Dallas Stars: A Theory As To Why Jamie Oleksiak Is Still Here

It’s clear to see, the Jamie Oleksiak experiment has been a huge failure, but the Dallas Stars have yet to the pull the plug on it. Here is a theory as to why.

In the National Hockey League, drafting and developing future NHL anchors is as big of a guessing game as anything. There are zero ways to account for stumbles in a player’s natural progression, or how their draft-year talent will translate to professional hockey.

No team is a better example of this than the Dallas Stars. The only two premier skill players the Stars have hand-picked and prepared within the organization are John Klingberg and Jamie Benn, two miraculous and fortuitous first-round Entry Draft selections that somehow panned out.

On the flip-side, the Stars have produced total flops from higher-round players that were expected to contribute at the level of Benn and Klingberg. Scott Glennie, Ivan Vishnevskiy, Jack Campbell, and Ludwig Bystrom are just a few of the names that fall under such a classification.

The thing about those four – amongst many others – is that the Dallas Stars have let them all go. They recognized their prospective flaws and low-ceilings, tossing them away at pennies on the dollar. Giving up on those prospects, some viewed as potentially franchise-shaping athletes, was done out of necessity and the recognition of Draft night failures.

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Then, there’s Jamie Oleksiak. The 6’7″ behemoth taken out of Northeastern University at 14th overall in the 2011 NHL Draft remains with the Dallas Stars organization despite years of struggles, and in the process displaying no signs of improvement. The Stars seem obligated to keep Oleksiak around, in turn dragging down the maturation of other young blueliners.

To a large degree, it’s genuinely sad. You root for a guy like Oleksiak to live up to the pressures of a first-rounder on a perpetually average franchise like the Dallas Stars, just to watch him struggle to even skate up the ice, increasingly appearing like a newborn deer hobbling around for lateral balance.

You see #5 skate up and down ice at what is relatively a snail’s pace, playing statistically and visually worse than anyone on the ice. Yet, Oleksiak is still getting ice time – in a myriad of different situations – as opposed to the deployment of faster and more effective rearguards.

You wonder when the Stars will call off the grand Oleksiak experiment, and why it has taken them so long. Then you continue wondering, stopping not once before reaching this conclusion: the Stars are so bad at drafting that they don’t even want to acknowledge it.

Having sent a plethora of promising hockey players into unemployment via horrendous scouting and drafting, the Dallas Stars organization just doesn’t want to realize that with Jamie Oleksiak. They grasp onto a low-ceiling player such as Oleksiak, clinging to desperate desires of him coming to fruition as the elite defender they perceived him to be.

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It’s like being in an awful, dysfunctional relationship, a metaphor I will use for my own good to better convey this theory. You know it’s bad, you know it has little potential, and you know that continuing will be worse for every party involved. But, you’ve put so much time, effort, and emotion into it that you can’t abandon such a large investment.

You fail to bring yourself to end it because you can’t admit to such an immense disappointment. Convincing yourself to shut the door is to concede that things were unsuccessful. It matters not how hard you can try if it lacks the key dynamics of a good partnership.

Our theory is that the Stars don’t want to see the error of their ways, registering that a change to their process of drafting and developing is imperative. They so deeply want to be right in regards to Oleksiak that they’re risking being irreparably wrong.

They have thrown Oleksiak into molten lava and asked him to swim, at the same time demanding the Stars to hold his hand in the lava. When it’s time to pull out the charred remains, it’s never Oleksiak’s fault, nor is that of the Dallas executives controlling the situation. It’s the team.

It only helps this point that on Monday, the Stars quickly recalled Julius Honka after Marc Methot recently underwent a knee procedure, only to say it was for depth purposes. To bolster a Jamie Oleksiak-led bottom pair was all the top possession player on the Stars roster is in the NHL for, and that’s remarkably frustrating.

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It’s indicative of the theory. They are willing to delay winning hockey games and building the best possible squad for the sake of never accepting their draft blunders. The Dallas Stars’ front office is comfortable with losing just to prove themselves as the correct party. It’s sad and I’m sad.

You don’t want to give up when you have invested so much into a project. Jamie Oleksiak is that.

But then again, that’s just a theory.