Mason Marchment’s Recovery Still “a Couple Weeks” Away, Ilya Lyubushkin Looks to Be Back in Lineup as Stars Prepare to Face Philadelphia Flyers

In case you missed it yesterday, Pete DeBoer was a guest on the Ticket’s “The Hardline” show yesterday with Corby Davidson, Dave Lane, and Bob Sturm.

The interview covered both the team’s recent performance and some specific players, like Jason Robertson and Mason Marchment. And DeBoer gave the most specific update we’ve gotten on Marchment to date, in response to a question from Sturm:

“[Marchment] had fractures in his nose and facial area,” said DeBoer. “I don’t believe it was the orbital bone, but in his face, and he had surgery. At the time he had the surgery, they were probably looking at about four weeks. We’re probably a week or ten days into that, from the time of the surgery, so he’s still got a couple weeks left to go.

You can listen to it starting at the 8:40 mark of yesterday’s show.

That recovery timeline for Marchment is a bit longer than DeBoer’s previous comparison to Matt Dumba, who took about three weeks to recover from his own injury. Marchment had to be taken to the hospital after taking a puck up high against Minnesota on December 27, and the subsequent surgery sounds like it took place within a couple of days after that.

So if there are indeed two-and-a-half weeks left in that four-week timeline, Marchment’s return could fall somewhere around the January 25 game in St. Louis or the January 28 game in Vegas. But again, until he starts skating, we won’t really know how close he is.

Initially, DeBoer said the doctors were waiting for swelling to go down before assessing Marchment’s injury further, but it sounds like they did that, and the surgery was to repair a broken nose and other associated fractures. And lest you think a broken nose is merely a cosmetic injury, let me remind you that the nose is one of the two main ways that human beings breathe (still waiting on a doctor friend to confirm the other way). And hockey players in world-class cardiovascular shape need to breathe a lot. All the best to Marchment on his recovery.

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In better news, the Stars look like they will likely have Ilya Lyubushkin back in their lineup after losing him halfway through Tuesday’s game in New York after he took a hard hit in the corner.

That’s an encouraging sign for the Stars, who have had to ask Miro Heiskanen or Esa Lindell to play 30-minute games in three different contests within the last month or so due to injuries and illness in the lineup, including Heiskanen’s 30:43 on Tuesday. Heiskanen is now averaging 25:23 per game, six seconds shy of his career high in time on ice two years ago.

Reducing Heiskanen’s workload was a priority for the Stars last year, and one of the reasons he’s been taken off penalty-killing duties as much as possible. But in crunch time, Heiskanen is always going to be asked to carry the heaviest load, and the Stars have to figure out a way to keep him fresh for the most important time of year while also winning games in the second half. One would expect reinforcements to be a part of that solution, though whether that’s just Lian Bichsel or a player yet to be acquired is still an open question.

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For tonight, Dallas is preparing to face the Philadelphia Flyers, themselves enmired in what looks like their fifth straight seasons without a playoff appearance. John Tortorella is doing his best to turn Matvei Michkov into the veteran coach’s ideal type of an NHL player, and that saga has been its own microcosm of Tortorella’s approach: lots of consternation and headlines that end with frustration from the fanbase with no results to show for it. Hey, did you know Tortorella has a .467 winning percentage in the playoffs? That includes a 19-25 record during his six years with the Rangers, who had a really good roster, but never managed to win a Cup during his time there.

Players have had good things to say about Tortorella, so that’s probably an indication that he knows what he’s about. But I don’t see how Philadelphia can go on like this. Eventually you have to expect the rebuild to end, right?

Anyway, we’ll see if the Stars can add another drop of the doldrums to the folks in Philly tonight. Should be fun.