Dallas Stars Sign Dillon Heatherington to One-Year Extension
By Summer LeBel
Another RFA deal is in the books for the Dallas Stars, who extended defenseman Dillon Heatherington on a one-year, two-way deal.
The Dallas Stars qualified all but one member of this year’s RFA class and they’ve been knocking the deals out one by one over the past few weeks.
With Heatherington’s deal done, it leaves them with just two more contracts to take care of: Mattias Janmark and Gemel Smith. Both Janmark and Smith have filed for arbitration with dates set in early August if deals don’t get done before then.
Heatherington was a second-round draft pick in 2013 by the Blue Jackets and came to the Stars in return for Lauri Korpikoski at the 2016-17 trade deadline. He headed straight to Austin after the trade to play for the Texas Stars.
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He spent most of last season with the Texas Stars, playing 55 regular-season games with the AHL club. He also helped them in the post-season after finishing the season playing in the last Dallas Stars game of the year.
During January and February, Heatherington was called up to be the seventh defenseman for the Stars. He got to play in five NHL games, the first ones of his career, then added one more to his total in April. He only had one point during his six games with the Stars, but he showed some promise despite his underlying analytics during those games not being particularly impressive.
It didn’t take long for Heatherington to get mixed up in some unusually bad blood. In the chaotic and weird game between the Stars and Panthers on January 23 during which the teams played like some bitter divisional rivals, Heatherington fought Alex Petrovic in the first period.
They both earned game misconducts in addition to their fighting majors with Petrovic getting an extra roughing penalty. It was one of six fights in that game, which got quickly out of hand in the first period, but Heatherington left an impact on fans during that mess.
Looking forward to next year, Heatherington will probably play most of the year with the Texas Stars once again. However, depending on what moves Jim Nill pulls off, he could also spend time as the seventh defenseman and he’ll likely be high on the list for injury call-ups.
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This contract wasn’t as big of a deal as some of the other RFAs the Stars had this off-season and won’t have the impact on the next year’s cap space that the ones for Janmark and Devin Shore will, but it’s one more thing off of Nill’s to-do list. Now he just needs to take care of Janmark and Smith before arbitration and sign Tyler Seguin as soon as possible.