One Clue about What the Dallas Stars Think They Need to Upgrade This Year

Two years ago, the Dallas Stars traded for Evgenii Dadonov and Max Domi at the trade deadline. The conventional wisdom was that the Stars were in need of forward depth, and with Thomas Harley making his triumphant return late in the season, that was the area Jim Nill shored up.

Last year, the Stars went out and addressed their blue line, acquiring Chris Tanev. It was a huge move that addressed the Stars’ biggest weakness, though it turned out that Pete DeBoer really would’ve liked to acquire two NHL defensemen, given the five defensemen the Stars ended up rolling with for much of the postseason.

This year, the Stars seemed prime to upgrade the roster even before Tyler Seguin’s hip surgery gave the collective fanbase a bunch of cartoon eyeballs with “$$$LTIR” in place of pupils. The defense seemed an obvious place to start once Tanev went to Toronto over the summer, but the power play’s scuffling start alongside some underproducing forwards has highlighted the need for some additional scoring help up front, too.

In all likelihood, the Stars will use every resource they have to get the targets they value, to the extent they can do so without mortgaging the future. But this really does feel like as much of a “go for it” year as any in recent memory, given the particular makeup of the roster.

When it comes to specific targets, I’m a little hesitant (read: cowardly) about identifying specific players, but Brock Nelson really does give me that Chris Tanev feeling from last year, insofar as he seems like exactly the sort of player who would fit the Stars’ perceived (and actual) needs.

What those needs are will drive Nill’s pursuits over the next two months. And at today’s morning skate, I was curious if DeBoer saw the Stars’ needing improvement, internal or otherwise in any specific areas. I think his answer was pretty interesting, so I’ll just put the entire quote here, which is a response to my question (which I have omitted in order to hide how convoluted it was) about how DeBoer views his team’s areas to improve in the second half of the season:

“There’s always things you wanna get better at,” said DeBoer. “I mean, right off the top of my head, obviously the power play and scoring. And you know, part of that is personnel out of the lineup. We know it’s going to be a little more difficult to score when you take Seguin and Marchment and some of those guys out, but you know, we’ve still got to find a way. I like our team game. I like how we’re defending. That’s given us a chance to win every night. I think some of those things are in good places, but there’s always little details of the game. I don’t think we’re a great—a good enough team yet on the walls. In order to play and win down the stretch and into the playoffs, I think we’ve gotta get better in those areas. So, there’s always things from a coaching perspective your group can get better at.”

Additionally, DeBoer then answered a question about the team’s success in shot suppression since the start of December (which relates a lot to one of the two stats we discussed yesterday). And DeBoer’s answered there, too, was very interesting, so I’ll include that here, too:

“Honestly, I think when Tyler Seguin goes out of the lineup,” said DeBoer, “you have to put an emphasis on defending. The reality is, you know, he probably creates a goal a night for us, and when you take him out, I think the mindset of your group has to change, to win 2-1 as opposed to 4-3. So I thought we made a real commitment. You know, it didn’t come easily. We lost some games there, you know, we didn’t play well. And I think we realized this is the way that we can have success with some of these guys out of the lineup.”

To be clear, I don’t think the latter quote is saying the Stars made a pivot to defense the way Lindy Ruff did with a 2016-17 team decimated by injuries. But I do think DeBoer is admitting that the Stars, this season, haven’t had the luxury that plentiful scoring provides, which is to say they’ve had to tighten up a lot of details on the back end because the tip of the spear has been either injured or dull, to stretch the metaphor far beyond its breaking point. So it seems clear to me that DeBoer, in his perfect world, would like to add what Seguin’s absence took away: the creation of one more goal per night. And what coach wouldn’t want that?

The former quote, however, might be more telling. The Stars’ forward group is not a bunch of hulking players, outside of Marchment, Robertson, Benn, and Hintz. A lot of their offense is driven (or was hoped to be driven) by players on the less-huge end of things, like Wyatt Johnston, Evgenii Dadonov, Mavrik Bourque, and Logan Stankoven. And heck, even Duchene showed last year that playoff hockey can be tough on his own scoring, so I don’t think DeBoer was speaking in mere platitudes when he talked about how the Stars aren’t necessarily winning as many board battles as he would like them to (if that’s a fair interpretation of “good enough team yet on the walls”, as I think it is).

One Stars player made a good point when I was talking to him about this today. He said that players who have come over from Europe don’t have to battle along the boards as much, because there’s so much more space on the wider ice. It’s not a physicality or even an intensity thing, as those players are just as skilled in those areas, but just a practical consequence of having more space. Players tend to go around each other if they can, rather that fighting for pucks along the walls. So when they encounter the North American ice with less space, those board battles become a lot more frequent, necessarily.

The Stars don’t have a ton of players who just came over from Europe, so that doesn’t really apply to their roster in any broad sense. But it is the case that those plays along the walls only become more necessary in the playoffs, when time and space are at a premium. And that means there are certain kinds of players who the Stars might end up targeting, whether that has to do with their size, their experience, or just their skill. Nelson is one such player whose size and reputation is as a player who gets things done come hell or high water, whereas a 5’10” forward like Mikael Granlund, who profiles more as a forward creative in space and off the rush, might not be.

That doesn’t mean either of those players (or ones in that same vein) will or won’t end up as Stars players by March 7, but we’re not trying to tell the future here. We’re just trying to look for clues. And if you’re ready to get out your magnifying glass a little early, I might suggest starting to look along the walls.