Four years ago, Tyler Seguin was questioning whether his NHL career might be over.
Seguin had pushed his body to the limit and then some during the Stars’ 2019-20 playoff bubble run, leading to multiple hip surgeries and six months of rehab. There was a time during that span when Seguin was, in his words, “honestly questioning” if he’d ever play in the NHL again.
Seguin made it back, and now four years later has opened his 33-year-old season at a blistering pace, with 10 points (six goals, four assists) in nine games. For a player who had a career-best 84 points more than a decade ago, he’s clicking at a 98-point pace.
The point totals aren’t sustainable. He’s not going to keep rocking a 35.3 percent shooting percentage he carries into Monday night, but the early returns show that after years of stepping away from the spotlight, Seguin has been one of the Stars’ best players.
One of the keys to Seguin’s start has been that he hasn’t played every game. He has missed four games because of injury, including the second of the back-to-back games in Finland last weekend. Seguin himself has admitted he has to listen to his body more, and playing back-to-backs might soon be a thing of the past.
It’s an embodiment of an ethos the Stars as a franchise should lean into this season. While it goes against much of the old machismo of hockey, they should heavily load manage their roster.
Of the forward core, five players need to be heavily monitored when it comes to wear and tear.
Seguin will be 33 in January, and Matt Duchene is already there. Jamie Benn and Evgenii Dadonov are both 35, while even at age 27, Roope Hintz’s style and approach to the game are impossible to maintain for an 82-game pace without the risk of injury.
Even some of the younger pieces of the roster have experienced the ill effects of back-to-back lengthy playoff runs. Miro Heiskanen, Jason Robertson, and Jake Oettinger have each hit walls in their play at some point in the past two seasons. Even Wyatt Johnston, seemingly immune to any struggles in the first two NHL seasons, has started slowly and looks to be dealing with the first adversity of his career.
Add in a cross-Atlantic flight to Finland plus an especially condensed schedule for the rest of the season, and the Stars should be doing everything in their power to limit everyone’s playing time during the regular season so the postseason can potentially go one round deeper than it did the past two springs.
To the credit of the Stars and general manager Jim Nill, the franchise has been more forward-thinking this season and last. The Stars have altered how they travel in recent years, allowing for more recovery time for players and less practice. The Stars have also invested in their sports science department and, following Nill’s lead, have let the experts in that field determine how the coaching staff handles certain players.
The final piece of that effort is fully investing in a load management schedule that limits how many players are going to even try and play a full 82-game regular season. No injury excuses are needed. It’s simply an acceptance that at the end of June the team that wins the Stanley Cup is often the one that has figured out how to keep the most key pieces healthy and running.
As for what that looks like, the Stars should effectively be rotating veteran healthy scratches at forward. Between Benn, Dadonov, Duchene, Seguin, and even Hintz, each member of that group should be sitting every fifth game for rest and recovery. Some of the younger players, like Johnston and Robertson, shouldn’t be cycled out that frequently, but the Stars need to make sure they’ve also been given the requisite night off every so often in practice.
The Stars can afford to do this because they have the depth both in the lineup and out of it, while it also creates a space where Oskar Back and Mavrik Bourque get a chance to earn more opportunities. Bourque and Back won’t be given anything come playoff time, but they’ll at least have the chance to find their ideal fit with the proposed plan.
Frankly, the biggest roadblock to all of this is the Stars convincing Benn to get on board. Benn is very much an old-school leader, the “watch what I do, not what I say,” type who battles through everything. The Stars will follow Benn to the end of the world and back; that’s been proven time and time again. Now it’s up to him to co-sign anything that involves voluntarily sitting out games for rest and recovery.
But there’s plenty of benefit for Dallas to sell. Point Benn to the Florida Panthers, the only team to play more games than the Stars the past two seasons. The Panthers were a scrappy, fun story on their Cinderella run to the final in 2023, but in the end, any chance of winning against the Vegas Golden Knights was limited by how injured and beaten up they were in the Stanley Cup Final.
One year later, and much healthier, to the credit of coach Paul Maurice, the Panthers hoisted the Stanley Cup.
The Stars have had their playoff injury sob stories. There are so many “what-ifs” about the team and playoff health, dating to 2016 when Seguin’s Achilles injury may have cost that team a trip to the Western Conference Final. That was followed up by a laundry list of injuries during recent runs. It hurts to win the Stanley Cup. It’s up to the Stars can ensure they aren’t adding too much hurt to the equation during the regular season.
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