FRISCO, Texas — The Dallas Stars avoided the ultimate nightmare scenario but the early returns on the lower-body injury Miro Heiskanen suffered in a friendly-fire collision with goaltender Scott Wedgewood on Thursday night still raise plenty of questions. Dallas will be without its workhorse defenseman, and best player overall, for the foreseeable future. How massive is the hole Heiskanen leaves in the lineup? How will the Stars look to replace him? What does it mean for the trade deadline?
Advertisement
Let’s work through some of the main questions that come from this unideal situation for the Stars.
How long will Heiskanen be out?
This is the biggest question, and as much as people may not want to hear this, the answer will require some patience. Stars head coach Pete DeBoer understandably didn’t have answers after the game Thursday night, in which the injury occurred early in the third period of the game against the Colorado Avalanche. After practice on Friday, there was some clarity but the evaluation process was still ongoing.
“He’s going to have some tests (Friday),” DeBoer said. “Doesn’t look terrible, as in he’s not out for the season but I would term it more week to week than day to day. No surgery or any of that so that’s the good news and the information I have so far.”
Reading into injury discussions in the NHL is a borderline impossible task, given the ambiguity. When Wedgewood left a game with a lower-body injury last February, he was deemed day to day but ended up missing more than a month. This isn’t a complaint directed at the Stars but it’s just how injuries are discussed in the NHL. Upper body or lower body is generally as specific as it gets and even if a body part is being shipped in from a galaxy far, far away, the player will likely be designated day to day or week to week.
There are a couple of things to take from the first update from DeBoer. As of right now, the no surgery part is important. On the flip side, having to qualify “not terrible” as “not out for the season” is a bit less encouraging. Week to week also means it’s most likely that any return to game action comes on the other side of the All-Star break.
Will the Stars put Heiskanen on long-term injured reserve?
Not at this point. LTIR has a lot of nuance to it. It’s not as simple as placing Heiskanen on LTIR and suddenly there’s a bunch of extra money (prorated $8.45 million in the case of Heiskanen) to play with. As mentioned above, Heiskanen is not expected to be out for the season, so when he does return, assuming it’s before the playoffs, the Stars will have to clear his cap figure again to bring him off LTIR. Many will point to Vegas or Tampa Bay as examples in recent years of using a player’s injury timeline to work with playing the salary cap but it doesn’t appear that Heiskanen will be shelved until mid-April. The Stars would want him back as soon as he’s ready and it seems like that will be in the regular season. Obviously, cap figures go out of the window once the playoffs begin so if Heiskanen’s timeline to return does extend into the postseason, there’s a different discussion the organization will have.
Advertisement
With all of that being said, placing Heiskanen on LTIR is not off the table yet. The tests he has in the coming days will help paint a better picture of when he can return. If the timeline is fairly long-term, the Stars can always resort to placing Heiskanen on LTIR. There’s no rush to doing that, as the organization can place him on LTIR whenever they reach a decision and make it retroactive back to the day after the injury happened. That’s where Heiskanen’s LTIR clock of missing a minimum of 10 games and 24 calendar days will begin. If the Stars lose additional players to injury, that could also be a factor because they’re just on the edge now, with 13 forwards, six defensemen and two goaltenders available and no wiggle room with the cap.
The Stars would prefer to avoid digging into LTIR. Teams in LTIR lose the ability to accrue daily cap space and it also affects performance bonuses the following season. The Stars have a big one with Joe Pavelski’s $2 million performance bonus rolling into next season. LTIR is an option but it’s not the preferred option.
How will the Stars look to replace Heiskanen internally in the short term?
“We’ve got to do it by committee with everybody,” DeBoer said.
Naturally, eyes will shift to Thomas Harley even more, who is having a phenomenal season but has had the luxury of skating under the radar a bit with Heiskanen doing so much of the heavy lifting at the top of the lineup, both defensively at five-on-five and quarterbacking the top power-play unit. These responsibilities will fall to Harley now, who is still just 22 years old and still growing his game. There is some Heiskanen to Harley’s game but the Stars know that they can’t just dump all of Heiskanen’s responsibilities onto Harley and keep chugging along. That’s not in the best interest of the team, or the player.
“You’ve got to be careful,” DeBoer said. “You’re not replacing Miro and we don’t want to put too much on (Harley) but he has some of those abilities and he’s still a young player. I think he wants that. I think he has the ability to fill in some of that but this is going to be by committee. You don’t replace a guy like that, with Thomas Harley elevating his game.”
Advertisement
As we outlined after the Avalanche game, Heiskanen’s absence creates a litany of problems for the Stars, ranging from the void of a true top-level defensive pairing to ice time and role management for players who are going to be called upon for bigger roles. Not only will Harley’s five-on-five ice time go up but so will the level of competition he faces. With Heiskanen, the Stars had the luxury of sheltering Harley a bit and allowing him to progress into that role, which he’s done a great job of doing consistently for the past year and a half. It’ll be harder for the Stars to have that same approach when Harley is essentially the only top-pairing caliber guy available.
That’s why the committee approach will be critical for the Stars. Nils Lundkvist has to be better and more consistent, both at five-on-five and on the power play. When Lundkvist was running PP2 and faltered, the solution was to ask the veteran PP1 talent in Heiskanen to double-shift. Now, the PP1 guy, Harley, is just getting his feet wet himself. At five-on-five, Lundkvist has to play to his offensive potential without being a defensive liability. For Esa Lindell and Jani Hakanpää, the inverse is true; they must play to the top of their defensive potential without being offensive liabilities. Joel Hanley and Ryan Suter have to at least be net-neutral players. The forwards will all have to pick up the slack and be more responsible in their own zone and the goaltender might have to make a save or two in a key moment that otherwise wouldn’t be expected.
Thursday night’s game, even when Heiskanen was still available, was a good example of the best defensive approach for the Stars. When the Stars were limiting Colorado’s offensive firepower, it wasn’t because they were making standout defensive plays in their own zone; it was because they forced the Avalanche to play right in front of their goaltender for extended periods of time.
“We talked in the third (period) that that’s the best defense against (Nathan) MacKinnon and that group, is to make them stop and defend in their own end,” DeBoer said. “I thought we did some really good stuff tonight that can’t get lost in the final result because of a bounce at the end and overtime.”
This means the top line of Jason Robertson, Roope Hintz and Pavelski has to consistently play with its vintage magic. The Matt Duchene line needs to just keep doing what it’s doing. The Wyatt Johnston line has to be better and the fourth line, which has been pretty good in many games this season with a rotating cast, has to be decent.
Replacing Heiskanen doesn’t fall on Harley, Lundkvist or any one player. It doesn’t even just fall on the defensemen. When DeBoer says replacing Heiskanen is going to be a task by committee, it’s going to take 19 players each and every game.
Is it bad or good timing?
There’s no good time for an injury, especially not to a player like Heiskanen, but if the Stars did have to go through it, this is not a bad time on the schedule for it to happen. Sure, the next five games are against division opponents but three of those five are against the two teams at the bottom of the division. After the next six games, the Stars will enter a stretch in which nine of their 10 opponents will be Eastern Conference teams, and the lone Western Conference game will be against the Anaheim Ducks. The All-Star break will also hit during that time and buy Heiskanen some time to recover without the team playing games without him.
Advertisement
There’s plenty to be determined on the exact timeline for Heiskanen but having that stretch to take the Stars to mid-February is good. A byproduct of this situation is that it does take Heiskanen off the ice for a while, too. After an offseason of talking about managing Heiskanen’s ice time, the star defenseman was heading toward another career-high in time on ice. When Heiskanen does return, his body should be fresh as the Stars gear up for the stretch run and heading into the playoffs.
What does it mean for external help?
I wrote about this Thursday night but Heiskanen’s absence should be a wake-up call to the Stars that they need to do something to upgrade the blue line, and that’s irrelevant to how much time Heiskanen misses. The Stars need another defenseman, preferably a right-shot. This has been the case for a while and it remains true now, too. To go along with the timing factor, at least this eye-opening reminder happened months before the trade deadline as opposed to on the other side of it when the team isn’t able to do much about it.
(Photo: Matthew Pearce / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)