This time last year, it was all too good to be true. Matt Duchene, having scored 65 goals in the previous two years with the Nashville Predators, was a Star for one year and only $3 million. He could have easily sought more. He could have gone the route of Patrick Kane, who’s being paid $4 million by Detroit next season, plus up to $2.5 million in (very) attainable bonuses for one year. Or Duchene could have gone elsewhere. Instead, he chose Dallas. When all was said and done, this really was too good to be true. But his arrival came with a few asterisks.
On the positive end, the former Avalanche pivot was a shot of nitrous oxide on offense. Not the kind in real life where you have to consider tank storage regulations and engine compatibility; we’re talking the comic book levels of a cheesy Vin Diesel movie. Not only was Duchene a 60-point player for Dallas, but Tyler Seguin and Mason Marchment went from 31 and 50 points, respectively, to 53 and 52 points with Duchene anchoring them. That’s a 24-point boost. Sure, Seguin and Marchment deserve credit, but who’s kidding who? Duchene was the difference. A bigger contract beckoned, almost certainly elsewhere considering Dallas’ tight cap constraints. No one would care so long as he did his part to power a deep playoff run.
But just like the aforementioned race tanks, Duchene’s performance was affected by its duration. This was a season of two halves, and the second wasn’t pretty. With only 15 points over his last 40 games, playoffs included, the 33-year-old hit the proverbial wall and the regression gods collected their debt. Granted, I don’t think Duchene went from good to bad during the regular season so much as he went from great and lucky to decent and unlucky.
However, the postseason was its own animal. Duchene looked lost, unable to adjust to the limited space that defines Stanley Cup hockey. He wound up being outscored by fourth-liner Evgenii Dadonov (7 points to 6). The big contract never materialized. Instead, he’s right back where he started: in Dallas on another one-year, $3 million deal. Does that mean the Stars should expect the same results next season as Duchene delivered in 2023-2024? Or can Duchene maintain his play all season long and next year is the real rebound season?
Answering that means asking a different set of questions. Did Duchene slow down because he got worse or because he got unlucky? Was the decline about his offense, his defense, or both?
Although this is just a loose glimpse, I split Duchene’s regular season into two halves looking only at his even-strength offense/defense (goals for, per 60 minutes of even-strength play, and goals against), and expected even-strength offense/defense. The color coding indicates his rank on the team, with top five in green and bottom five in red.
There was definitely an element of fortune baked into Duchene’s very successful first half. But it was earned luck; his shot quality proved to be high-level. The second half was a disaster, plain and simple. The encouraging sign is even though his shot quality per shift declined, he remained one of the Stars’ top threats. (Seguin’s lower body injury, which took him out for 11 games through most of March, probably had an impact on his production, too.)
Everyone more or less has a grasp of this, so that isn’t exactly news. The more interesting exploration is gaining perspective on Duchene’s postseason performance. Except for the overtime goal in Game 6 against the Avalanche (his former team), his game was frustrating. Between the added moves that left him easier to defend and a rush attack that fizzled where it once fried opponents, there was little of the Duchene that Stars fans were used to seeing. But was that the real Duchene?
Duchene has 51 career playoff games on his NHL resume. Comparing his career average using the rubric above to the 2024 run with Dallas makes one thing abundantly clear: from a pure production standpoint, Duchene simply got unlucky. (Here I’m comparing Duchene’s career averages to the last five seasons of playoff data with green indicating above the average rates of a playoff forward, yellow being average, and red, below average.)
Broadly speaking, Duchene has been a relatively strong playoff performer, even defensively. Unsurprisingly, the biggest change between his career average in the postseason versus this year’s was his goal-scoring rates, which took the biggest hit. But there’s an important asterisk here. When adjusted for era and competition—itself a pain-staking process that Paul Pidutti from DailyFaceoff has been diligent enough to compile—forward production is more or less consistent from the regular season into the postseason. Assuming the Stars get back in the playoffs, which is all but a mathematical certitude regardless of your opinions on their admittedly muddled offseason, there’s every reason to expect a bounceback, however modest.
Duchene certainly had good cause to hit that wall. He was refreshingly candid about the difficult stretch of being bought out by the Predators and his personal struggles in the aftermath. As he told the media in his year-end press conference, “I’m a human being at the end of the day, and I was kind of running like a robot there for eight or nine months.”
According to Duchene, the decision to return to Dallas was about being so close to winning the Cup, and that a redo was about hockey justice. Statistically, he’ll most likely get some. But which player will we see? The one who struggled to play the game like a marathon, or the one who exceeded by turning hockey into a sprint?
Duchene’s story is fascinating for its wealth of alternate universes. On the surface, sure, he has the potential to replicate most, if not everything he accomplished last year: pulling Seguin and Marchment up by their bootstraps, and maybe even sacrificing some of his production for consistency going into another postseason. Of course, he also has the potential to slide further. Given his age (he turns 34 in January) and physical style (throwing big hits is every bit as violent as the leg strength and tenacity required to do what he does best), this wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest.
Either scenario would be fascinating, but I’m just as intrigued by the possibility of Duchene becoming something of a shepherd, for lack of a better word. What if Pete DeBoer doesn’t run back the line with Seguin and Marchment at all? What if he instead trusts Duchene to take Mavrik Bourque under his wing the same way Jamie Benn did with Wyatt Johnston and Logan Stankoven?
Duchene’s presence promises to be less about the roots he establishes for himself and more about the roots he establishes for others. After all, nobody expects him to be a hero. The Stars will live and die by the improvement of Johnston and Stankoven, along with the potential of Bourque and theoretically Lian Bichsel. Duchene’s club-friendly contract feels like an admission of this. Jim Nill could have replaced Joe Pavelski and Chris Tanev if he wanted. (Well, Tanev less so given how quickly Toronto tripped over its own cap just to get that six-year deal done, but still). Instead Nill brought in a committee to facilitate the development of its young core: a core that will lead the way in spite of its youth. Part of that is its own story, but I suspect that’s the story Duchene wanted to play a role in, too.
It’s only two-thirds of a year, but the hockey season is long. Dallas can live with more asterisks and warts in Duchene’s game. And what does a deep playoff run look like if Duchene does sustain his production this time around? Or if he just does the opposite of this past season: struggling in the first half, excelling in the second? It’s a little hopeful, of course. But at least that hope comes cheap for another year.
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