For most teams, the story about a youth movement or the new core leading the way is for teams thinking about lottery draft balls instead of the trade deadline. Their future is now because they have no choice.
The Stars are not most teams.
Despite starring youngsters Wyatt Johnston, Logan Stankoven, Thomas Harley, and Mavrik Bourque—more on Lian Bichsel later—Dallas has the second-best odds to win the Stanley Cup, according to staffers who cover the NHL for The Athletic.
ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski has picked the Stars to win the 2025 Stanley Cup. The playbook for what makes a team competitive is supposed to follow a checklist of hockey aphorisms. For example, if you’re just shy of being the favorite, you need to add that veteran savvy to contend for the Cup. That’s certainly the philosophy of the Edmonton Oilers, who signed Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner in the offseason. However, with its season opener looming on Thursday night, Dallas is employing a playbook built around its youth movement.
Leading the way is Johnston, who needs no introduction. To recap, his sophomore year wasn’t just an improvement from a rookie season that earned him Calder attention. It was also a metamorphosis. Johnston scored as many points as Roope Hintz, with 65. When the postseason came around, he was arguably the Stars’ best forward at crunchtime, and arguably the best player in his draft class.
Stankoven may not be as mature as Johnston in terms of pure development, but whatever gap exists between the top forwards in the 2021 draft feels like the length of a sweat bead after Stankoven’s preseason performance. After doing a deep dive into his point projections ahead of the Calder race, I’d estimate that his statistical profile for forwards his age hews close to players like Kevin Fiala, Jamie Benn, and even Auston Matthews. Though a small sample size, Stankoven belongs in a cohort that averages 52 points. If he wins the Calder, then he’ll most likely score closer to 63, as that is the point average of the last 10 Calder-winning forwards. The expectation for Stankoven may be unfairly high, but that’s the standard.
However, Stankoven won’t be the only one thinking about a Calder trophy. In the QMJHL, Bourque was involved in nearly 40 percent of his team’s offense; that’s a milestone in Mitch Brown’s history of tracking prospect data. He has the least experience of the Stars’ vaunted trio, but newest kid on the block or not, Bourque will come in as his team’s most mature. At 22, he is, after all, the oldest of the three. And unlike players who take longer to make the jump, Bourque has leveraged his developmental curve to add more and more layers to his game. His game may be less flashy than Johnston and Stankoven’s, but it possesses just as much nuance.
On the defensive side, Harley enters what is functionally his sophomore season. After scoring 15 goals to lead all Victory Green blueliners, he very well could level up his game. As with Johnston, Harley might have been the best player at his position to come out of his draft class. According to Evolving-Hockey’s Wins Above Replacement model, Harley’s shift-to-shift impact was worth an extra seven points in the standings, higher than even Miro Heiskanen and Charlie McAvoy. Whether or not the data checks out is not the point; Harley is operating at a high level that goes unnoticed by even some Stars fans.
Then there’s Bichsel, the youngest of the franchise’s new core, but also its biggest. (He plays like it, too.) If Chris Tanev had been too injured to play in the Edmonton series, Bichsel would have been able to boast three playoff appearances among the AHL, the SHL, and the NHL. Although he’ll start the season with the Texas Stars, with players like Brendan Smith and Nils Lundkvist in front of him, who believes his promotion is anything other than a formality? If NHL readiness were given a thoughtful definition beyond being ready when a player is told he’s ready, then Bichsel probably makes the cut. Watch this play for an example of how much of a three-zone defender he is instead of just a skilled brute:
This is not to be argumentative. Two things can be true at once: Bichsel can give Dallas better shifts than some of the players above him on the depth chart, and he can benefit from playing top minutes in Cedar Park. The point here is not to make grandiose projections, but to emphasize that Bichsel is as much a part of this story as everyone else. There’s a good chance you’ll hear about Bichsel being Dallas’ “deadline addition” in March, and there’s a good reason for that. He’s yet another young player ahead of the curve.
In Colorado, everything falls on the shoulders of Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Cale Makar. In Edmonton, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl take over, or the Oilers stand no chance. In Dallas, the mid twentysomething crew of Heiskanen, Roope Hintz, Jason Robertson, and Jake Oettinger began easing the burden on Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin as early as far back as the 2020 Cup Final run. But what makes the Stars special is they’re bleeding in another, potentially even more talented group just as the aforementioned quartet hits its prime. That means Benn and Seguin, who remain quality NHL players, can be the third men on their own lines. Even more significantly, it means that Hintz, one of the game’s best two-way centers, may be relegated to an ultra-high-end second pivot before his 30th birthday. It means Robertson, one of the game’s best young wingers, faces far less pressure to replicate his scoring spree from two years ago if he is, in fact, transitioning into more of a two-way, Selke-caliber forward. And it means Heiskanen might soon be a player carrying a defensive pair instead of the only one capable of doing so.
If Johnston, Stankoven, Bourque, Harley, and Bichsel develop, the Stars should be great for a long time. But if they come through now? Then that Cup favorite tag is justified—because some of them might be among Dallas’ best players as soon as this season.
All of this might seem unfair to put such pressure on a young core. Why ask so much of the group? Simple: because they are professional hockey players. They grow by challenging themselves to be better hockey players. Why not challenge them to help create the best team? I’ll never understand this double standard of expectation except as an artifact of developmental attitudes in the NHL. It’s unfair to ask a young player to accelerate the future in order to lead the way, but somehow it’s OK to demand success from veterans whose past has accelerated their expiration date? A player’s success doesn’t just come from who he is, but where he is. Ryan Suter’s time was up because his best years were well behind him. For Johnston, Harley, et al, their best years are just beginning.
So sure, Dallas is doing things a little differently. But who cares? Champions aren’t built with resumes, but with ability. The Stars’ youth movement has enough of the latter to make this the best team in hockey.
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