The Stars are 12-6-0, and there’s a sense around the team the record should be even better. But considering Pete DeBoer has led Dallas to the fourth-best record in the NHL since his hiring in 2022, there’s good reason to believe that come April, the Stars will be preparing for another promising playoff run.
As usual, the Stars have gone about their business with strong goaltending from Jake Oettinger, who has rebounded from a down year with a bang, looking every bit like the 25-year-old goaltender Jim Nill recently signed to a lucrative eight-year extension.
What hasn’t been business as usual is what’s happening at the other end of the ice. Uncharacteristically for the DeBoer era, the Stars are just barely inside the top 10 in the NHL in scoring, and that’s even after seven-goal outbursts last week against Pittsburgh and Boston.
In fact, the Stars would be far lower in all of the offensive categories were it not for one of the most dominant forward lines in the league. It’s just not the line everyone expected would be especially productive.
With the retirement of Joe Pavelski, a logical replacement next to Roope Hintz and Jason Robertson seemed to be phenom Wyatt Johnston. In just over 100 minutes together last season, the Robertson-Hintz-Johnston trio looked like one of the best lines in the NHL, controlling 80 percent of the expected goals share during their five-on-five time.
But instead of that line leading the way to their normal spot near the top of NHL scoring, the Stars’ presumptive top forwards are lagging behind their lofty expectations. And while each member of the line scored a goal against San Jose Wednesday night, they’re still a ways off their normal pace. After consecutive seasons pacing his teams in points, Robertson is sixth on the team in scoring, with just 11 points through 18 games. Hintz isn’t doing much better, with just 12 points of his own. And we’d best not discuss Johnston, who ended last year with 32 goals and 65 points but only managed to crack the Stars’ top 10 after Wednesday night.
It might be a sign of things to come, but in the meantime, the Stars have developed one of the best lines in the NHL by reuniting three veteran forwards: Matt Duchene, Tyler Seguin, and Mason Marchment.
The results have been beyond what anyone could have hoped for. The trio holds top three spots in scoring on the Stars, with Duchene’s team-leading 10 goals and 21 points putting him up among the top 25 in the league in scoring, with Seguin and Marchment not far behind.
It’s a start that has surpassed even Duchene’s production of last season, when he began the season on a similar tear after signing as a free agent. That time around, Duchene was the main beneficiary when it came to points, until his scoring slowed and injuries hit his line.
“Coming in last year, I remember sitting down with those guys and saying to them, ‘I believe we can be as good as any line in this league,’” Duchene told D Magazine on Tuesday. “And until [Seguin] got hurt, we were on a pretty big heater. But it was tough to find chemistry after that. I wasn’t playing as well, and I wasn’t where I needed to be to help it keep going.”
This season, Duchene has had plenty of help. Against Pittsburgh, all three forwards had a goal. Seguin had a two-goal game in the Stars’ second contest of the season, against the Islanders, and in a hard-fought divisional matchup in Minnesota last Saturday, Marchment scored both goals in a 2-1 victory.
Duchene has a pair of two-goal games, and that doesn’t include a highlight-reel goal in the Stars’ loss against Anaheim on Monday night—a goal in which Marchment and Seguin both tallied an assist on a gorgeous transition play capped off by Duchene’s deke.
It has been a group effort. Any of the three might be the first forechecker, and any of them might be setting up his linemate for a great scoring chance. All three have been more effective than anyone else on the team in capitalizing on the chances they’re getting.
They feed off one another. Marchment has consistently praised his linemates for how hard they work and communicate, and Seguin has waxed poetic about Duchene’s puck possession. In fact, Marchment said after his two-goal night against Minnesota that the group easily could have had more. When a line is going as well as this one is, he’s certainly right.
“It’s a line of three really unselfish guys who care about the team winning, and care about each other,” Duchene says. “And when you feel that from each other and know that each guy wants what’s best for the other guy, it’s easy to trust each other.”
But lest you think the line is running hot only because it’s getting some great bounces in a small sample size, the underlying numbers suggest otherwise. The Duchene-Seguin-Marchment line is sixth in the NHL in expected goals share among forward lines who have played at least 120 minutes together, which is remarkable for two thirty-somethings and a 29-year-old in a league that is skewing younger than ever.
If anything, the line should probably be scoring more than it already is. For instance, in the oh-so-close comeback effort against Anaheim on Monday, the Duchene line controlled an unheard of 90 percent of the expected scoring at five-on-five, despite only getting the one goal. Suffice it to say, the line is controlling play whenever it’s on the ice.
But it’s one thing to start well, and quite another to sustain it. Duchene talked this summer about the stress of losing the tip of his finger in March 2023, then being bought out unexpectedly by Nashville shortly afterward. And after moving his family to Dallas just a couple of months later, Duchene says a lot of things hit him at once midway through the season, and his play began dipping, including when he scored just two goals in the Stars’ 19 playoff games (though one of them was a pretty big one).
But Duchene chose to return to Dallas on a bargain of a contract for the Stars, and the points are flowing at a fantastic rate. That’s especially noteworthy given Seguin has already missed four games.
Deboer is well aware, and the line’s ice time has steadily increased. He has adjusted other lines in an effort to get other forwards going, but the Seguin-Duchene-Marchment line has remained intact, with DeBoer acknowledging Wednesday that it’s been the only really reliable line he has had for most of the young season.
“They’ve been fantastic,” says DeBoer of the Duchene-Seguin-Marchment line. “Let’s be honest: they’ve carried us so far. We need some other lines to get going … We’ve got a lot of other guys in that room that need to start to carry the mail on some nights. When we’ve been a really good team in my time here, it’s a different line every night. Or one line’s off, and another line picks them up. But we’ve been more of a one line team offensively so far.”
Indeed, no team can survive with one line carrying the load, as Dallas teams of the past know all too well. To complicate matters, DeBoer mentioned earlier this month that Seguin, who turns 33 in January, most likely won’t be an option for back-to-back games, as he has a lower-body issue that “flares up” when playing two games in two days.
But maybe knowing that is for the best. If you adjust Seguin’s scoring to a per-game pace, he’s neck-and-neck with Duchene for the team lead. If that’s the sort of production a rested Seguin can provide, a measured workload seems like a smart move. (In fact, our Sean Shapiro makes a compelling case for load management throughout the roster.)
As for Marchment, his 18 points in 17 games are ahead of his torrid pace during his career year in Florida in 2022, when he scored 47 points in 55 games. That prompted Nill to sign him to a four-year deal in the subsequent offseason. And Marchment isn’t merely getting points from the perimeter, as evidenced by his taking a puck to the face against Winnipeg on November 9 that required a number of stitches. (It didn’t stop him from returning later in the game.)
If anything, the injury might have further invigorated Marchment, who has put up a ridiculous 10 points in the four games since, including a five-point night against Pittsburgh. In fact, the NHL named Marchment its Second Star of the Week for his three-game run immediately after absorbing that puck to the face.
Regardless of how much Seguin, Duchene, and Marchment are scoring, all of them are quick to point out the dangers of getting fixated on results rather than their process as a group.
“I’ve been on lines where there was too much internal competition,” Duchene says. “You could feel it, and it eventually could catch up to you and create tension. That’s never been the case with us. We’re just really supportive. A lot of the time in hockey, maybe you’re playing with a guy that you get along with, but you’re not super close with. But in this situation, we’re all pretty close. There’s times we disagree on things, but we hear each other out, and it just makes us better. We push each other.”
The trio isn’t only exhibiting that level of trust and camaraderie on the ice. Duchene says he, Seguin, and Marchment have dined together on several occasions. Spending that time together has only led to more trust.
“We want to win a Stanley Cup,” Duchene says. “That’s our number one goal. And we know we’re a small piece of the puzzle here, and getting that done, it takes the entire team. And we’re just trying to play our part the best we can.”
So far, so good. Now it’s time for the rest of the team to join them at the table.
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