just qualified that statement.)

Yes, Jason Robertson and Roope Hintz are obviously more likely to be Selke Trophy candidates given their tools, skating, size, and so forth. No one’s saying Mason Marchment can keep up with Connor McDavid in open ice like Miro Heiskanen can, but the fact remains that the coaching staff found a lethal weapon this year in the first quarter of the season, and they deployed it as effectively as you possibly could have done. Credit to the players and the coaches for finding the right balance in doing so.

But without Seguin, the Stars’ best line is going to need some big help. Logan Stankoven was the go-to option in Utah, and I think that’s the smart thing to stick with for the time being. Stankoven has the vision of Seguin and the athleticism of, well, Stankoven, which should allow him to support the line with both forechecking and playmaking, as well as threatening a deadly shot, which Seguin was also doing.

Against Utah, you could see some adjustment happening, but the line didn’t seem to falter too much, with Matt Duchene still looking elite alongside Marchment, who has been similarly dominant lately.

Starscap vs. UtahWide open neutral zone in this one with Dallas having a strong counter-attack game to Utah's speed and constant regrouping. Duchene/Marchment were the heavy hitters in terms of chances & possession despite getting blanked on the scoresheet. Excellent game from that line again.

— Corey Sznajder (@allthreezones.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T18:53:26.453Z

For my money, parking Stankoven and Wyatt Johnston on the top two right wing spots is the way to go. Stankoven is great enough to build chemistry with other great players, and I think his skills should complement those two really well.

It’s possible we’ll see him and Wyatt Johnston swapped at some point if one or both of them don’t start scoring at their usual rate, but I think you have to leave Johnston with Hintz for right now and let that line build chemistry. Sometimes you just have to trust your best players to figure it out.

As far as where Seguin would fit back in if his recovery is closer to the four-month timeline, I think that’s a bridge you cross when you come to it. But that’s a very good problem to have, presuming Seguin’s return happens in the most ideal sort of timeframe. And I think the roster will probably look a bit different by that point, too.

***

Speaking of the roster and the salary cap, here’s the deal: during the course of a regular season, as we all learned during the last two years in particular, every day that a team is under the salary cap during the season, they accrue that space as “extra” cap room. PuckPedia has a short and sweet explanation for that process that you should just go read, as everyone seems to get confused about how much space a team has midway through the season, and why players’ cap hits “decrease” as the days go by.

But for our purposes today, the important thing to note is that the Stars have not yet put Seguin on Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR). Once they do that, they’ll be able to exceed the salary cap by Seguin’s $9.85 million cap hit, minus however much cap room they have at that moment. But in all likelihood, they won’t make that move until the day when they need to use that cap room because they’ve acquired other players who would put them over the cap. But they won’t make the LTIR move a minute earlier than necessary, because once they do that, they will no longer be accruing (“banking”) cap space to use at the trade deadline.

In other words, the ideal scenario would be for the Stars to bank their extra cap space until the day Nill has the trade all ready to go, then for the Stars to call up a player or two to get right up against the salary cap on the day of the trade with as little as one dollar to spare. Then they would put Seguin on LTIR, giving them $9,849,999 in additional cap room to use (on top of the five or six million dollars in pro-rated cap space they could have accrued up to that point), at which point they could add the player(s) in question.

Mark Janko would be the one doing all the wizardry and calculations to pinpoint which players’ specific cap hits would match up with what days in order to hit that number right on the nose, though it’s not as crucial that they get every last cent out of the cap manipulation as it was last year, given how much room they’ll have to work with.

After all those moves, they could send those call-ups back down the next day. That would give them back those players’ cap hits when they’re loaned back to Texas, as well as the banked space they accrued up to the moment they used LTIR, if they didn’t use it all in one fell swoop on that same day.

So, if you want to impress your somewhat-nerdy friends, just remember this: the Stars almost certainly won’t move Seguin to LTIR until the day they make another big move, since that will halt their cap space accrual for the season. But rest assured, the Stars are going to have a ton of cap room to work with this year.

How will they use that space? Well, you can read Sean’s theories about a couple of particular players, whose names I won’t mention today in order to goad you into subscribing to his SubStack. But for my money, I think the Stars would absolutely want to add another top-six forward who could take Seguin’s spot on the power play, as well as another defenseman to play that Chris Tanev role they coveted so much last year.

It’s funny, though. If you assume that Lian Bichsel gets called up this year, then the Stars would have four left-handed defensemen they would absolutely want to play every night in Heiskanen, Lindell, Harley, and Bichsel, and just one right-handed defenseman the coaching staff really seems to trust in crunch time, in Lyubushkin. So while Nils Lundkvist really has made enormous strides this year, I’m still skeptical that he’ll be given the chance to show his stuff when the stakes are highest. And Matt Dumba’s struggles earning trust have been well-documented, so I’m not ready to guarantee that the’d be in the starting lineup for Game 1 in April, either.

The Stars got a taste of what it’s like to have a defensive rock like Tanev on the back end, and I think they’ll be hard-pressed not to look for a similar player again. But given what they did this summer after buying out Ryan Suter, their definition of “a similar player” might be quite different from yours and mine.

One thing’s for sure, though: every GM with a big cap hit to unload is now targeting the Dallas Stars for their big moves to open up cap space. In past years, Nill has always been good about exploiting such an imbalance, as was most prominently seen with the Patrick Sharp/Stephen Johns heist with Chicago. But with so much room to work with, it will be hard to resist the appeal of Big Names when the Stars could make more than one big move. The question is whether the big name players will be worth the opportunity cost of not making a different move.

The Stars will be receiving pitches left and right for the next few months until the trade deadline, and you can bet that Nill will be using his cap space to take a big swing. And probably, he’ll take a couple of them.