Any new Dallas Stars jersey will have a lot to live up to after last year’s record-setting debut of the ‘99 jersey, which continues to be in high demand after selling out multiple times last season. The bar was set high, and by all accounts, the Stars will be adding two more sets of new threads to compete with the rest of their rotation for this upcoming season.

The first and most obvious of the two new jerseys will be whatever the Stars end up trotting out for their Stadium Series game against Vegas in February down in Arlington. NHL teams have traditionally gotten a little bit more adventurous with the Stadium Series outfits compared to the Winter Classic, where sweaters tend to aim for a more (yes) classic feel.

When we use the word “adventurous,” we need look no further than last year’s Tampa kit, which featured the phrase “pirate lore” used entirely without irony opposite Boston trying out some white Mickey Mouse gloves for their own ensemble.

Things weren’t quite as edgy back in 2014, when Anaheim and Los Angeles kicked off the Stadium Series at Dodger Stadium with a jersey matchup that seems tame in retrospect (though the larger numbers on the back still seem a little odd to me). But over the last dozen years, you can find plenty of examples of Stadium Series uniforms that would never get the green light in just about any other context. It’s a one-off event, and that means you can put “Smash Ville” on your actual NHL jersey if you really, really want to. Legally, nobody can stop you.

Read more

On Monday afternoon, the Stars and Mavericks sent out a joint press release announcing “an agreement” about the outstanding legal issues between the two teams. Here’s what the statement said, in both picture and block-quote form:

The Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars have reached an agreement that resolves the outstanding matters between the two organizations. American Airlines Center will continue to serve as the home of both teams at least through the 2030–31 season.

It’s not the most detailed of statements, but Dallas’s city manager, Kimerly Bizor Tolbert, said that Dallas is pleased with the resolution, for whatever that’s worth. She also added an extremely optimistic statement about both teams’ “long-term future in our city,” and well, I don’t think today changes the fact that I have a very hard time seeing such a future lasting beyond 2031 in any meaningful sense, even if the Mavericks’ Valley View Mall site is technically within Dallas city limits.

Anyway, a settlement between the two teams (as we presume this vague announcement to be describing) was always the likely outcome, even if it dragged on for a bit longer than you might have expected. As Mike Piellucci wrote over at D Magazine, lawyers are expensive, and with both teams having already made clear plans to play elsewhere in five years, a settlement of some kind just made too much sense not to happen sooner or later. And from the little that’s out there publicly, both sides will say that they are happy with just such a settlement.

As for the specific details of that settlement, don’t expect to hear the terms any time soon. Neither side seems to have much incentive to reveal them, but I do think there are a few things about the overall developments that we can reasonably conclude at this point.

Read more

If you didn’t see it clearly
I’d say you ain’t even tried
’Cause with my eyes shut tightly
It’s plain as daylight

It’s the Texas summers that remind you of what it means to live here. The heat beats down on you not only from the sun above, but outside of every door you open. Getting out of your house, your car, or the grocery store means a hot breath in the face. When it’s over 100 for days on end, you start strategizing your time outside much the same way people in Minnesota do in the winter, which is to say you avoid it unless absolutely necessary.

That heat also brings a sort of sports desert along with it. Most hockey fans in Dallas understand that year-round hockey coverage is going to be at a premium. Awesome hockey meetups notwithstanding, it’s not like you can flip on the nightly news and expect to hear hockey talk happening on a Monday in DFW. It’s the hockey offseason, and most Stars fans I know tend to have at least one other sports team to occupy their time.

Sports can be a balm to heat-related depression. Unfortunately, July and August are when three of the main attractions here lie dormant, making the options for sportsing less plentiful than they might be in October. There are still options, though.

Take the WNBA, for instance. The Dallas Wings are a fascinating team for many reasons, but despite the presence of phenoms like Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd (the latter of whom is currently recovering from a right knee issue), the Wings are right on the playoff bubble as things stand now. They’ll be playing at American Airlines Center next season, which should be fascinating, but I think it’s fair to say the Wings have yet to truly capitalize on their recent talent influx. The potential is clearly there, and attendance figures might improve at a bigger arena next year, but some success in the short term certainly wouldn’t hurt either.

FC Dallas is in a similar spot as the Wings, sitting at 7th in the West right now. Petar Musa has been everything you’d have hoped he’d be after Dallas went out and signed him to a huge deal, and he’s one of the top goal-scorers in MLS again this season. But I confess that this team has not really captured my heart over the last few years, even when I’ve attended games at Toyota Stadium. Maybe the revamped stadium will do the trick for me, but I’ve struggled to stay locked in on this team since the departure of Ricardo Pepi. I would be glad to be forced to hop on a bandwagon in Frisco, but it just hasn’t happened lately.

And of course, there’s another team on the playoff bubble in their league. Let’s take a bit more time to dig into that one, and a couple others.

The Frustrating Texas Rangers

Jamey Newberg has covered yet another Rangers season with his typical aplomb, and I remain captivated by the analysis even as the on-field product grows wearisome. The local baseball concern is following up a season of wasted pitching dominance with largely the same lack of run-scoring, and now with their top two pitchers also dealing with injuries of their own.

There have been moments, and the Salute for deGrom is certainly one of them. It’s not quite Claw & Antlers, but it’s not not that, either.

Corey Seager gave the team a boost after his return at the end of July, but his OPS still lingers below .700. And if you subjected yourself to any of the West Coast Baseball the Rangers have engaged in this week, you have suffered as a result. Posting a 2-5 record against the two worst teams in the league is a dreadful way to head into the final quarter of the baseball season, and the Rangers managed it in in their typically excruciating fashion.

I’ll admit that my perception of the Rangers this year has also been disproportionately jaded by my having attended the 9-0 loss in which they were no-hit by the Astros in May. This Rangers offense is incredibly capable of letting down their fans, and I don’t see how you can really harbor much hope that even clambering atop a pitiful AL West will lead to anything more than a quick playoff exit for a team swinging the bat like they have a hole in their collective heart.

I’ll further admit that the new stadium remains a dreary place in which to watch a game. Sure, the air conditioning is certainly preferable to that time in 2007 that my legs turned beet red after a day in the right field stands at the Ballpark, but the cacophonous sound bouncing around the shed more than outweighs the friendlier temperatures. Controlling the atmosphere and injecting sound into it leads to sterility more than liveliness. Baseball is meant to wash over you, not reveberate.

That 2023 World Series win was glorious, and it will never be taken away from us.1 But the seasons since have been a stark reminder of the depths this Rangers team is capable of, and it’s been the furthest thing from diverting this summer.

Look, I love baseball. I grew up playing baseball. Taking oneself out to the old ball game is a wonderful tradition. But man, these Rangers have made it a chore, and I really wish they hadn’t. There could be no more natural outlet for offseason hockey fans than to watch the Boys of Summer, but even the appeal of temperature control isn’t enough to draw me into the slog that this season has turned into, and that’s a real shame.

The Desperate Dallas Mavericks

Here’s a weird StarsThoughts fact: this after-midnight post on the night of the Luka Dončić trade remains the most-viewed story on this entire website. Mostly, that’s due to timing, as I just happened to be awake when the trade broke late on a Saturday night and couldn’t not write about the most insane NBA trade of all time, but it’s still an oddity that the most popular post at this place has been one about their AAC co-tenants.

The NBA season corresponds almost exactly to that of the NHL, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been offseason stuff to follow. Patrick Dumont has learned a lesson or two, including that It Is Bad to Set Fire to an NBA Fanbase. The last few months appear to have been a calculated exercise in trying to right an impossibly bad wrong.

Nico Harrison was always going to pay for making one of the dumbest trades in sports history, and he did so when he got axed less than a year after making said trade. The basketball team found itself in rough shape last season, finishing just above Memphis and Sacramento last year. For all you basketball novices out there, it is exceedingly rare for it to be a good thing to be mentioned in the same sentence as both Memphis and Sacramento. (Probably this is true even in non-basketball contexts, though I admittedly know Sacramento much more intimately than I do Memphis, so we’ll table that digression for now and avoid further offense to any Memphisites.)

Since the height of the Mavericks’ foolishness, they’ve pivoted to taking their anger out on the Dallas Stars. Maybe that’s just typical Adelson Stuff, or maybe it’s a more devious plan to capitalize on obscure clauses and squeeze every bit of revenue out of the AAC that they possibly can, regardless of how much the fans in Dallas suffer as a result. I don’t know, but it’s hard not to suspect something sordid, given recent history.

In most cases, you’d be right to say that we just need to focus on the team’s actual performance on the court, but the actions of the family that Mark Cuban regrets having sold the team to kind of supersede those normal imperatives. To give the Mavs credit, they’re certainly trying. Hiring Masai Ujiri and firing Jason Kidd is pretty clear evidence that Patrick Dumont has been diligently reading his copy of “How to Fix a Massive Mistake and Win People Back Over,” and the absurd stroke of luck that was the Cooper Flagg lottery pick only furthered his goals on that front. There is a path back for this ownership that really oughtn’t have been there after the Luka trade.

To be blunt, I don’t think I can ever really see my way to rooting for a team owned by the same people who made the Luka trade, but I know the diehard basketball folks out there probably feel differently. To that end, the Anthony Davis trade and the installation of an Actually Competent leader in Ujiri might mean the world to moving on. It’s only potential meaning right now, though.

Even with Flagg, the Mavericks still have quite a ways to go, even if Dereck Lively II manages to stay healthy this season. I just don’t hear the Mavs talked about with nearly as much love as I did five years ago, even when they were losing. There is something really special about an athlete being on a first-name basis citywide the way Luka was, and you don’t sell that kind of relationship for magic beans without suffering some amount of lasting consequences. Some scars never truly heal.

Anyway, we’ll see what the Mavericks have in store this season, but for now, they’re probably the very last team any Stars fan would choose for their itinerant rooting interests. Let’s wrap up with the boys.

The Exhausting Dallas Cowboys

Stars fans will tune into at least one game played at the Death Star over the next six months, on account of the Stadium Series matchup between the Stars and the Golden Knights on February 20. It will certainly be a spectacle, because that is what Jerry World is for. Comparisons to the Winter Classic in the Cotton Bowl are inevitable, but don’t be fooled: this will be entirely its own thing, for better or for worse.

As for the football club, what can I really tell you about the Dallas Cowboys that you can’t learn in absurd detail from Bob? I won’t even begin to try to break down the eternal dysfunction that is The Biggest Team in Sports, but their record speaks for itself:

Those Mike McCarthy years sure do feel like the opening and closing of the championship window of the Dak years, at least to an admitted casual. A 33-year-old quarterback can certainly still win a championship, but aging curves don’t lie. His job is tougher now than it was five years ago, even with great targets to hit.

But perhaps you feel optimistic, especially after the signing of Von Miller yesterday. Perhaps you feel like this Cowboys team could be the one. Even this year’s Dak Prescott is still a far better quarterback than he’s often gotten credit for, and Bob did a good job not too long ago at reminding everyone of that fact. If Prescott can squeeze another year of top-level QB talent out of the position for Dallas (while remaining healthy), then they certainly have the surrounding pieces to make the most of it. CeeDee Lamb is still elite, and the defense is a fearsome bunch indeed. They also have a kicker you may have heard of, on account of Brandon Aubrey is one of the best ones to ever do it.

I’m not naïve or anything. I know how the city of Dallas (and the NFL at large) will revolve around the Cowboys when the season begins in September, because it does so year-round. But man, the Cowboys are about as far removed from Normal Sportsing as Manchester City are from being a Neighborhood Soccer Club.

The owner of the Cowboys is a man Forbes lists as the 128th-richest person in the entire world, and he has chosen for decades to cosplay as his team’s GM. You know this. Pretty much any objective party will tell you that Jerry’s decisions have largely been to the benefit of his ego more so than to the benefit of the team, but when you’re richer than 99.9999% of the people on planet Earth, you don’t have to care about that. You can operate your team like you’re playing Madden ‘05, where the only people who judge you are ones you can tune out with the click of a button.

Maybe the Cowboys will Do Something this year. Certainly their owner will do his best to ensure that they are Talked About, but we know enough by now to remain confident that the Cowboys will be regular members of the news cycle regardless of whether the athletes succeed or fail. The point isn’t to win, but to be seen doing whatever it is they will do. By that measurement, I suppose the season can already be deemed a great success.

So, for Stars fans looking for alternative local teams, where does this leave you? I purposely avoided discussing high school and college teams, but I know those are near and dear to many folks’ hearts. Sports aren’t about rationality, and that’s true whether you’re just a fan or the owner of the richest team on the planet. They’re about the drama and the hope, the tension and the possibilities. Rooting for a sports team is a trust exercise where you know you’re going to fall and not be caught, at least some of the time. We sign up to suffer.

Have you managed to stick with the Rangers even through their recent and depressingly familiar doldrums, on account of their being the only championship team of the Metroplex since the Mavericks climbed the mountain in 2011? Do you still retain hope that this time, the Cowboys won’t hurt you? Have you forgiven the Mavericks for ripping out the city’s beating heart for reasons that amount to little more than negligence and egotism?

Or perhaps you’re all-in on the Wings or FC Dallas, specifically because they aren’t drawing all the headlines. Maybe you prefer staying off the beaten path until the hockey season kicks back into gear in October. Certainly you have options in Dallas, but none of them have gone as far in the playoffs in recent years as the Stars. Success counts for a lot, but being Big in Dallas still tends to have more to do with how you are talked about than about what you have actually done.

That’s why I think hockey fans might be the most interesting litmus test of all when it comes to DFW sports fandom. Where do your allegiances lie, when the ice has yet to set? I want to know how other people process the many and varied options of fandom in this place, because the picture is as crowded as it is clouded.

If you’ve chosen to add another team to your rooting interests, I can only imagine that you have a good reason for it. I’d love to hear what those reasons are, even if they aren’t rational.

As August approaches its apex, I’m reminded, as always, that I haven’t read as much as I’ve wanted to. Part of this has been due to a busier-than-usual couple of months, with multiple family events out of state, a good friend’s wedding, and a move to the other side of Dallas. Understandable it may be, but I still feel the lack of having read as much as I would have liked to.

Still, I’d like to share a few of the books I have read over the last little while with you, as well as one from a couple of years ago. We did this last year, as you may recall, and I wanted to relay a couple options for those of you out there looking to kill some time on vacation or wind down during these absurdly warm summer evenings in Dallas.

While it’s not available for purchase, let’s preface this list with a book that I know some of you already picked up from Steve Hill on Tuesday night in Allen: a collection of all of the SportsToons Dallas Stars editorial illustrations from the 2025-26 season.

I’ve made sure to purchase Steve’s prior collections from the last couple of years, because they’re unique, well-done, and as excellent a Season in Review as you’ll find anywhere. These are fantastic books to flip through if you want to jog your memory about everything from a fun postgame press conference to a regular season overtime goal, and Steve puts a sneaky amount of care into getting the details right.

Anyway, keep an eye on the SportsToons socials, because I’m sure he’ll let you all know when you can get your hands on this year’s copy. As always, it’s well worth the wait.

The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL, by Sean McIndoe

If you’ve ever run across any of Sean’s work, you know he’s probably the funniest hockey writer of the last 15 years, and that may still be underselling him. Sean’s combination of dry wit and historical knowledge made him mandatory reading back in the Blogger and Vice days, certainly in the halcyon days of Grantland, and most recently at the Athletic.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Sean knows more about NHL history than 95% of other writers out there, and that makes him the perfect person to pore over that history. You will learn more about the NHL’s history from this read (which is surprisingly quick for a history book) than you will from most encyclopedia. Sean also has an uncanny ability to make connections through the decades that remind us that some of the most unbelievably insane moments in NHL history aren’t as far removed from us as we tend to think they are.

As Sean himself puts it:

This is the story of the 100-year history of the NHL, with an emphasis on the moments that were confusing, funny or just plain strange. You'll learn about the formation of the league and the Original Six and the Richard Riots and expansion and The Trade, for sure. But you'll also learn about the long-forgotten original rules , and the time a team wore earmuffs on the bench, and the team that once named Mr. Rogers captain, and the NHL tough guy who fought Muhammad Ali, and the time a team realized it had been spelling its own name wrong for 60 years, and how Harrison Ford kept Joe Sakic from becoming a Ranger.

Anyway, pick the book up here and also anywhere. Sean also recorded the audiobook himself, if you’d prefer to go that route.

I’m biased because I think the world of McIndoe’s work, but I genuinely think this is one of those books every hockey fan would improve their life by picking up. Knowing is sometimes much more than half the battle.

The Best Team Money Can Buy, by Molly Knight

For a lifelong Dodgers fan like me, this was absolute catnip. Unfortunately, it’s also quite pertinent to the current moment in Major League Baseball, when the league is actively deploying marketing slogans like “level the playing field” against its highest-spending teams.

We won’t get into the whole flap about the lockout that the lower-spending owners are all clearly jonesing for, because we’d all be better off reading about how the Dodgers actually went from a team in bankruptcy to the juggernaut they are today. Knight’s book contained tons of interviews I’d never seen before, covering everything from the preposterous Frank McCourt1 era and divorce trial (which led directly to the media rights deal the league tries to blame others for today) to Clayton Kershaw’s gut-wrenching disappointments in the first half of his career.

Even if you’re not into the Dodgers or baseball, this is a story of how sports ownership works, and how badly it can go when it doesn’t. It’s incredibly well-sourced, written in compelling fashion, and consistently evocative. It’s a great read, and you will be a smarter sports fan for having done so, even if you still don’t like the Dodgers afterward.

It’s on Amazon.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Yes, there’s a movie with Ryan Gosling, and it’s pretty good! I made a point to read the book before the movie after having read The Martian after having seen the Matt Damon film, as I wanted to try things the other way ‘round this time. I’m glad I did, too.

Read more

Once more, thank you to everyone who came out to the event on Tuesday. It was a great time with good people, and it was a delight to chat about hockey with so many of you readers. I was told there were over 200 hockey fans in attendance over the course of the evening, which is pretty impressive for a weeknight in Fairview in the middle of August. Sean and I spent a few minutes debriefing about the event with Gavin in person on AIH yesterday, so give that show a watch or a listen if you haven’t yet.

At the end of the event, Gavin held a live Q&A with audience members. There were a ton of good questions, and I think they were well-answered by the other (smarter) panelists. A couple of those questions have been sticking with me in the following days, however, so let’s take a moment today to elaborate upon some of the most pressing concerns for Stars fans with four weeks to go until the preseason.

Q: Which player(s) on this roster or in Cedar Park has/have the biggest potential upside next season?

This isn’t quite the same question as the overall best-case scenario for Dallas, which we’ve touched on previously. My gut reaction on Tuesday was that Thomas Harley could provide this roster with the greatest in-house boost, and I think I still stand by that after 48 hours of contemplation.

Jake Oettinger was also heavily discussed, and given the outsize impact goaltending has upon most any hockey game compared to that of other positions, a big year from Oettinger would certainly mean a ton, especially if it continued into the postseason. Goaltending is 75% of your team, unless you don’t have it, and so on.

It’s also worth pointing out that a big trade could always wind up changing things, too. Mikko Rantanen obviously wound up being the answer to this question in the 2024-25 season, though nobody could possibly have guessed it at the beginning of the year. We’ll stick with the current roster for this questions, though.

Read more

Tonight’s the night! Starting at 6pm, you can stop by the Fairview/Allen BoomerJack’s to meet and greet all your favorite hockey folks before we record a live podcast later in the evening—a podcast which, I am told, you will also have the opportunity to participate in.

Who’s going to be there? Well, I’ll tell you who, if you’ll calm down for a minute. How’s this guest list strike you?

• The in-charge Gavin Spittle

• The inimitable Sean Shapiro

• The incomparable Lia Assimakopoulos

• The indefatigable Brad Lukowich

• The unparalleled Stephen Meserve

• The ingenious Steve Hill

• The effervescent Brien Rea

• Maybe one or two other folks not mentioned here

You’ll have at least an hour to go around and tell all those folks how awesome they are, and I recommend you do just that while the rest of us are in the corner arguing about Brenden Dillon’s zone deployment in 2012.

Stephen, Brien, and Sean all have Texas Stars (and hockey in general) stories for days, so take advantage of this chance to extract every little nuggets of hockey lore you can while they’re here. You don’t need me to tell you this, I am guessing.

If you haven’t had a chance to meet Lia of the Dallas Morning News, I guarantee that she will have a story about her time covering sports that you haven’t heard before. Whether it’s about Pete DeBoer’s first playoff run in Dallas, what it was like to share lunch with Roope Hintz in Finland, or how she manages to cover roughly half of all DFW sports while still meeting her deadlines, Lia has seen and covered just about everything. Also, she’s very cool.

Brad Lukowich’s career speaks for itself. He will also have a chance to actually speak, himself, tonight. And if you haven’t had a chance to ask Gavin or Steve about how they have poured their own love of sports into their respective media empires, now is your chance to hear those stories.

It’s going to be a great time, and I am very much looking forward to it. There will also be a whole bunch of giveaways where attendees can win everything from Stars tickets, to some of the above authors’ books, and probably even some high-fives. (Also, keep an eye on the StarsThoughts chat today for the code word you’ll need to grab a prize out of the Stars Thoughts grab bag tonight.)

Even if none of the above strikes your fancy (though I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t), you’ll also have the chance to hang out with other fans, many of whom will surely be at least as cool as some of the aforementioned folks. This is a really lovely event that 105.3 The Fan is putting on, and any Dallas hockey fan can tell you that it’s not every day that a local media outlet puts this level of effort into making something like this happen—let alone making it free to attend, like Gavin and The Fan are doing. I think that’s pretty cool, particularly in August.

So even if you just stop by to grab an iced tea and complain about how I say “um” too much while I’m speaking, we’d be glad to see you there. This is a good time to show up and show out, even if it’s just to throw batteries rotten vegetables at me while I’m arguing with someone about the critical differences between Mr. Pibb and Pibb Xtra1. I could probably use the vitamins.

Stars hockey will be back on the ice in just a few weeks, but you don’t have to wait more than a few hours to bask in some cool hockey talk tonight. What better way to kick off the end of the summer than by partying with other hockey fans in an air-conditioned restaurant? See y’all there.

Note to paid subscribers who are showing up to BoomerJack’s tomorrow: I’ll have a few random items to give away.

If you’d like one, all you have to do is walk up to me and say the name of the hockey player I’ll send out to y’all tomorrow (Tuesday) morning in the subscriber chat. You might get something cool! You might also get something less cool. Or if there are a ton of people there, I might run out of stuff altogether, because I don’t have a magic bag of holding or whatever. Also, Gavin tells me that there will be a whole bunch of other giveaways there for all attendees, so I’m sure most folks will leave with something more than just memories, even though memories are the most priceless thing of all, according to credit card commercials that have no ulterior motives whatsoever. See you there!

Just about any time a team loses in the first round, uncomfortable questions get asked. That’s true whether you’re the 2023 Colorado Avalanche, fresh off a Stanley Cup championship, and it was true for the (also) 2023 Boston Bruins, whose 135(!) points in the regular season didn’t help them in a seven-game loss to Florida.

If teams of that caliber are subject to criticism when they fail to advance, then most certainly it is true of a Stars team that is 27 years and counting from its last and only championship season. The loss hurt even more, coming as it did against the notorious playoff underperformers in Minnesota.

The nature of sports is for some things to matter more than others, and that’s especially true of Stanley Cup Playoff games vs. regular season tilts. Many players find that their games struggle to translate entirely to the intensity of the postseason, where checking is tighter, puck battles are even fiercer, and the crowd is absolutely juiced so long as the game is even marginally within reach.

Predictably, fans over this summer have been beset with (very understandable) pessimism primarily about two things: Dallas’s premature playoff exit, and the somewhat thinner roster after the departure of Mavrik Bourque. These are very reasonable and valid concerns, and it is up to the Stars to show that they can overcome those challenges to keep the window as wide-open as it’s been for the last few years.

But I was watching a shift from Game 3 over the weekend because I am a total party animal, and something about it struck me. A few somethings, really. Here’s the full clip before we touch on a couple specific points.

So the top line has just finished a shift, and you can see Wyatt Johnston heading off. Mikko Rantanen hangs out despite being a minute into his shift, on account of it’s his first shift of the game, he’s feeling fresh, and he’s Mikko Rantanen. He bolsters the weak side as the Stars change, and that’s how you get Oskar Bäck and Radek Faksa playing alongside a superstar in the offensive zone. As you’d expect, the puck finds Rantanen after he and Bäck gain the zone, and two Minnesota players converge on the Stars’ winger. This should be a turnover of some kind, by rights.

It is not a turnover. Instead, the trio of hulking forwards (all of whom are at least 6-foot-3 and easily over 200lbs) and the Stars’ third defense pairing hold off the Wild’s top defense pairing in Hughes and Faber, as well as a M. Foligno-Boldy-McCarron trio (Boldy having been on the ice for the entire time Rantanen has been out there), and the puck is fed to Faksa as he skates toward the corner.

Faksa will send it to the point, where Bichsel and Myers will connect and put the puck right back in deep. Faber will catch the top of Faksa’s pants with a one-minute cross check, sending him down to the ice (with no penalty call, which is probably correct after Steel drew a marginal power play a minute earlier, on which the Stars scored the opening goal). Dallas will continue to possess the puck.

For a fourth-line shift (or at least two-third of one), spending this much time in the offensive zone is a treat. To do so against the Wild’s top D pair is even more so, and perhaps that’s why Bäck finds some extra juice as Quinn Hughes wheels behind his net to finally gain possession and relieve some pressure. One would generally expect Quinn Hughes to escape the forecheck of Oskar Bäck in such a situation, but that is not what happens.

Because the Stars’ fourth-line pressure means that Hughes has been out there for a while now, and Bäck’s reach is annoyingly effective at closing him down, preventing anything like a controlled exit. Here’s the clip:

As you saw, Hughes was not able to escape, and the puck was just bumped up the wall and eventually sent out by McCarron to neutral for a turnover, after which Dallas sends it right back in, and the lines keep rolling.

Now, Hughes would end up playing almost 44 minutes in the eventual double-overtime game (which the Stars won), and Boldy just shy of 35. One early shift in the defensive zone didn’t make or break the entire game for Dallas. But what I do think it did was establish the Stars’ fourth line as a viable option in the first road game of the series, where matchups weren’t in their favor. Colin Blackwell took most of their other shifts on that line’s right-hand side, but even without Rantanen’s magnetism, that Stars’ fourth line was absurdly dominant in Game 3 of the series.

How dominant? Well, here’s how Radek Faksa (he of the stitched-up, punctured foot) controlled play in his 13 minutes of 5v5 time in that Game 3 marathon of the playoffs. All of the below numbers are events in the Stars’ favor during Faksa’s 5v5 ice time:

Shots on goal: 4-0
Scoring chances: 5-0
High-danger shot attempts: 4-0
Unblocked shot attempts: 7-1
Expected goals: 0.81-0.03, which equates to a 97% xGF share.

Combine that with Faksa and Bäck’s perfect penalty-killing in Game 3, and you can see why that duo was trusted in every game. Fourth-liners don’t have to change the game, but they do need to do their job, and those two did that and then some in a crazy (and memorable) Game 3.

One more chart, really quickly: outside of a crazy second period where Minnesota got a double-deflection goal and two ugly (for Dallas) rush tallies, the Stars’ in-zone defense was incredible.

(Don’t forget about Matt Duchene’s goal-saving play after Oettinger’s stop on that 2-on-1, either.)

There’s one other thing about Game 3 that I wanted to mention, and it involves the only other player to have an expected goals share of over 90% in Game 3: Thomas Harley. Some players started the night like Faksa, showing their best even in a crazy building hungry to stomp their opponents into dust.

Other players needed a minute to adjust, as you can see from Harley’s opening shift, where this happened:

There’s a world where things go even worse on that play, and it becomes a microcosm of all the weird hiccups of Harley’s 2025-26 season. Instead, Harley showed the same ice water that ran through his veins for Team Canada, and he rebounded from that moment of terror to do this during his 23 minutes of 5v5 ice time:

Shots on goal: 12-4
Scoring chances: 14-3
High-danger shot attempts: 6-0
Unblocked shot attempts: 20-6
Expected goals: 1.38-0.11 (a 92% xGF share).

Harley was still good after game 3, but not nearly as dominant in the final three games of the series. Losing his defense partner in Game 4 and playing 29 minutes in back-to-back games probably had something to do with that, as the reality was that Dallas’s right-side defense became a liability in the final two games, between Myers’s struggles and Lundkvist’s absence.

There’s a reason that even purported top-four RHDs command insane salaries in this league, and with Nill’s attempt to acquire Zach Werenski, you can’t say he wasn’t willing to swing big in order to solve that issue, even if it would have cost the Stars Harley to do so. (Yes, Werenski is a left-hand shot, but he has played on his off-hand side, because it turns out elite defensemen can do that.) Time will tell how that all works out in the long run, but there’s no denying that Harley will be coming into this season with just a little bit more to prove.

In Game 6, Myers was finally scratched (and I’m sure he would be the first to admit that his play through the previous five games merited it), and Harley was paired with Heiskanen. It wouldn’t matter, and the Wild got past Dallas to earn the privilege of losing 4-1 to Colorado in the next round.

I do think there’s an argument to be made that a more stable top-four defense group in Games 5 and 6 could’ve swung things the other way for Dallas, even if the underlying injuries and absences in the forward group (and to Heiskanen) probably had sunk the Stars’ Cup chances before the playoffs even began. Obviously results are all that matter, and there’s no redeeming a first-round exit, particularly one with such meager 5v5 goal-scoring as Dallas managed.

Even so, the more you look at this series, the more you can understand why the Stars aren’t exactly punting on a season by largely running things back. Sure, Jim Nill did try to make a couple of seismic shifts over the summer, neither of which panned out. But it’s not like Dallas isn’t still a really good hockey team. They are that, in fact!

As for Game 3, the Wild had no business pushing it as far as they did, but the second period of the third game of the series showed what that Wild team was capable of: with one good bounce to get the crowd back into the game, they were able to punch Dallas in the mouth and capitalize on a couple of Grade-A chances (one of which Oettinger needed to stop). They almost stole the game right there, until Matt Duchene was able to tie things back up on the power play, and Johnston would win it two periods after that.

It was a crazy game, as you may recall, but the Stars got the win they deserved in the end. Unfortunately, it wound up being their last victory of the season. But if I might Columbo you all for a moment, this game almost didn’t require overtime, because of one other play in the third period that involved both Thomas Harley and Radek Faksa. Here it is:

Harley makes a wicked stretch pass off the boards, and it finds Faksa in behind Jake Middleton. Faksa uses his size to protect the puck, and he drives to the net, where Wallstedt manages to get something on the shot. But Wallstedt pretty clearly had no clue where the rebound was until a microsecond before Mavrik Bourque’s stick arrived.

These are the moments that change games, and sometimes more than that. If Dallas wins this one in regulation rather than requiring double overtime, does anything change in the series? I have no idea, but it’s probably not outlandish to suggest that playing less hockey would have benefited the more banged-up team. Of course, Dallas didn’t win in regulation, and they didn’t win any of the next three games. For that, they can blame nobody but themselves.

(Also, how about Joel Eriksson Ek grabbing Bourque’s arm and taking a dive here in overtime to try to buy a call? I’d have to think he’d have been fined if this had drawn a penalty.)

Game 3 was a reminder that, for all of the talk about Dallas needing more from their forward depth and more from Thomas Harley in general, they actually got precisely that, for a little bit. It turns out that this is a good team!

That doesn’t guarantee anything at all, and better teams than Dallas have lost in the first round before. Such teams surely will again, but sports would be a lot less fun with more guarantees. All we can really do is ride the wave, whatever it brings. After it crashes, you just have to wait for the next one, and hope it takes you farther. Maybe that’s masochism, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned fanaticism. Sports are healthy, right?

Last year’s Dallas Stars team changed. In the prior three years under head coach Pete DeBoer, the Stars were a team that broke the puck out quickly, generating offensive chances at a top-10 clip in the league.

That wasn’t quite true every year over that stretch, however. In 2022-23, Dallas was just mid-pack in both 5v5 goals scored (as they were this year) and expected goals, but we do tend to romanticize the past when the present takes a dip, and it did that last season.

The 2025-26 Stars lost in the first round, and their offensive numbers slowed down a fair bit under Glen Gulutzan. At 5v5, the ‘25-26 Stars were last in the NHL in shot attempts shots on goal. Their actual goal-scoring was far better than that—16th in the league at 5v5 and absolutely lethal on the power play—but concern about those underlying numbers turned into the biggest of talking points in the playoffs, when the Stars were outscored 14-4 by Minnesota when both teams had five skaters on the ice.

Anyone who has gone through a bad breakup knows how the present pain tends to make more distant memories of other exes a little rosier in retrospect, and certainly, you could look at myriad metrics this season and compare them to the last couple of years with disdain. Considering that the Carolina Hurricanes were the best team in the East in xGF this year, it would be understandable to look at the Stars’ process by comparison and say that it just wasn’t Cup-worthy, this season. One team breezed through the first three rounds thanks to Logan Stankoven and a demonstrably repeatable process while the Stars struggled to generate any kind of 5v5 production against a Minnesota team that, for all their virtues, was right next to the humble Columbus Blue Jackets in terms of defensive aptitude.

All of this preamble is setting the table for the Well, Actually of this piece, but that doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it as such. The Stars genuinely do need to make some of the adjustments Gulutzan alluded to at his end-of-season presser in order to exert more offensive control over games. With that said, I don’t think their process is quite so flawed as raw expected goals measurements would seem to indicate. Here’s part of what I mean by that:

Read more

One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing
Yes you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky
But 'til that morning, there's nothin' can harm you

I don’t know anybody whose favorite month of the year is August.

Probably it starts in childhood, where August is the harbinger of a new school year and, more devastatingly, the death knell of every summer vacation. June is bliss, the Friday night of the weekend. It’s a month that brings not just its own freedom, but the promise of another month of Saturdays in July. The beginning of summer holds, both chronologically and experientially, the longest vacation days of the year.

Late June is also a time packed with the final celebrations of hockey: the Stanley Cup gets awarded, new players get drafted, and loads of new contracts are signed as the calendar flips to July. The hockey season may have ended in June, but its reverberations last well into the next month, just as those warm evenings with friends in high school carry us past midnight before a single yawn dares to show its face.

In August, a dreadful Sunday afternoon calm settles in. You still try to squeeze the last of the juice out of the weekend, but as the great Monday1 morning draws nearer, the few remaining days of freedom lack the same sense of infinitude, tainted with the knowledge of an approaching end. By that point, the still-warm evenings are less a gift than a warning, as an establishment turns the house lights up at 2am to clear out lingering revelers.

For kids, August is dreary because it’s the last of a carefree thing; for adults, August is a nightmare of crammed-in vacations, back-to-school prep, and absurd energy bills; and for hockey fans, August stinks because it’s the one month of the year where hockey goes completely dark.

Well, I shouldn’t say it’s completely dark. Sean is flying off to watch and learn about hockey as we speak, and of course you all know about the wonderful open meetup we’re having next Tuesday at BoomerJack’s.

In fact, one of the coolest things about Gavin’s event is that it’s happening right when hockey fans need it most, or at least I do. August can be the toughest time to remember why we love hockey, in no small part because it’s the time of year where ice itself is at a premium.

Growing up, my family lived next to a church parking lot where we could ride our bikes, shoot hoops, and play street hockey. There were countless late evenings in summer where my brother and I (and sometimes one of our sisters) would tromp out after dinner to shoot a Mylec hockey ball into a chicken-wire net as the sunlight faded into shadow. Youth at its apex raises the question: is the ignorance of mortality the same thing as immortality? Memory suggests it might just be.

Read more

I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about it by now, but I wanted to create a standalone announcement with all the information I have about the August 11 meetup Gavin Spittle is putting together. In fact, that Hockey Celebration is a week from today! So if you aren’t already planning to stop by and talk about hockey with a bunch of folks for an hour or two (or more), now is your chance to do so.

I’ve tried to cover all of the most obvious questions, but let’s start with the most important details:

What: Spits & Suds Hockey Celebration, Meetup, and Live Podcast

When: Tuesday, August 11 at 6:00pm for the meet & greet, followed by the podcast recording around 7:00pm or so

Where: BoomerJack’s Grill in Fairview (near Allen)

Who will be there: Gavin is hosting this whole deal, and he’s bringing out the big guns with in-person guests like Sean Shapiro, Lia Assimakopoulos, and Stephen Meserve. Also, I’ll be around somewhere, but more importantly, I’m told Steve Hill from SportsToons will also be in attendance. (Oh, and knowing Gavin, I’d expect there to be one or two other surprise guests as well, but you’ll have to show up and find out who those will be, because that’s how surprises work.)

How much will it cost? It’s free! Just get yourself there, and ka-blamo! You’re part of the event. (We do ask that you buy a drink or a food from our hosts at Boomerjack’s, of course, but since most of you have probably been to restaurants before, I trust that you understand how this all works.)

What do I get out of it? Oh, looks like we got a real Selfish Selwyn over here, huh? Well, fine. There will be free giveaways! Gavin has been saying that folks from the On-Time Experts will be there to give away some Stars tickets, so that’s obviously a great thing to win. Also, I have a few assorted items that I might just bring to give away as well. Or maybe I’ll just force some of this fan paraphernalia on people even if they don’t want it. Boom! You got free stuffed.

How much do we have to pay you not to say “free stuffed” ever again? A high-five should do it.

Why should I come to this? Because it’s a Hockey Thing in August, and it’s a chance to hang out with a bunch of cool hockey people and also me. But if I had to guess, I’d say you are likely to meet some other very cool hockey fans (though none of them will be quite as cool as you, the one reading this right now).

Wait, we can’t buy VIP tickets or anything like that? What if I want to pay extra to yell at Sean, or to give Stephen a high-five? Nope! Just show up, and you’ll have to get in the high-five/yelling lines like everyone else. Er, wait, I mean yes, you have to give me cash, personally, when nobody is looking. Bring cash just for me, yeah. Then I’ll make you a “Secret VIP,” which is a thing so exclusive that nobody else will even have heard of it or know what it means. But DO NOT TELL anybody about this. Bring cash for me, though.

What if I’m an introvert? You can show up and listen quietly and not talk to anybody else, just like I do when I go to the airport.

Will we be forced to go around the room and introduce ourselves like it’s an awkward corporate icebreaker exercise? This is not likely, but I won’t rule anything out.

Can I arrive or leave whenever I want? Legally, yes. Technically, yes. But if you get up and make that chair-scraping noise right as I’m saying something Super Smart on the podcast, I reserve the right to make a bad joke about it. Probably I will chicken out, though.

How many people will be there? What am I, psychic? I have no idea. Probably a big ol’ fun group, or maybe hundreds and hundreds of heaving throngs like there were on the Winter Classic midway in Fair Park! Wait, how is this affecting your decision, anyway? Are you like, one of those people who only go to parties once someone texts you a list of who all is already there? Because that’s my thing, and I won’t have you stealing it.

Have you ever done an event like this before? Yes, in fact! Taylor and I hosted a DBD meetup way back on December 29, 2019 at Craft & Crowler before said Winter Classic, and it was one of my favorite memories from my time writing for that site. It was really lovely. If you were there, I’d love to hear about some of your memories of that evening, but mine were exceptional.

Can we cut you off when you make the same dumb joke for the sixth time in a row in response to a genuine question and ask Lia to give us a real answer? Begrudgingly, yes.

What should we wear? Whatever you want. I would assume some people might wear their Stars gear, but Bill from Legal is telling me that I cannot impose a dress code at this late date, and also at any date, and also stop e-mailing me. Haha, Bill is such a kidder. Anyway, I’d recommend full white tie formal, so a ball gown or a white piqué shirt, top hat, cane, tails, and the works. I have a penguin costume I wore as one of Mr. Popper’s Penguins one time at on old job. I probably won’t wear that this time, though.

Will the Stars trade for Patrick Sharp again, like they did at that Party in the Park fan fest meetup back in July 2015 on Periscope(!) when Josh Bogorad announced the trade live? This seems unlikely to me, for multiple reasons.

What should we bring? If you have a book you’d like Sean, Steve, or Stephen to sign, you can buy their stuff here: SportsToons, We Win Here, and 100 Things Stars Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die.

Isn’t “before they die” kind of a morbid end to a subtitle? Sure, but maybe the idea for the publisher of the whole series was to grab people’s attention when they saw such a dire phrase on a bookshelf at Borders. (RIP, Borders.)

So wait, 6pm at BoomerJack’s in Fairview next Tuesday, and make sure to buy a Coke or whatever? That’s all we needed to know, and you rambled on for this long? Yeah.

How much are VIP tickets for the line to chuck batteries at your head, specifically? Surprisingly, these tickets sold out within seconds of going on sale. Weird, that.

After spending some time last week moping under thunderclouds and gazing through rose-colored glasses, I’ve come to the conclusion that we won’t know how the Stars will actually finish this season until they play the games. This is called Analysis, and it’s something that requires the kind of insight you can only find at great websites like this one.1

What’s less unique to Dallas than that chestnut is the fact that the Stars will have both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to each of those 84+ games they play this season. There will be the odd game where Minnesota waxes them 6-1 to open the playoffs, but there will also be nights like October 25 last year, when an already depleted Stars lineup out-shot the eventual Stanley Cup champions en route to a strong 3-2 victory.

Did you forget about that game? If you need your memory jogged, it was the one where Miro Heiskanen scored 22% of his total goals for the season (neither of which he actually shot into the net), while Sam Steel scored the second power play goal of his career (after a six-year hiatus following his first). You know, normal Dallas Stars stuff.

Putting the goal-scorers aside for the moment, it’s worth reflecting on that game in a tad more detail. Because here’s the lineup Dallas deployed that night:

Steel-Hintz-Rantanen
Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Erne-Seguin-Blackwell
Hryckowian-Faksa-Bastian

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-Petrovic

Oettinger

The Stars were still without Jamie Benn and Matt Duchene, so that meant Adam Erne and Colin Blackwell were third-liners for the night. And while neither of those lines was terribly strong, they did serve up a pretty representative shot chart from last year. Because while the Stars did put 34 shots on goal to Carolina’s 28, the Hurricane Hailstorm was in full effect, with pucks being flung toward the net from all over the ice, heedless of whether they had a prayer of going in.

On the other side, the Stars were, as ever, a bit pickier about their shot selection, particularly at even-strength:

If you take away those three point shots from Lyubushkin, Bourque, and Petrovic, the Stars would have adhered to what in some respects was their ideal gameplan: shooting only from the tops of the circles on in, where one can theoretically put pucks on net with greater certainty (and thus, give them the best possible chance of sneaking in). Keep in mind that the grey shapes up there are missed shots, and you’ll realize just how accurate Dallas was compared to Carolina in this one.

The Stars’ accuracy was not a fluke, or at least it wasn’t a one-game fluke. As a team, Dallas led the league in shooting percentage last year at 13.15%. This wasn’t just a power-play skill either, as the Stars were also near the top of the league in five-on-five shooting accuracy (and tops in the West). Dallas leveraged the shooting talent of its players as well as any team in the league, and they wound up with 112 points at season’s end.

This was kind of a reversal of the playoffs against Minnesota, when an even more banged-up Stars team wound up out-shooting Minnesota, only to find their accuracy to have abandoned them at even-strength. Dallas shot only 3% in that series against Minnesota despite out-shooting the Wild in five of six games, as Minnesota was able to cash in on their truly premium chances to the extent that Dallas never could, as we looked at in detail a couple months ago.

Some of Dallas’s playoff defeat was simply a result of Minnesota’s better execution (and health). That series wasn’t one with a Stars team hanging on for dear life and hoping to get lucky with one of the few shots they had, but rather one where the top guys from one side forced more mistakes from opponents than the top guys on the other. Anyway, we’ll not do another postmortem, but I know everyone tends to point to the playoffs any time regular season discussions get going, so consider the playoffs Talked About for now, and let’s get back to our point.

In that Carolina game back on October 25, I really do think you can see some of the principles of Glen Gulutzan’s team beginning to take shape (even if it would take another couple of months and a tidal wave of injuries for its best version to show up). Dallas blocked a lot of blockable shots, capitalized on a couple power plays, and Carolina couldn’t consistently penetrate the inner slot.

Yes, Heiskanen got a couple of fortunate bounces after the Stars failed to score on a couple of their own Grade-A looks (including a Robertson breakaway), but it was still a pretty good example of how a team missing some key pieces (including Roope Hintz after he was knocked out of the game by Taylor Hall) could beat That Carolina Team without getting overwhelmed. On balance, it was an impressive win, even if it was far from a clean one. Heiskanen also made a rare mistake late in the first that led to a goal, and the Stars really did have to dig their way out of a first-period hole.

Putting this in perspective for a moment, let’s remember that these same Hurricanes went 12-1 in the first three rounds of the playoffs. Carolina absolutely rolled through the East before dropping two against Vegas, so winning a game with as many breakdowns as Dallas’s October contest had is no small thing. The Stars stumbled, corrected, and came away with a victory the team deserved.

In a lot of ways, this is the sort of game that should feed your optimism about next year’s Stars. Sure, they’ll be thinner up front than anyone would like, but their most dangerous weapons are still going to be present and accounted for. And just as the Stars were able to fix some first-period issues in this game, so also were the playoff Stars able to address their Game 1 struggles against Minnesota en route to a much more even Games 2-6. Gulutzan and his team deserve the criticism they received for how they began the playoffs, but they also deserve credit for how they addressed those early issues and came within an eyelash of going up 3-1. Whatever this Stars’ team’s faults, their ability to regroup and rebound is not one of them.

They’ll have to do perhaps more regrouping than ever this season, as the Western Conference only looks to have gotten more difficult over the summer. Colorado and Minnesota should make getting out of the Central as labyrinthian an achievement as ever, and the inevitable lineup adjustments necessitated by an 84-game schedule will be formidable indeed. This would not profile as the sort of season where you would choose to have less depth than more, given the option.

This year, the Stars are pretty much out of options for the time being. This Stars group will have to show what it can be at its best, and how it can bounce back from its worst nights. This is the challenge of sports, and I can’t imagine it’s made more pleasant by fans and media members asking about it directly after things have gone wrong. That’s just the price of making millions of dollars being a world-class athlete, I suppose.

When I try to place the pessimism and the optimism over one another like National Treasure magic glasses in order to see the Real Dallas Stars, I keep coming back to what we saw in that Carolina game. This was a Stars team capable of breakdowns and odd-man rushes allowed, but it was also one that could assess their opponent and turn even the eventual best team in the NHL into a fairly fruitless offense for the final 40 minutes.

At their worst, the Stars were a team that struggled to drive possession and relied on their power play to bail them out, but this was much truer in the first half of the season than it was afterward, (though the final 15 or so games of the year are ones I’m inclined to de-emphasize, given all the injuries after the Olympics along with how different the league gets once teams start selling and the playoff picture starts solidifying).

At their best (say games 45-70), the Stars were a team who could drive possession, whose physicality only accentuated their foundational strengths, and whose lethal finishing ability and special teams prowess were complementary abilities rather than fundamental ones.

The floor feels like it could be a bit lower for this year’s Stars team than it was last year, if only because of the loss of Bourque along with the statistical reality that any team would probably be unlikely to repeat all of the good fortune and power play perfection Dallas got when they weren’t playing their best hockey earlier in the year.

But at the same time, I don’t think I’m willing to say the Stars’ ceiling has definitively lowered, or at least not all that much. Because in the playoffs, hockey tends to be a strong-link game, and this is still a Stars team with a host of very strong links. And when he’s been given time to analyze and adjust (even if he hasn’t always opted to do so), Gulutzan has demonstrated some pretty strong acumen in terms of getting the most out of his team thus far.

Maybe that’s just a long-winded way of saying that, when taking all the upsides and downsides into account, I can’t help but think that this year’s longer summer could end up bringing an equally extended spring. That “could” doesn’t mean “should,” but insofar as we’re capable of anticipating how any given hockey season might play out, I still tend to find myself falling slightly more on the side of the sunshine than the rain when it comes to these Stars. Ask me again in October, though.

Something I’ve been doing out of habit for the past couple seasons is writing down all the starting forward lines and defense pairings for each game. It’s partly done out of a need to do something in the dreary 15 minutes between warmups and puck drop, but it’s also a habit borne out of an eye toward posterity, as I find it convenient1 for my purposes to be able to look back and see how any given game months in the past began.

There are much more sophisticated charts at places like Natural Stat Trick and HockeyViz that can show you more detail about when and with whom players actually share the ice, but there’s something about how a coach chooses to begin a game that I find interesting. As much as we want to know “what the lines are,” the reality is that in today’s NHL, most lines are quite fluid, with forward trios changing depending on time, score, and even which zone a shift is beginning in.

Injuries also have a big impact on said combinations, as you can see by the forward group the Stars trotted out to start a 5pm home game against Chicago in early March, in the 63rd game of the year:

Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bunting-Hryckowian-Erne
Blackwell-Bäck-Bastian

Now compare that to how they started back in the first game of the season in Winnipeg, without Jamie Benn or Oskar Bäck available:

Steel-Hintz-Rantanen
Robertson-Johnston-Bourque
Blackwell-Duchene-Seguin
Hryckowian-Faksa-Bastian

None of those eight trios would start a single playoff game together, and for many different reasons. The top line is the thing that draws one’s eye, though. When Mikko Rantanen returned (though not fully recovered) from his knee injury late in the season, Wyatt Johnston reunited with him immediately, which had cascading effects for the rest of the forwards.

And in Game 6, facing elimination, the Stars loaded up the top line in exigency with Jason Robertson on the wing, only to see a 2-1 lead in the game turn out the way Dallas’s 2-1 lead in the series had done:

That up there is a good reminder of just how much is certain to change from the start of a season to its finish. Justin Hryckowian went from battling for a fourth-line roster spot in training camp to being the spark plug for a 45-goal scorer and a superstar winger in the postseason. In the long run, players shape the lineup as much as coaches do.

So as we look ahead to this season, I can’t help but wonder what surprises are in store for this year when it comes to linemates. We know that NHL coaches are constantly tinkering and searching for chemistry, and the balance between giving a line time to find a rhythm is dangerously close to the time it takes for a trio to start stagnating. It’s a fine balance, and it’s one made more complex when players are unavailable for short or extended stretches of the season.

Sure, we could wait and see what happens, then delight in whatever surprises come our way. But if you’re reading about hockey on July 31, then you’re a real Greedy Gus for this stuff, and I’m here to help. So today, I wanted to consider three line combinations that I genuinely think we could see at some point as the season wears on.

Maybe these possibilities will be surprising to you, or maybe not. I don’t know what’s going on inside your head, and frankly, that’s for the best.

Read more

Over the past four NHL seasons, two teams are tied with a league-leading total of 439 points.

One of those two teams is the Colorado Avalanche, whose place atop that list shows that winning a championship in 2022 could have been just the start of a multi-year run. Instead, they won only one playoff series in the next three seasons before getting swept out of the third round this past spring. We hardly need reminding that regular season success does not guarantee a win in any given playoff series.

The other team to have led the league in points over the past four seasons is the same one to have eliminated the Avalanche in two of those four postseasons: the Dallas Stars, whose six playoff series wins over the past four seasons doubles what the mighty Avalanche have been able to do in the same span.

Obviously the Stars were not coming off a Cup championship like Colorado after 2022, and that makes all the difference in the world if you’re a fan. But there’s no arguing the fact that in the four years since, Dallas has been the better playoff team of the two, to the tune of 11 more wins.

Given all that, I think it’s entirely fair to say that even a slightly thinner Stars team this year could easily do some serious damage in the playoffs, should they have something close to a healthy roster in April. This group has done a lot against some very good teams, so the optimistic tone we’re about to take today shouldn’t feel like that much of a stretch, even if your inner skeptic prefers not to indulge such a view. The Stars may not have won a championship recently, but they are much closer than a whole lot of other teams. To win 67% of the available points over four years requires you to be the better team two out of three times, and they’ve been that.

As far as the makeup of the team, it’s worth pointing out that despite all of the roster attrition caused by the salary cap over the last couple of years, the Stars really don’t have any egregious overpays clogging up their roster, unless you want to complain about the final year of Seguin’s eight-year deal which was signed in a difference hockey universe. Of that deal, I’ll simply note that Tyler Seguin is going to be as motivated as he’s ever been to remind people why he got that deal, and I’d bet against him at your own peril.

By and large, Jim Nill has built a team that provides surplus value relative to its cap hit with a lot of high-end talent, and that’s why the Stars have been one of the best teams in the league for the last four years and counting. True, they don’t have much in the way of up-and-comers to bridge any gaps that might emerge, as we discussed earlier this week, but that’s only an issue if the current group starts to flag, and that has yet to happen for any meaningful stretch of time thus far. There are not many holes in the most important parts of this roster.

If these Stars wind up having a terrific season, it shouldn’t be too surprising. They’ve got three centers who all qualify as top-six talents in Johnston, Duchene, and Hintz. Roope Hintz and Wyatt Johnston combine for a smaller cap hit than either of Leo Carlsson or Macklin Celebrini. And on the fourth line, Radek Faksa isn’t going to blow the doors off the place offensively, but that’s never been his role anyway. Besides, the Stars also have multiple bottom-six centers who can also flex out to wing in Arttu Hyry, Sam Steel, and Oskar Bäck, so they have options if injuries strike again. Up the middle, the Stars are in excellent shape, as they have been for a few years now, and that’s the position that most teams find hardest to solidify.

The blue line is also as good as anyone could ask. Anyone who watched Thomas Harley at the Olympics last year can rest assured that Thomas Harley is still the player Dallas locked up long-term, and a return to form this year would go a long way toward jogging everyone’s memory. Here’s a fun fact for you: the pairing of Thomas Harley and Nils Lundkvist accounts for nearly the same $12 million cap hit as the Devon Toews-Sam Malinski pairing Colorado had to roll out for much of the spring. With 32+ year-olds like Josh Manson and Brett Kulak also signed for at least a couple more years at $4-4.5 million apiece, the Stars look positively lean by comparison when you compare their own bottom four, even if you aren’t thrilled about what Tyler Myers did last April.

Lian Bichsel is still full of upside as well, and that’s a much more preferable way to operate your blue line depth than to be hoping to stave off decline. Round that group off with Miro Heiskanen and Esa Lindell on one of the best defense pairings in the league, and you have a team with a blue line that is not only efficient, but still quite promising, too. Harley and Bichsel are both under 25 years old, for goodness’ sake. This group is a long, long way from the years when they were hoping that Andrej Sekera or Sergei Gonchar still had something left in the tank. If one year of Tyler Myers as your sixth defenseman at $1.5 million is the most the average fan can find to complain about, it’s fair to say the group is pretty darn solid.

The biggest area of need for the Stars is, as it was last year, the winger depth. We covered this earlier in the week, but the other side of that coin is the fact that quality wingers are easier (and generally cheaper) to acquire than top defensemen or quality centers. Right now, the Stars winger depth looks something this, presuming everyone comes into camp healthy:

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell/Kiviranta

You can also plug in Arttu Hyry if you like, though he may have to begin the year in Texas for cap reasons. The point is, the Stars’ winger depth may require some optimism, but it’s a far cry from the disaster that teams like Edmonton were rolling out last year, with Kasperi Kapanen playing next to McDavid and Draisaitl in 2026. And again, Dallas can always look to go get another middle-sixer if they decide that they need to without having to sell the farm. (I seem to recall that they did so last trade deadline, but my memory gets fuzzy about which winger they acquired and how he did in the playoffs. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll come back to me.)

The metrics liked that top-nine group last year (though Seguin wasn’t playing there, of course), and if the power play continues to do what Neil Graham showed it capable of, the goals should not be in short supply. That means that even if the Stars don’t get all the production they would ideally receive from players like Steel, Benn, or Hryckowian, they still have other ways of manufacturing offense. And remember, we’re talking about complementary offense rather than core contributors, a mere rounding out of key production from Johnston, Rantanen, Robertson, and Duchene. That’s still critical, but it’s also easier to find in multiple ways.

Sure, Dallas would ideally have a deeper group on the wing, but it doesn’t require a huge leap to project someone like Tyler Seguin to be able to match the departed Bourque’s 20/20 season. Remember, last year’s team had to roll out players like Bäck and Adam Erne on the third line more than a few times last year, and they still wound up scoring the ninth-most goals in the league. When you have the top-end talents the Stars do with Rantanen and Robertson, you can afford a little patience with your other six wingers—especially if they’re doing a lot of other things well (like Sam Steel did, for example).

We’ve been pretty candid about how far short Jake Oettinger fell of his and his team’s standards last year in terms of netminding, but let’s zoom out for just a second here and remember that at 27 years old, Jake Oettinger is still well-within the established prime of goalie aging curves. He’s also put up a .909 save percentage over the last four seasons, which is better than Jeremy Swayman (.907) and Sergei Bobrovsky (.901), and only slightly behind Igor Shesterkin (.911). Even after last year’s down season, Oettinger is still solidly above-average, and he’s shown the ability to steal a playoff series against a President’s Trophy team as recently as 2025, when he outdueled Hellebuyck.

When accounting for his workload, Oettinger is still in a relatively small group of go-to number-one goalies who are still on the right side of 30 years old. Over the last three years, Oettinger has saved 0.16 goals above average per game, and while that’s not quite up to the elite standards of Shesterkin (0.36) or Hellebuyck (0.35), it’s light years away from being anything like a problem. And as we’ve discussed, the Stars also have Rémi Poirier looking ready to dip his toes into NHL action this year or next, while they also have the luxury of the perennially solid Casey DeSmith1 for one more season. Goaltending isn’t their biggest weapon, but it’s nowhere close to a position of need. Many otherwise talented teams cannot say the same thing. If the team is going well in the spring, all they need is for Jake Oettinger to regress back to his 2025 self, and they should be in for another deep run (and even better, if the offense doesn’t evaporate in the third round).

As for coaching, I keep coming back to just how underappreciated Glen Gulutzan was last year. Navigating the unyielding string of injuries the Stars endured last year was a daunting task, but Gulutzan found ways to spackle and paper over the team’s holes en route to the third-best record in the league. Doing that without a goaltender stealing games every night is something I tend to find more impressive than even what Winnipeg did in 2024-25.

Some people will still express skepticism about Gulutzan’s playoff record, but I’m not sure what more you could really have expected out of the roster he had to work with against a loaded-up Minnesota. Dallas was without Hintz and Seguin for the series, then lost Hyry and Nils Lundkvist during it. Rantanen (knee) and Heiskanen (oblique & ankle) were playing with significant injuries, while Faksa wound up requiring a second foot surgery after the season finally ended. This was not a fresh group, or anything close to it.

And despite all that, Dallas still came within mere minutes of going up 3-1 in Game 4, and thus, up 3-1 in the series. You may remember when Johnston tucked this puck behind Wallstedt in the third period, sending it along the goal line and off the far post, keeping the Stars’ lead at 2-1 with eight minutes to play rather than giving them an insurance tally. What a fun memory that is.

And just two minutes later, you will also remember that Marcus Foligno scored on this shot, somehow, to tie the game. Minnesota wound up leveling the series in overtime.

We’re not here to re-litigate that series, but simply to point out what a hollowed-out version of the Stars still almost did. It’s cruel to ask you to imagine what that series could have looked like with a healthier Rantanen or Heiskanen, let alone an active Roope Hintz or Tyler Seguin, so I won’t ask you to do that. Probably, you’ve been down that road far too many times already.

The best-case scenario for the Dallas Stars isn’t that they get all the breaks in terms of health and a relatively easy playoff path, like Carolina kinda did last year or Colorado certainly did in 2022. (Well, I mean, I guess that is a best-case scenario, but it’s not the most reasonable one.)

If we’re being realistic, then the Stars could have an outstanding season and postseason by simply experiencing the benefits of their established strengths and their latent potential. This is a well-built team, even if they aren’t perfect, and Gulutzan has demonstrated that he understands how to maximize the team’s strengths while mitigating their weaknesses. That’s as good a definition of a coach’s job as any other, I’d say.

Oh, and if Jason Robertson stays in Dallas after the trade deadline and Dallas have another good playoff run, then suddenly you’re looking at a Stars team that would be extremely attractive to some of the elite players who could be looking to change teams in the summer of 2027. Heck, Dallas would probably still be an attractive destination even if they did have to trade Robertson, and that’s as much to do with what Jim Nill has done off the ice as it is with what the team has done on it.

Yes, the window isn’t as wide-open as it was two or three years ago, and things could always go awry. I’m quite aware that in late July, most fans would prefer to face their fears more than indulge their hopes, but this is how competitive windows always tend to work. The Stars’ own band of Cup-worthiness might have narrowed a tad over the summer, but they’ve still shown themselves capable of doing excellent things for quite a few years now, and it’s not like they’re the 2008 Stars or anything. One more great year in 2026-27 is not only possible, but wind up leading to even more good years after this one without too much fairy dust needing to be sprinkled.

Success is never guaranteed, but good teams have better odds of climbing the mountain than bad ones. This season is fully capable of demonstrating why that has been true for Dallas, and why it could still remain so for years to come. All the players have to do now is go out and prove it, again.

It is April 1, 2006. I’m finishing my sophomore year of college in Los Angeles, and my older brother tells me some good news: the Kings have a promotion that allows college students to get premium seats at an exceptional discount.

As I recall, we got glass seats just to the right of the penalty boxes for something like 60 bucks a pop. Even granting that this was 20(!) years ago, it still felt like a great deal. Seeing any hockey game from the front row is an experience everyone should have if they ever get the opportunity, and doing so in a game between two division rivals with the Stars in first place? Well, that seemed like the perfect way to wrap up the first season after the lockout, particularly for a poor college student like myself.

These were, after all, the first-place Dallas Stars, the same club sitting on 49 wins and 102 points with nine games left to play.

For context, the Stars’ .699 points percentage at that time was better than the West-winning Stars of 2024, that team of the 113-point season. The 2005-06 Stars were known for being shootout fiends, sure; they were also a really, really good team.

(I talked with Jussi Jokinen in Finland a couple years ago about those shootouts and many other things, if you’d like to revisit that piece here.)

Anyway, here John and I were in Los Angeles, and we were pumped to watch the Stars up close after viewing a barn-burner in Anaheim the night before that ended in an uncharacteristic shootout loss, with the Ducks taking a 5-4 win. Andy MacDonald had scored a goal to tie the game up with less than three minutes remaining in the third, and Marty Turco had let in the first two shots of the skills competition while Jokinen and Antti Miettinen went 0-for-2.

It was a bummer of a game, but I recall us talking at the time about how at least we saved the good tickets for the Kings game, which would surely have a better result than the shootout loss to the Ducks. Surely!

Read more

Jim Nill said last week that he expects the Stars are pretty much set for the summer. That means that we can officially start prognosticating and projecting, which is to say pretending that our guesses are actually expertise.

As much as keeping Jason Robertson for at least a little while longer is a good thing, there is still a pretty stark reality facing these Stars: they did not get deeper than they were last year. Losing Mavrik Bourque would indicate quite the opposite, in fact. The Stars will need to hope for better injury luck from nearly all of their key players, because they don’t have another first-round talent with NHL experience on the wing ready to take another big step.

There’s always a certain portion of any fanbase that is prone to proclaiming cynicism. When I was growing up, my friend Nick was a big Red Sox fan. I remember Nick repeatedly using the term “worthless” to describe, at various times, Jason Varitek, Kevin Youkilis, Doug Mientkiewicz, Dustin Pedroia, and a host of other players from that legendary 2004 Red Sox team. Mind you, he kept doing this any time one of them would have a bad game even after 2004, when they all broke the curse together. The instant things started looking grim, Nick would start ripping his guys.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. When you care about something and it hurts you, the natural reaction is to steel yourself against further hurt the next time, keeping expectations a bit lower, and waiting a bit longer before opening yourself up, which is to say it’s the hope that kills you, and people are generally disposed to staying alive.

Little wonder, in that light, that so many people are readying themselves for a relative bummer of a Dallas Stars season. Not only did the Stars lose Bourque while adding no significant talent to last year’s team (with apologies to Joel Kiviranta), but they’re also coming off their worst first-round series in five years. Even the most ardent flame of optimism needs a little fuel, after all.

We’ve spent enough time pushing back against that pessimism, so you know the case is pretty much what Nill laid out last week: better health from key players could be the big difference-maker. And while Nill didn’t add this part, I’ll go ahead and state that if the Stars were to drop from last year’s 112 points down all the way to a mere 99 points, that trade off will be worth it if they have a healthier team in April. It’s not like the path out of the Central Division is ever an easy one.

As for the doom and gloom, the case is more complicated. Cynicism clouds our judgment, and we swing wildly from elation to devastation. So, let’s try to give a clear-eyed appraisal of just what could go wrong, and the most likely effects of what such events could mean, for this Dallas Stars team.

Commencing Hypothetical Pessimism

Roope Hintz is one of the biggest X-factors, as his absence in the playoffs clearly made life easier on the Minnesota Wild. He and Jason Robertson were play-driving monsters (relatively speaking here), and while Matt Duchene performed admirably in his stead, the loss of Hintz (and later Hyry) cemented Dallas with essentially two fourth lines in the playoffs, and Minnesota feasted.

But what if Hintz at 30 years old isn’t the X-factor he used to be, especially after getting his hamstring torn in multiple places? After all, his underlying trajectory is already starting to mirror that of a lot of players entering their thirties, and he hasn’t hit 70 points since Pete DeBoer’s first year in Dallas. What if Hintz, healthy or not, just isn’t the player he used to be?

Here’s a fun1 trivia question for you: in 53 regular season games last year, how many 5v5 goals do you think Roope Hintz scored? The answer is not a terribly encouraging one.

You could add Tyler Seguin’s name to that final sentence, too. He’s shown all the highs and lows his game can bring over the past few years, but there is a probably a non-zero chance that at some point, his deluge of devastating lower-body injuries is going to take away more of his production than his work ethic and hockey IQ can add. The Stars are in a position, this year, where they kind of have to count on both Hintz and Seguin, but there is a real possibility that neither can be what the team will need them to be.

Injuries aside, let’s talk about aging curves in general, as the four oldest players on the Stars are all in that range where you kind of have to operate on a year-to-year basis in terms of expectations: Matt Duchene, Jamie Benn, Tyler Myers, and Casey DeSmith. We’ll begin with the goaltending.

For DeSmith, it’s worth pointing out that goalies are more volatile than other positions, which can often exacerbate age-related decline. However, I remain pretty optimistic about DeSmith based on what we’ve seen the last two years, and in Gulutzan’s D-zone system last year in particular. Decline is inevitable for all human beings, but with a backup’s typical workload, DeSmith should be well-positioned to continue providing surplus value.

If he doesn’t, then the Stars are in the position of needing to either go out and grab a backup from elsewhere, or to ask Rémi Poirier to make his NHL debut in a very critical season. That could work out well, but if we’re strictly discussing the worst-case scenarios, then we have to mention that it could also not work out well. Poirier is an unknown quantity, and many promising goalies struggle to make the leap and stick in the best league in the world. If DeSmith takes a step back and Poirier can’t take a step forward, then your goalie situation is sketchy, putting even more pressure on Jake Oettinger to re-find his best game after a particularly disappointing season. And with his trade protection now in effect, the Stars don’t really have an alternative if Oettinger can’t get back to his best self. Ask the Oilers how frustrating it can be to have a great team that can’t find consistent goaltending.

Tyler Myers is in a less critical position, and I still tend to think he can approximate what Ilya Lyubushkin was bringing (and at half the price) for the last couple of years. If he can’t, though, the Stars don’t have Alex Petrovic to recall anymore. That means the next RHD up would be Kyle Burroughs, probably. How do you feel about Kyle Burroughs as a starting defenseman on a team with Cup aspirations? Probably the average fan is hoping they don’t have to answer that question.

Jamie Benn is Jamie Benn. Certainly you have an opinion about Jamie Benn that no paragraph in July is going to change either way, and we’ve seen so many highs and lows of his career that you don’t need a hypothesis to picture them. If he looks a step slower this season, his playoff performance could be tough to watch. And as we mentioned at the end of last season, he’s not exactly a player you can really scratch when he might need it. That can create a predicament, especially for a team light on depth as it is.

But of all the five 35+ players on the roster, I believe Matt Duchene is the one who could affect things the most. We saw what happened last year when he was struggling with symptoms from his vestibular concussion, and we then saw what he could do when healthy and in a good spot. Duchene is signed for three more years at $4.5 million, which is a bargain when he’s producing like he can.

The most worrying thing about Duchene, for me, was how uncomfortable he looked on the wing last year. I’d always kind of expected him to make a Pavelski-like transition to wing at some point in the four-year deal he signed, but his inability to make it work last year gives me pause. Yes, he wound up being a critical center when the Stars needed him most, but the Stars might need scoring wingers even more than centers in the near future. If Duchene can’t help with that situation and he loses a step in the back half of his thirties, I’m not sure how much value he’ll be able to retain down the middle.

Moving onto the other guys at the top of the lineup, I remain pretty optimistic about the blue line (though not quite as much as I’d be if that blue line included the reigning Norris Trophy winner). Miro Heiskanen and Esa Lindell are wonderfully complementary players, and Nils Lundkvist showed last year how much value he can bring at a bargain of a deal. Lian Bichsel is entering the final year of his ELC, and remains the youngest player on the roster, barring a training camp surprise.

Thomas Harley remains the point of my concern, and I wonder if the attempted Werenski trade revealed some of the Stars’ own concerns, too. That’s not to say that you don’t trade Harley for Werenski every time on a pure talent-for-talent basis, but I have to wonder if the Stars have some lingering questions about Harley’s up-and-down season last year. If he can’t carve out his own role behind Heiskanen, then how can Harley bring a value equivalent to his $10 million cap hit?

I’m still betting on Harley, because he’s simply shown too much too early in his career not to be a smart bet. But on the deal he’s now on, Harley is no longer a luxury; he has to be a lynchpin. If he can’t drive a dangerous defense pairing, it will be hard for him (and his team) to fight off some frustration.

As for the forward group, what else is there to say? The power play carried the team for long stretches last year, and despite 45-goal seasons from two players, their 5v5 production was smack-dab in the middle of the pack at 16th. The Columbus Blue Jackets scored more 5v5 goals than the Stars did, last season.

That’s kind of what we worried could happen when the team with the 6th-best 5v5 offense lost Marchment, Granlund, and Dadonov last offseason. Robertson absolutely carried this team at 5v5 last season, where he scored 25 times—nine more than any other Stars player. But it was a top-heavy offense indeed, and those tend to fall a bit more easily than ones with deeper foundations.

Justin Hryckowian could hit a sophomore slump as more pressure lands on his shoulders and the league scouts him more heavily. Wyatt Johnston and Mikko Rantanen, for all their superstar production, showed that they can be contained in crunch time when the chips are down (at even-strength, at least). The Stars’ assemblage of fourth-liners don’t look likely to generate much more surplus production than they did last year, which is more of a problem than it might have been three years ago. At a team level, the Stars profile as a group that needs to do what they did last year, relying less on overwhelming force than on strategic bunkering, striking when the iron is hot and biding their time otherwise.

Glen Gulutzan told the media after the season ended that they’d considered some neutral zone changes, so we’ll see if those come to fruition in September. If you’re the Stars, you kind of have to make some changes, if only to ensure that you reach whatever this group’s true ceiling is. With the top end of their lineup, this roster still profiles as a team that could win any game on any given night, and I’d still take them to win four of seven against 90%2 of the teams in the league.

The weird thing about searching for this team’s floor is that you keep running up against how high its ceiling can really be. Any team is capable of bottoming out in any given season, and by rights, the Stars probably should have been the team in the West to do that last year, when everybody and their uncle got injured. Instead, Gulutzan’s group found a way to rip 112 points from their opponents, and they came within an eyelash of taking a 3-1 series lead over Minnesota.

Still, we have to acknowledge the reality that if the Stars struggle to start the year, more than one domino could fall. Jason Robertson’s contract status means that if the Stars are not looking like a cup contender when the calendar flips over, the Stars would have to seriously consider selling him to the highest bidder if they can’t find a number that both sides are willing to extend with. Every player in that locker room will be aware of the specter of losing one of their best players hanging over the team.

So if things are rocky to start the year, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they could be compounded. If some age-related decline affects some key players, that could combine with the misfortune of injuries to create a level of unrest that this locker room has steadfastly refused to tolerate. Even the best of teams has a breaking point, and this would be the first season in a long while where the Stars would have to seriously consider punting on the year if things aren’t lining up. And coming back from such a re-tool is always more easily said than done—especially with a Stars roster that doesn’t really have many players on it that are eligible to be moved and who would command any sort of significant return.

That’s where the just-abouts of Nill’s attempted trades this summer could wind up haunting the team for years to come. Because if the Stars can’t capitalize on the current window, it’s hard to see them finding a way to extend it more effectively than the combination of those two deals could have done. Selling from a position of strength tends to elicit a far better return than doing so out of desperation.

If you want to be pessimistic about the Stars, you have ample opportunity to do so, as illustrated above (and at times last season). But the other side of the coin is that these Stars simply have too much talent—both drafted and otherwise acquired—not to remain a force. The Maple Leafs may have gone from 108 points to 78 after losing Mitch Marner, but that was also a team without a functional goaltender or anything approximating a high-quality blue line.

As much as we’ve spent the last 2,000 words searching for every bit of looming disaster on the roster, it’s hard not to run up against the fact that a team as good as the Stars usually won’t go gently into that good night until overwhelming amounts of disaster arrive. And if last year didn’t qualify as significantly disastrous, maybe you would have been better off not thinking too terribly hard about what such a disaster might have to look like. Sorry about that.

I moved to a new place on the other side of Dallas this week. All things considered, choosing what wound up being the hottest week of the year for a move probably wasn’t great foresight, but that’s what I get for buying a crystal ball from that guy in the Torchy’s parking lot.

My old place in Valley Ranch was great, but it was time for a change. I’d moved there back in 2019 when the world and I were very different, so a spot in 2026 that didn’t entail hour-long drives on game days was long overdue.

Today, I’m surrounded by unpacked boxes, but there’s excitement, too.1 Change is inevitable, but there’s something invigorating about seizing it before your hand gets forced, like diving underneath a big wave just before it crashes on top of you.

Now, would I have stayed in my old place if someone had paid me $12 million to do so? Sure I would have, at least for a year. This is what we in the writing world call a “syllogism,”2 which is just one of the many words I can use to demonstrate why I would be worth $12 million, should someone discover within themselves a strange desire to so compensate me.

Jason Robertson did not move this week, as we discussed when his own one-year extension happened Tuesday evening. Why that extension happened when it did is not entirely clear, even if there are a few things we can deduce.

When we in the media (you might think of us as “a collection of syllogisms”) were asking both Jim Nill and Jason Robertson about why the deal got done when it did, they didn’t appear terribly eager to reveal who bent first.

Here’s part of Jim Nill’s response when asked about the timing:

“They had to go through their process. We had to go through our process. And in the end, you know, they filed. Deadlines always help to get things finished, which is important. This could have gone, I think I mentioned the last time we met here at the end of the summer, that I don’t know where this is gonna go. But deadlines help, which is, I think, good for both parties. I talked to Jason this morning. We had a good talk, and he’s up in Detroit. He just wants to continue his training and get excited about this year. He loves hockey, and he just wants to be training and know where he’s gonna be at for this season. So that’s a long story short.”

-Jim Nill, 7/22/26

Clear enough for you? Okay then, let’s try for Jason Robertson. Here was his answer:

“Well, I mean, kind of knew where I was going. Saturday being that deadline and those meetings and everything. I think it was in our best interest to try to avoid that and figure out something before that and do something we’d both be content and happy with.”

-Jason Robertson, 7/222/26

If I might be so bold as to summarize those answers, I’d say that the prospect of arbitration was unpleasant enough to both sides that $12 million at one year began to feel not only acceptable, but even appealing, giving the alternatives. Anyone who’s ever tried to take frontage roads during rush hour knows just how tolerable it can be the next time to head up the on-ramp, joining the thousands of others who fork over their change rather than stagger through a series of jammed intersections.

You can listen to both of the above pressers in full by clicking on the linked names above. If you do, you might just come away with the same impression I did: there are clouds on the horizon, and everyone knows it.

To be clear, Jim Nill was adamant that Jason Robertson wants to be a Dallas Star. Take this answer to the question about whether January/February is another deadline for re-signing Robertson, given the NHL trade deadline shortly thereafter:

“Well, [January 1] is when we can do a new agreement. But I think we’ll be talking before that. And, you know, things happen. It’s a long ways away. A lot of things happen in this game. You know, you look back over the last two, three years, things that happen in the business. You don’t know, but that’s our plan. Let’s get the season going. He knows where he’s at. We’re happy where he’s at. We’re happy he wants to be Dallas Star. We want him to be a Dallas Star. I’ve had those discussions. Like I said, we want to make this work, and so does he.”

-Jim Nill, 7/22/26

And then here was Robertson, when asked by Greg Wyshynski how he reconciles the fact that Dallas says they want him to retire a Star but were only able to sign him to a one-year deal:

“At the end of the day, it’s a business for them, for me, everything. I don’t know their future plans. They don’t know their future plans either. It’s too soon, so raw. It just happened yesterday. We’re both so content on getting it done and having time to re-evaluate both our futures.”

-Jason Robertson, 7/22/26

Robertson in particular was very careful with his answers, and understandably so. But if you really want to do the Big Media Market thing and overanalyze every word he used, you might take note of the fact that Robertson used a couple of “theys” when referring to the Stars during the presser. Now, given that he has been involved in tough negotiations with the team for months now, that’s a completely understandable way to phrase things. He and his camp were on one side (and will be again in a few months), while Jim Nill and the Stars are on the other. Personally, I’m not reading into things any more than that at present, but it’s just something to file away. When a player says “they were in a little crunch,” when referring to the Stars’ cap situation, my ears perk up.

Read more

The Jason Robertson saga is over, at least for the time being. Dallas announced Tuesday evening that Jason Robertson and the Stars have agreed to a one-year, $12 million deal in advance of his salary arbitration hearing, which had been scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.

For the Stars, they get Robertson signed at the $12 million figure they’ve been sticking to since negotiations really began in earnest. For Robertson, he gets the certainty of a deal that really has no precedent, as he could potentially have made less that figure in arbitration, as we discussed last week.

As a reminder, here are the top RFA wingers who have signed deals in the last few years—and who would likely have been the primary comps for Robertson in arbitration:

One suspects that Robertson came to the conclusion that he wasn’t likely to make much more than $12 million in arbitration, and potentially even a bit less. Since arbitration figures are different things than a player’s actual value on the market as an unrestricted free agent, getting a deal done at the number Robertson and Dallas did effects a compromise that avoids any further risk for both sides.

For the Stars, they probably also don’t mind the number because it keeps their cap structure for this season at least relatively manageable. They’ve above the salary cap by a bit over $1 million as things stand now, but if everyone on the roster is healthy after preseason games wrap up, Dallas can start the season under the limit without having to make any more trades. All they’d need to do is send two players (I’d bet on Arttu Hyry and Kyle Capobianco) down to the AHL to start the year, then bring them back up the moment an injury strikes—or when enough cap space has been accrued to fit one of them as-is.

Hyry, by the way, is still waivers-exempt, while Capobianco profiles as someone likely to clear them, like he did last year. But that might not even be necessary, because if Dallas begins the season with a player on LTIR like they did last fall, they could send down both of the waivers-exempt players on their roster (Hyry and Lian Bichsel) and finagle things to get as close to the cap as possible before putting someone on LTIR, thereby maximizing their LTIR pool.

The most surprising part of this whole thing might be that the Stars and Robertson managed to agree on anything at all, given how tough this negotiation has been. But deadlines make headlines, and that remained the case on Tuesday, when things finally got settled.

Here’s the first part of the Stars’ press release:

FRISCO, Texas – Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that the club has signed forward Jason Robertson to a one-year contract that will carry an annual average value (AAV) of $12 million.

“Jason has been a cornerstone of our franchise since he was drafted in 2017,” said Nill. “A dynamic and skilled player, he has been one of the league’s top offensive threats since making his NHL debut. We’re excited for what this season will bring for both Jason and the team as we continue our push to bring a championship to Dallas.”

Nill and Robertson will each speak with the media tomorrow (Wednesday).

We discussed a lot of the finer details of what a one-year deal means for Robertson on Monday, so check that out if you haven’t yet. One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that Robertson will no longer be able to sign an eight-year extension, as those will be phased out when the new CBA kicks in two months from now.

Instead, Robertson will now be eligible to sign an extension on January 1, 2027. That could be the new maximum term of a seven-year deal with Dallas, who will have more room to maneuver with Tyler Seguin’s $9.85 million cap hit coming off the books that same summer. It could also wind up being with another team, if he and the Stars still don’t see eye-to-eye on his long-term value. Because as we’ve discussed, the Stars simply can’t afford to walk Robertson all the way to free agency next summer. If they can’t work out an extension, then he’ll likely be traded before the deadline.

In other words, this deal does what arbitration would have done anyway: kick the can down the road. It simply happened more efficiently. Any sort of harmony between Robertson and the Stars is noteworthy at this point, though.

If you’re looking for some kind of indication about whether Robertson and the Stars could wind up working out an extension, then I suppose the fact that they came to even a small agreement is worth noting. But for my part, I’d have to think Robertson might wind up looking for even more than the rumored $14 million he was asking for this summer, particularly if he has another strong season.

For the Stars’ on-ice situation, you can at least remove all the qualifiers from your projected lineups. Because barring further trades, we will probably see something like the below, come opening night:

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
Robertson-Hintz-Seguin
Steel-Duchene-Benn
Bäck-Faksa-Kiviranta/Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Myers

Oettinger
DeSmith

The hope would be that Seguin is healthy enough to match (or even exceed) what Bourque did last season, and that Harley can look more like himself than he did to start last year. There is a world where that happens, and it’s worth acknowledging it. A healthier Stars team could be a very, very good one, once again.

More likely, however, the Stars will profile as a team that would be fortunate to repeat their 112-point performance with what is essentially a thinner version of the same group from last year, depending on what you think of Tyler Myers and Joel Kiviranta.

If the team struggles and Robertson’s ask is too high for Dallas to stomach, will the Stars look at moving Robertson for multiple pieces, as they nearly did with Seattle earlier this summer? Teams do tend to get desperate when elite players are on the market midseason, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Dallas keeps that option firmly on the table when (and if) negotiations with Robertson and agent Andy Scott pick back up.

Alternatively, the Stars might be more open to going to a higher number with Robertson next summer, both because they’ll have more room to do so and because the market will probably have shifted enough to make even a $14 or $15 million ask seem not unreasonable. Being a little further out from Rantanen’s extension might also make such a deal more palatable for the team, but that’s only speculation.

In any case, the Stars and Robertson have made peace for now. As was the case last year, the best thing Robertson can do for his next contract is to go out and have another whale of a season. That would only be a good thing for Dallas—whether it’s for this year, or for many more years to come.

I was in a good friend’s wedding this past Saturday. After the ceremony and photos were finished, I was able to get back to the reception in time to finally eat some food. (What is it about weddings that makes one so ravenously hungry?)

So, I got my plate filled up in the buffet line, but I couldn’t make it more than ten feet back without running into someone I knew, and so conversation superseded ingestion for a while. Finally, I wound up taking my plate and heading into the kitchen, where I had a moment to eat in peace. That moment lasted until I got halfway through a chicken salad croissant, when someone saw me and said, “So, what’s up with Jason Robertson?”

That anecdote was just to illustrate how this is still a topic causing Stars fans some anxiety no matter where they are. So, let’s see if we can clear some more of the remaining fog between Robertson and the Stars as they hurtle towards some kind of clarity this weekend.

Barring any trades, Jason Robertson and the Dallas Stars will have a new contract by about this time next week, if not sooner. Per PuckPedia, Robertson’s salary arbitration hearing is scheduled for Saturday, July 25.

Robertson is one of six remaining RFAs (as of this writing) who have not yet settled on a new contract with his team, and while many players can wind up settling right up until the beginning of the hearing, Jim Nill generally prefers to get things wrapped up sooner. For things to have gotten this far (with Mavrik Bourque having to be moved in the meantime) suggests that the two sides really have been just too far apart for any reasonable compromise to be possible. Thus, a third-party will have to resolve the situation.

I don’t claim to know what Jim Nill is thinking, but a couple situations from his Stars tenure have stuck with me when it comes to how these sorts of negotiations can go. So at risk of invoking irrelevant anecdotes, let’s touch on a couple of times Nill and a Stars player had to grind out a deal in the past, because I think it’s instructive.

Defenseman Brenden Dillon didn’t have arbitration rights in 2014. Mike Heika reported at the time that Dillon and his agent were looking for a two-year deal at $3.8 million coming out of his ELC—around the same AAV Cody Eakin had just signed for (and with the very same agent).

But the Stars weren’t looking to go that rich, it turned out. Dillon would eventually sign a one-year deal with Dallas for $1.25 million in early October, right before the season began. And just over a month later, Dillon would be traded away in a package for Jason Demers.

While I don’t think the way negotiations between Dillon and Dallas went was the reason1 Dillon was moved, I have always wondered if Dillon might have stayed in Dallas longer if he had been able to get signed to a longer-term deal. Instead, things went a different way. When a team and player don’t see eye-to-eye on the player’s value, it can be an indication that their paths will diverge before too long.

For contrast, how about a situation where Nill did settle with a player on the cusp of a hearing? Because there was another tough negotiation in 2014 where the Stars almost had to go to a third-party arbitrator, only for the Stars and a certain Antoine Roussel to settle on a long-term deal at the last minute, avoiding arbitration in the nick of time with a four-year, $2 million AAV contract.

Obviously, Robertson’s deal is going to be a much, much trickier one to navigate, but hey: precedent is precedent. There’s one other tough negotiation that I always think of when it comes to arbitration and the Stars, though. And in fact, it’s the only time I can remember Jim Nill actually going to salary arbitration during his Stars’ tenure.

Read more

The home of Stars broadcasts is experiencing some rare turmoil this week, as at least two teams in its fold are reportedly leaving the Victory+ platform.

On Wednesday, we learned about the Texas Rangers’ jumping ship effective immediately. Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported today that the Rangers will be moving from Victory+ to BZZR as of this Friday, following the All Star break. BZZR is a new streaming platform the name of which I don’t know how to pronounce, and which also doesn’t appear to have a television app yet. One would expect that such an app is being worked on behind the scenes.

As Rangers’ broadcaster Jared Sandler said today, this was apparently a move the Rangers made out of necessity, not an opportunistic one:

That necessity, as Grant also mentioned in the DMN piece, was related to “growing concerns about the viability and financial solvency of Victory+.” As Sports Business Journal reported today as well, Victory+ has been unable to secure as much additional financing as they had hoped to do, and that’s led to the platform encountering issues in making minimum payments to teams whose games it’s broadcasting—an issue eerily similar to what happened in the final days of RSNs like Bally Sports before teams like the Stars and Rangers left those platforms.

Per SBJ, Victory+ was in conversations with some NBA teams about broadcasting their games, but the inability to secure additional financing coupled with the NBA’s developing a centralized league broadcasting solution for the 2027-28 season meant that partnering with teams for only one year ultimately meant that any such short-term move wouldn’t be worth it.

From everything that’s out there, it sounds like the Rangers were concerned that Victory+ would be unable to meet its financial obligations, which would in turn put the Rangers’ ability to meet its own contractual broadcasting obligations in jeopardy. Thus, the Rangers moved to another platform in the short term to ensure the continued broadcast of their games rather than risk further uncertainty with Victory+.

Alex Silverman also reports that the NHL is setting up a similar sort of league-controlled broadcasting platform for a few teams caught in RSN no-man’s land for the upcoming season. The nature of that platform is still unclear, though as of a few months ago, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had said the approach would be more of a supportive one than the fully-formed streaming platform like other leagues are planning to do.

It sounds like the lack of additional financing for Victory+ has begun to show up in the present for other teams as well, as the Anaheim Ducks are also leaving the platform this season, per Sports Business Journal:

As part of the launch of the Rangers Sports Network in early 2025, the Rangers had chosen Victory+ as their initial DTC partner and offered fans a yearly paid subscription option. Since February, however, Victory+ has had difficulty securing additional financing. And according to multiple sources, Victory+ has had trouble making its minimum guarantee payments to teams in multiple leagues.

Victory+ has streamed games free for the NHL’s Stars and Ducks and WNBA’s Lynx and Dream. However, the Ducks have informed Victory+ that they plan to terminate their agreement with the company as well. It is unclear whether the Stars will remain with Victory+. In the case of the Lynx and Dream, those teams do not receive a minimum guarantee and are merely in an advertising revenue share with Victory+.

-Sports Business Journal
7/15/26

The Stars and Ducks were something of a success story last season, by all accounts, as the teams found a relatively smooth solution in the uncertain world following the collapse of the RSN model. That success was short-lived, it would seem.

You can read more about the Ducks’ decision here, but this excerpt was especially pertinent.

The Ducks have informed streaming platform Victory+ that they intend to terminate their local streaming agreement, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. The team, which had two more seasons remaining on its deal with Victory+, is in the process of finding another direct-to-consumer streaming partner for the 2026-27 season […] Multiple sources told SBJ that Victory+ has missed rights payments to several of its partners in recent months.

-Sports Business Journal
7/15/26

Victory+ (APMC) has yet to return requests for comment. As for the Dallas Stars, the team told me today that things are “status quo” between them and Victory+ right now. We’ll see what happens as the NHL season approaches.

(The Stars understandably declined to comment on proceedings between the Rangers and Victory+.)

Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts had mentioned some concerns about the economics behind the Stars’ free broadcasting model for Victory+ when he spoke with me a couple of weeks ago, but there was no mention of teams leaving the platform at that point.

For the time being, the Stars will apparently be broadcasting games on Victory+ when the NHL season starts, but a lot of things are still unclear. We’ll have more on this story as it develops, as it is sure to do.

I haven’t put this out on social media yet, but I wanted to give a small update for y’all here about the fact that I’m adding another byline this upcoming season. Starting this month, I’m the new NHL.com correspondent covering the Dallas Stars.

First: I’m going to be an independent correspondent, so nothing around here should change much at all. Stars Thoughts will keep doing its thing as we enter our third(!) season together, and you will still see my work popping up in magazines and podcasts1 and other places. (Or even in-person, if you’re at Boomerjacks on August 11!)

The main reason I wanted to let y’all know here first is because this new role will probably mean some very minor changes next season, and I wanted to let y’all who are keeping this place going exactly what I anticipate those changes looking like.

Read more