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Stars Sign Matt Duchene To Four-Year Extension

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The Stars have signed center Matt Duchene to a four-year extension, per a team announcement. It’s worth $4.5MM per season for a total value of $18MM. His deal carries a no-movement clause through 2026-27 before decreasing to a five-team approved trade list for the 2027-28 and 2028-29 seasons, per PuckPedia. The yearly breakdown is as follows:

2025-26: $3MM base salary, $3MM signing bonus
2026-27: $1.8MM base salary, $3MM signing bonus
2027-28: $3.6MM base salary
2028-29: $3.6MM base salary

Duchene could have tested the market as one of the top unrestricted free agent centers available, but he’ll instead opt to stay in a Dallas market where he’s excelled as a key top-six contributor over the past two years. In doing so, he takes a significant discount on his market value, at least on a per-year basis. A four-year offer at a much higher price may not have been out there for the 34-year-old, but AFP Analytics projected a three-year deal for Duchene to fall in the $7MM range per season if he hit the open market.

The 2009 No. 3 overall pick is coming off a spectacular 2024-25 campaign. While the Stars scored the third-most goals in the league, their offense was largely generated by committee. Duchene was the only Dallas player who played at least 25 games that hit the point-per-game mark, leading them in scoring with a 30-52–82 line while playing in all 82 games. Averaging over 17 minutes per game, it was the second time Duchene had hit 80 points in his 16-year NHL career and the fourth time he had hit 30 goals.

Duchene initially arrived in Texas on a one-year, $3MM contract for 2023-24 following a surprise buyout by the Predators with three years left on his contract. He posted 25 goals and 65 points in 80 games last year before taking a repeat of that deal to stay with the Stars last summer. It was a significant discount then, and he takes another significant discount now, locking in some highly-desired security through the rest of his mid-30s as well.

The Stars need any help they can get to ice a cap-compliant roster for 2025-26. Duchene’s steep discount certainly helps, but they still find themselves in a position to clear multiple salaries in order to even ice a full roster, let alone re-sign any other pending UFAs. Dallas now has just $455K in cap space with a roster of only 17 players, per PuckPedia. They need to open at least $1.9MM cap space at an absolute minimum via trades to be able to sign three league-minimum players for a bare-bones 20-man roster. In reality, they’ll move at least two of Mason Marchment ($4.5MM), Mathew Dumba ($3.75MM), and Ilya Lyubushkin ($3.25MM) to open up far more than that to give them some in-season flexibility while not taking a catastrophic hit to their forward depth. Jamie Benn, Evgenii Dadonov, and Mikael Granlund remain as pending UFAs up front.

For Duchene, he’ll still be getting compensated more than his contract with Dallas indicates. The expiry of his new deal following the 2028-29 season lines up with when his buyout paychecks from the Predators will end. He’s still set to receive $6.56MM from Nashville in 2025-26 and then $1.56MM annually through 2028-29.

Image courtesy of Jerome Miron-Imagn Images.

Stars Sign Ben Kraws To Two-Way Extension

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The Stars have signed goaltender Ben Kraws to a two-way extension for the 2025-26 campaign, the team announced Tuesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Kraws was slated to be a restricted free agent in two weeks after completing his first NHL contract, a one-year entry-level deal he signed with Dallas as an undrafted free agent in March 2024. The 6’5″, 194-lb netminder was coming off a strong showing in his fifth collegiate season at the time, posting a 2.49 GAA and .919 SV% in 37 games for St. Lawrence University. He played all but two games during the season and was easily the school’s top player, earning a Hobey Baker Award nomination as a result.

While the 24-year-old has seen a few games of action with AHL Texas since signing his deal 15 months ago, most of his short time in the pros has been spent down a level with ECHL Idaho. He was the Steelheads’ starter this year while sitting No. 5 on the Stars’ goalie depth chart behind their NHL duo of Jake Oettinger and Casey DeSmith and the AHL tandem of Magnus Hellberg and Rémi Poirier. He did quite well in his first professional audition, posting a 2.88 GAA, .910 SV%, five shutouts, and a 23-12-5 record in 40 games.

Hellberg won’t be back with the organization next season after signing in Sweden, while Poirier re-upped with the Stars on a two-year, two-way deal just yesterday. The latter outplayed Hellberg anyway and is likely slated to take over as the AHL starter next year. Kraws’ landing a second contract from Dallas indicates they may be penciling him in as Poirier’s backup in the AHL next year.

Still, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Dallas add another name to the mix in net, even if it’s on an AHL-only contract. Kraws has a more pedestrian .896 SV% and 2.87 GAA in seven career AHL showings for Texas. There’s certainly room for improvement on that small sample size, and the Stars would do well to add a more experienced call-up option in case an injury sidelines DeSmith or Oettinger for any significant length of time.

Stars Sign Remi Poirier To Two-Year, Two-Way Contract

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The Dallas Stars have announced they’ve signed goaltender Remi Poirier to a two-year, two-way contract beginning next season. Poirier has spent the last three seasons with the AHL’s Texas Stars.

Dallas originally drafted Poirier in the sixth-round of the 2020 NHL Draft. He signed his entry-level contract two seasons later, after finishing a fourth year with the QMJHL’s Gatineau Olympiques. His pro career kicked off in the ECHL, but he earned a promotion to the AHL after posting three shutouts and nine one-goal games through his first 22 games. He finished his rookie pro season split between tier-two and tier-three, ultimately finishing the year with a .928 save percentage in 23 ECHL games and a .907 Sv% in 16 AHL games.

The momentum from year one was enough to propel Poirier to the top of a closely-contested Texas goalie room last season. He played in 38 of Texas’ 72 games on the season, and posted a team-best .904 save percentage and 17-16-4 record. He seemed set to continue on as Texas’ starter into this season, until the Stars signed Magnus Hellberg to a one-year, two-way contract last August. Hellberg assumed the lion’s share of minutes over Poirier, though Poirier’s .908 Sv% in 31 games still trumped Hellberg’s .904 Sv% in 41 games.

Hellberg recently signed with Djugardens IF of Swedens’ SHL for next season. That move should open the door for Poirier to once again step into the AHL spotlight. He boasts a career-long stat line of a 43-32-8 record, .906 Sv%, and 2.86 goals-against-average in 85 games and four seasons.

Stars Reportedly Dialing Back Efforts To Trade Jason Robertson

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June 13th: According to today’s rendition of 32 Thoughts, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman has heard that the Stars are already dialing back their efforts to explore moving Robertson this offseason. Friedman wouldn’t confirm whether it was because Dallas prefers to retain Robertson or if they hadn’t received adequate preliminary offers. Furthering this point, David Pagnotta of The Fourth Period spoke on NHL Network, reporting that the Stars prefer to move Mason Marchment, Lyubushkin, or Dumba to alleviate their financial gridlock.

June 10th: It appears there’s some legitimate fire to the smoke that erupted last week when Daily Faceoff’s Jeff Marek opined the Stars could move winger Jason Robertson to ease their incredibly restrictive salary cap space this summer. Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet said on 590 The FAN yesterday that Robertson’s name has indeed been floated in trade talks around the league, although “it’s not a guarantee that [he] goes.”

Robertson, 26 next month, has had a bit of a winding road since bursting onto the scene at the beginning of the decade. The 2017 second-rounder’s rookie season was the shortened 2021 campaign, scoring 45 points in 51 games to finish second on Dallas in scoring and place second in Calder Trophy voting behind Wild star Kirill Kaprizov. After eclipsing the point-per-game mark the following season, the two sides agreed on a four-year, $31MM deal after a lengthy run on the RFA market for Robertson.

It immediately looked like one of the best contracts in the league. Robertson erupted for a career-high 46 goals, 109 points, and a +37 rating while playing in all 82 games in the 2022-23 campaign, placing him fourth in MVP voting and tying for sixth in the NHL in scoring. Since then, Robertson has remained a veritable first-line piece but has seen his point production regress heavily, making him more of an ideal No. 2/3 forward instead of a team’s top scorer. He’s continued that ironman streak from the 2022-23 season but has just 80 points in each of the last two years, a 26% decrease in points per game from the heights of his breakout. His average ice time also dipped below 18 minutes per game in 2024-25 for the first time since his rookie season, and he was limited to six points in 11 postseason games after returning from a knee injury sustained in the final game of the regular season.

Aside from Dallas’ current unenviable cap situation, having just under $5MM in space with seven roster spots to fill, per PuckPedia, there are some peculiarities with Robertson’s contract that make him more of an understandable trade chip than at first glance. He’s still under team control as an RFA with arbitration rights when his extension expires next summer, and because his contract was somewhat significantly backloaded, he’s due a $9.3MM qualifying offer that’s much higher than his current $7.75MM cap hit. While Robertson’s upside remains tantalizing, is that QO number one the cap-crunched Stars are willing to even pay for one year, considering his more pedestrian offensive output over the past two seasons?

There are less efficient deals the Stars will presumably try to jettison first before becoming seriously engaged in Robertson talks. 2024 UFA defense pickups Mathew Dumba and Ilya Lyubushkin both flamed out and make $3.75MM and $3.25MM against the cap next season, respectively. They’d need to replace them with cheaper UFAs this summer, but packaging some futures to get rid of those contracts would at least open up the cap space to potentially retain two of their three main pending UFAs – forwards Jamie Benn, Matt Duchene, and Mikael Granlund. At present, they don’t stand much of a chance of even signing one while being able to fill out the rest of the roster.

If Dallas does structure a Robertson trade, they’ll presumably do so around a cost-effective player who can step into his top-six role directly – potentially a winger still on his entry-level deal – so they can use most of his cap hit to instead commit to extensions for the aforementioned UFAs and potentially pursue a depth defense upgrade.

Magnus Hellberg Signs With SHL’s Djurgårdens IF

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After a middling season in the AHL while on a two-way deal with the Stars, goaltender Magnus Hellberg is heading home to the SHL. Djurgårdens IF announced they’ve signed Hellberg to a three-year deal, bringing him back to Sweden through the 2027-28 season.

Hellberg hasn’t played in the SHL since 2011-12, back when it was called the Elitserien. He was a second-round pick by the Predators in 2011, for a time looking like he could be a long-term backup to Nashville stalwart Pekka Rinne. He was a solid AHL netminder for them, posting a .917 SV% and 2.36 GAA in his first three North American minor-league seasons, but only got one NHL relief appearance before a goalie crunch meant he was traded to the Rangers in 2015 for a sixth-round pick. His tenure in New York at least brought his first NHL start, but he only managed a .882 SV% and 2.44 GAA in three total appearances with the Rangers before reaching Group VI unrestricted free agency in 2017.

He opted for more opportunity overseas instead of trying to climb up an NHL depth chart elsewhere, signing with Kunlun Red Star of the Kontinental Hockey League. It was in the KHL that Hellberg finally established himself as an elite option in a high-level professional league. Across five seasons in China and Russia with Kunlun, SKA St. Petersburg, and HK Sochi, he posted a 2.00 GAA, .927 SV%, 24 shutouts, and an 81-64-14 record in 169 appearances. He was a two-time KHL All-Star and was rostered for Sweden at the 2018 and 2022 Winter Olympics, also winning a gold medal at the World Championship in 2018.

That prompted Hellberg to make an NHL return late in the 2021-22 season, signing on with the Red Wings. He’s spent the last few years as a journeyman, making stints as a No. 3 option for Detroit, Ottawa, Seattle (although he never played for them), Pittsburgh, Florida, and Dallas. He saw NHL action in three of those stops (Red Wings, Senators, Penguins), but only put up a .891 SV%, 3.12 GAA and a 7-8-1 record in 22 appearances over three years. He spent all of last season on assignment to AHL Texas after clearing waivers with Dallas, where he recorded a fine but unimpressive 2.69 GAA, .904 SV%, two shutouts, and a 24-14-1 record in 41 games.

Now 34 years old, this is almost definitely the end of the road for Hellberg in the NHL. He’ll aim to rediscover his KHL form with Djurgården, which just gained promotion back to the SHL after three seasons in the second-tier HockeyAllsvenskan league.

Stars Open To Trade Offers On Mason Marchment

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The Stars are open to the possibility of dealing winger Mason Marchment, reports David Pagnotta of The Fourth Period. It’s a more palatable avenue to clear cap space this summer than moving star left-winger Jason Robertson, who Dallas has at least considered including in talks in the weeks since their elimination in the Western Conference Final.

Marchment, who turns 30 in a week, is coming off one of the better seasons of his career. He scored 22-25–47 with a +15 rating over 62 appearances in 2024-25. While he missed significant time due to a facial fracture and subsequent surgery, that was his best goal-scoring work on a per-game basis for his career at 0.35 and his second-best season in the points department at 0.76.

The left-shot winger has averaged 21 goals and 51 points per 82 games over his six-year NHL career. Injuries are a legitimate concern, having only hit the 80-game mark once, but he’s one of the more consistently effective middle-six wingers in the league when healthy, both offensively and physically. Checking in at 6’5″ and 212 lbs, he’s a willing fighter and frequent hitter while also serving as one of the more efficient per-minute point producers of the last few years.

His possession impacts leave a little more to be desired. His raw numbers look fine, but become more concerning when put in context, considering he’s spent the majority of his NHL career with a pair of strong 5-on-5 teams in Florida and Dallas. They’re not huge drawbacks – he’s averaged a -0.2 relative CF% at even strength over his career while receiving semi-favorable offensive zone deployment – but his reputation defensively likely outweighs reality a little bit.

Nonetheless, his $4.5MM cap hit provides great value to the Stars. That’s almost never a deal a championship-contending club would be looking to move, but as detailed at length, the Stars simply don’t have a path toward cap compliance next season without making a salary dump. They have under $5MM in projected space with seven roster spots to fill, meaning they’d essentially have to sign only league-minimum players this summer while letting all of their pending free agents walk.

Salary cap considerations are essentially the sole motivator behind considering moving Marchment, a pending UFA starting July 1, and Robertson, a pending RFA starting July 1. They each have one year left on their contracts and would normally have their resources devoted toward extension discussions in a few weeks, but without a chance of recouping any cost-effective assets in a deal involving overpaid defenders Mathew Dumba and Ilya Lyubushkin, it appears general manager Jim Nill is looking to part ways with a player with higher trade value to try and land a cheap contributor as part of the return.

Marchment would obviously have a much lower return and asking price than Robertson, a first-line fixture who’s posted 80 points in back-to-back seasons following his 109-point breakout in 2022-23. Parting ways with the former would also have a much less transformative impact on their forward group next season. Still, if they get the right deal for the latter, it may make sense. Extending Robertson, who will presumably cost at least his $9.3MM qualifying offer per season to re-sign on a multi-year deal, would give Dallas seven players making over $8MM per season in the summer of 2026, when they need to work out a new deal for star defenseman Thomas Harley.

Stars Fire Pete DeBoer

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The Stars announced Friday they’ve fired head coach Pete DeBoer. He had one year left on his contract worth roughly $4MM, Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News relayed yesterday. With no other head coaching vacancies after the Bruins filled theirs yesterday, they’ll be paying him to sit unless he lands a job with another club thanks to an in-season coaching change in 2025-26.

“After careful consideration, we believe that a new voice is needed in our locker room to push us closer to our goal of winning the Stanley Cup,” general manager Jim Nill said in a team release. “We’d like to thank Pete for everything that he has helped our organization achieve over the past three seasons and wish him nothing but the best moving forward.”

If DeBoer sits at home for the entirety of next season, it’ll be the first NHL campaign without him leading a team’s bench since he first entered the league as head coach of the Panthers in 2008. He’s been a fixture for nearly two decades, and for good reason. DeBoer-coached teams have made the playoffs nine out of the last 10 seasons, and he’s advanced to the third round in six straight postseason appearances.

Those clubs, including Dallas for the last three years, have lost every one of those six Conference Finals/Semi-Finals, though. That’s the impetus behind today’s coaching change as the Stars look to get over the hump, although they were likely pushed in this direction by the specific circumstances of how their season ended in Game 5 of the Western Conference Final against the Oilers.

DeBoer pulled star goaltender Jake Oettinger from the game after two defensive breakdowns led to a pair of early Edmonton goals, and continued to justify his decision postgame despite his offense going completely dark for most of the series. Dallas scored 11 times in the five-game loss, but six of those goals came in a Game 1 blowout. They averaged just 1.25 goals per game as they lost four straight to end their season.

His decision to remove Oettinger from the game reportedly caused a high degree of frustration within the organization. If the relationship between DeBoer and Oettinger was fractured beyond repair, moving on from the former was the slam-dunk decision. Oettinger, who will presumably finish top-10 in year-end All-Star voting for the third year in a row, signed an eight-year, $66MM extension last October that doesn’t kick in until next season.

Goaltending drama aside, moving on from DeBoer is arguably the most seismic coaching move of the offseason, along with the Penguins’ dismissal of Mike Sullivan. The Stars had a 149-68-29 (.665) record in his three seasons as head coach, the best record in the league since his hiring. While Dallas didn’t convert on any of its WCF appearances, their streak of three straight third-round showings tied the franchise record set from 1998 to 2000.

With his Stars tenure now behind him, DeBoer is up to 17th on the NHL coach all-time wins list with 662. The 56-year-old has an all-time regular-season record of 662-447-152 (.525) across stops in Florida, New Jersey, San Jose, Vegas, and Dallas and has advanced to the third round in eight of his 17 years as an NHL head coach.

It’s unclear what DeBoer’s firing means for the Stars’ assistant coaches, particularly Misha Donskov and Steve Spott. The two have worked closely with DeBoer over the last several years and followed him from Nevada to Texas. He had not previously overlapped with the Stars’ third assistant, Alain Nasreddine.

Image courtesy of Jerome Miron-Imagn Images.

Free Agent Focus: Dallas Stars

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Free agency is now under a month away, and teams are looking ahead to when it opens. There will be several impact players set to hit the open market in July, while many teams also have key restricted free agents to re-sign. We continue our look around the NHL with an overview of the free agent situation for the Stars.

Key Restricted Free Agents

F Mavrik Bourque – The Stars don’t have many restricted free agents, but one forward they may want to retain long-term is Bourque. The 23-year-old Quebec native enjoyed a solid rookie showing in 2024-25, posting 11 goals and 24 points in a bottom-six role. However, while he suited up in 73 games during the regular season, he only saw action in three playoff contests, with no points to show for it. Still, the arrow seems to be pointing up for the team’s 2020 first-round selection. Bourque has excelled in the AHL, posting 47 goals and 129 points in 147 games for the Texas Stars, and has the potential to make an impact in the NHL. For a team with limited cap space, signing a young forward with high upside makes sense.

D Nils Lundkvist– For a team that has five defenders set to make more than $3MM next season, the Stars may not want to shell out much more cap space to blueliners. With that said, the team should have some interest in retaining Lundkvist, a former first-round selection of the New York Rangers. The 24-year-old skated in 39 games this past season, posting five assists, a plus-four rating, 34 blocked shots, and 23 hits. Although his offensive output declined from the 2023–24 season, in which he tallied 19 points and a plus-13 rating, Lundkvist saw an increase in average ice time, rising to 15:01 from 14:06 per game. With only six defensemen under contract for next season (excluding non-rostered players), re-signing Lundkvist could be a cost-effective option for the team’s third pairing.

Other RFAs: F Antonio Stranges, G Remi Poirier, G Benjamin Kraws

Key Unrestricted Free Agents

F Jamie Benn – The team’s most notable pending unrestricted free agent, at least from a nostalgic point of view, is longtime captain Jamie Benn. For the first time in his career, Benn is heading for the open market. Benn has played all 1,192 of his games in Dallas, and the soon-to-be 36-year-old ranks second only to franchise legend Mike Modano in several key categories, including games played, points, goals, and shots on goal. Benn also recently discussed his desire to re-sign with Dallas. This past season, Benn showed he can still be productive in a bottom-six role, finishing with a solid 16 goals and 49 points. And while the Stars may have a mutual desire to retain their captain, the issue now may be the team’s limited cap space. Should the team resign Benn or use this opportunity to get younger?

F Matt Duchene – Duchene showed last season that he can still perform at a high level, finishing with an impressive 30–52–82 stat line in 82 games. However, the well dried up for the 34-year-old in the playoffs, where he posted just one goal and six points in 18 games. That reality may leave a sour taste for GM Jim Nill and the front office as they consider whether to re-sign Duchene. Either way, Duchene’s strong regular season may generate enough interest on the open market to price him out of Dallas. He will certainly see a sizeable raise on his previous $3MM AAV deal.

F Evgenii Dadonov – Like Duchene, Dadonov is coming off a resurgent season that will likely lead to a pay raise in free agency. While he didn’t share the statistical success of Duchene, Dadonov posted 20 goals and 40 points on the year, his most points since the 2021-22 season. However, Dadonov also struggled in the playoffs, posting four points and a minus-three rating in 13 games. Still, 20-goal scorers don’t grow on trees and Dadonov is sure to draw interest from teams seeking depth scoring.

F Mikael Granlund – Perhaps no pending free agent’s market is harder to gauge than Granlund’s, who has been a wildly inconsistent contributor throughout his career. Still, he appeared to find instant success after being traded to Dallas last season, posting 21 points in 31 games. He finished the year with 66 points between San Jose and Dallas, his most since the 2017-18 season. He also posted a solid 10 points in 18 playoff games. The pass-first forward just turned 33 and may be seeking one more significant contract on the open market.

D Cody Ceci – One of the more unusual stats from the 2024–25 season was that Cody Ceci appeared in 85 regular season games — 54 with the Sharks and 31 with the Stars. He tallied 24 points overall, including nine assists during his time in Dallas. Ceci also logged a notable 20:14 of ice time per game with the Stars, a number that increased to 21:31 in the playoffs. The Stars are sure to have interest in retaining Ceci’s services, but the veteran of 871 career games will have plenty of suitors if he reaches the open market. Like Granlund, Ceci may be looking for one final large, multi-year agreement.

Other UFAs: D Brendan Smith, G Magnus Hellberg, F Colin Blackwell, F Cameron Hughes, F Kole Lind (UFA-Group6), F Emilio Pettersen (UFA-Group6), F Matej Blumel (UFA-Group6)

Projected Cap Space

Nill and the front office will have to get creative if they want to make any sort of waves in free agency, or even to simply retain a few of their pending free agents. According to PuckPedia, the team currently has just south of $5 million in cap space. With over $60 million committed to their top seven players, the team is top-heavy with contracts and faces tough decisions regarding the future of their pending free agents, including Benn.

Contract info courtesy of PuckPedia.

Re-Examining The Conference Finalists’ Trade Deadline Acquisitions

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The trade deadline is always an interesting time to reflect on with the benefit of hindsight. Several massive trades were made leading up to it, including two trades involving star forward Mikko Rantanen. With the playoffs down to just two teams, and a bit of a break coming, an opportunity has presented itself to re-examine the deadline and look back at some winners and losers, some two months later.

Looking back at the biggest deal between the Dallas Stars and Carolina Hurricanes, it is interesting in retrospect, given that both teams lost in their respective Conference Finals. The deal involved Rantanen going to Dallas in return for Logan Stankoven, a 2026 first-round pick, a 2026 third-round pick, a 2027 third-round pick, and a 2028 first-round pick. Rantanen was later signed to an eight-year $96MM contract extension by the Stars, and now it looks like an absolute win for Dallas. Rantanen had come as advertised, posting nine goals and 13 assists in 18 games during the NHL Playoffs, with no games bigger than Game 7 of the first round when the 28-year-old had a hat trick to knock out his former team, Colorado. The trade for Rantanen solidified the Stars’ forward group. It gave them another high-impact forward to position them as a top Stanley Cup contender for the foreseeable future.

It’s hard to call Carolina a loser in the deal, given the haul that they got for Rantanen. Still, looking at their roster, they certainly lacked a gamebreaker in these playoffs and could have used Rantanen in the Conference Finals. Carolina fans will wonder what could have been had Rantanen stuck around. Still, Carolina probably did the right thing by recouping assets for Rantanen rather than letting him walk for nothing.

Dallas addressed other key areas at the Trade Deadline by acquiring forward Mikael Granlund and defenseman Cody Ceci from the San Jose Sharks for a first-round pick and a conditional third-round pick in 2025. Granlund provided some offense, but his skating was an issue at times against some of the quicker Edmonton Oilers players, and defensive issues have also been a problem. Granlund did have five goals and five assists in 18 games during the playoffs, but that is off the offensive pace he set in the regular season, and he has benefited from good deployment and a solid PDO.

Ceci, on the other hand, hasn’t been great, as his underlying numbers are arguably the worst of any of the Stars’ regulars. Ceci’s acquisition was a bit of a headscratcher at the time, but Dallas has used him heavily (probably too much) in the playoffs, playing him over 21 minutes a night. Ceci had three assists in 18 games, but to his credit, he had some of the most challenging assignments nightly, contributing to his poor analytics.

Ceci’s former team, the Edmonton Oilers, didn’t have the capabilities of making a big splash at the deadline. Still, they did make a handful of acquisitions that have solidified key positions in their march to the Stanley Cup Finals. The Oilers’ big moves were for forward Trent Frederic and defenseman Jake Walman.

Frederic was acquired to provide some sandpaper in the bottom six and chip in the occasional goal. It took a while for him to get going, thanks to a high ankle sprain, but he seemed to hit his stride in the second round against Vegas. Frederic hasn’t provided much offense, with just a goal and three assists in 16 playoff games, but he has been a physical threat anytime he’s on the ice, with 59 hits thus far. Frederic’s underlying numbers aren’t good, but he has been handed complex deployments and tough matchups as a member of the Oilers’ bottom six.

The Walman acquisition by Edmonton was a tidy piece of business, as the 29-year-old has helped stabilize the Oilers’ bottom pairing and has chipped in some offence as well. Walman has been given a very favourable deployment, which has allowed him to use his puck-moving ability and skating to contribute to Edmonton’s playoff success. Edmonton paid San Jose a steep price to acquire Walman, and while his results have been okay, it does feel like an overpay for what he brings.

The Florida Panthers were another team that was busy around the Trade Deadline, making a massive trade for defenseman Seth Jones on March 1st. The Panthers sent goaltender Spencer Knight and a conditional first-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft for Jones, who also came to Florida along with a fourth-round pick in 2026. Jones was dramatically overpaid in Chicago at $9.5MM annually, but with retained salary, is at a $7MM cap hit with Florida, which is much more in line with his play. Jones has been great since coming over to Florida, eating up a ton of minutes and providing above-average play in almost every aspect of the game. Jones struggled at times with the speed of the game, but has been an overwhelmingly positive presence for the Panthers; his acquisition has given Florida a very formidable defensive core that has brought them to a second straight Stanley Cup Final.

Jones wasn’t the only splash that Panthers general manager Bill Zito made at the Trade Deadline, as he also acquired forward Brad Marchand from the Boston Bruins. Marchand has been everything the Panthers were hoping he could be and more, playing a pivotal role in the series against the Toronto Maple Leafs with three goals and five assists in seven games. Marchand’s acquisition cost Florida a conditional second-round pick in 2027 that has now become a first-rounder. Still, given his impact, Florida would likely pay it again if given the choice.

Lastly, we look at the moves the now-eliminated Carolina Hurricanes made at the Trade Deadline. As part of the Rantanen trade, Carolina was able to acquire forward Taylor Hall, who is no longer a Hart Trophy contender but remains a good player. The 33-year-old was the first overall pick in 2010 and had a decent offensive season this year with 18 goals and 24 assists in a bounce-back year after he was injured for most of the previous season. While Hall was a good acquisition for Carolina, it wasn’t enough to move the needle, and ultimately, their lack of meaningful additions cost them, as they didn’t have the horses necessary to get by the Panthers.

Outside of the trades involving Hall and Rantanen, the Hurricanes’ acquisition of Stankoven was a tidy little move that should pay dividends long term, as the 22-year-old was a steady point producer down the stretch with five goals and four assists in 19 games with Carolina. Despite being undersized, the Kamloops, British Columbia native also had a good playoff showing, with five goals and three assists in 15 games and should be a key contributor for the Hurricanes for a long time. His presence won’t lessen the sting of not being able to keep Rantanen in Carolina, but the Hurricanes didn’t walk away empty-handed and will have some other pieces of that trade in the fold very soon.

All that being said, the lack of a game-breaker badly hurt the Hurricanes, and they may look back on the move to trade Rantanen with a bit of regret, given that they lacked that player who could take over a game in the Florida series. Carolina continues to struggle to overcome the hump that is the Eastern Conference and probably should have been more aggressive at the Deadline given the state of their roster and their position in their competitive window.

Carolina made one other move for depth center Mark Jankowski. The 30-year-old finished the regular season strong with eight goals in his final 19 games but was used sparingly in the playoffs as he dressed in just seven games and had a single point. His move offered some depth, but it just wasn’t what Carolina needed to take down the formidable Panthers.

Image courtesy of Perry Nelson-Imagn Images.

Should The Stars Consider Trading Robertson?

at CDT | by 8 Comments

As a result of extensions handed out to Wyatt Johnston and Mikko Rantanen, the Stars enter the summer with less than $5MM in cap room, per PuckPedia, with several roster spots to fill.  Obviously, they’ll need to trim some salary somewhere but instead of looking to move some of their pricier role players, Daily Faceoff’s Jeff Marek posits the idea of moving Jason Robertson.  The 25-year-old has one year left on his contract with a $7.75MM cap hit and will be an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent next summer in line for a sizable raise.  While losing him would undoubtedly be a big hit to their roster as an 80-point player for three straight years now, it could also allow them to recoup some of the draft capital they moved out when they loaded up at the trade deadline and add some flexibility to round out their group this summer.

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