Dallas Stars: Predicting Potential Injuries In New Season

The Dallas Stars will be a few players short at this year’s training camp due to injury. What will be the outcome if their season continues in kind?

A big deciding factor in the downfall of the Dallas Stars’ 16-17 season was the early and often onslaught of injuries. It seemed like all they could do to keep the roster updated with healthy forwards enough to create the needed lines.

Injuries have been something the Stars have faced at annoying intervals here and there, and they’ve come back to bite the Stars at the most inopportune times. High hopes were destroyed and the outcome of seasons diverted in mere moments.

Last season the Stars suffered what seemed to be more than their fair share of bad luck. Once the injury plague was over, it seemed they had done their time and things would get better.

While it’s not uncommon at all to have a few injuries at the outset of a new season, the recent news about who will be left off the training camp roster due to injury seemed like a flashback in some ways. Will the Stars have to battle similar injury issues for yet another season?

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Again, the injuries the Stars are looking at now are not dire. Martin Hanzal has an ankle injury that is expected to last only another few days, Miro Heiskanen is out due to a concussion, and Chris Martenet will miss for mono.

Hanzal is the only player listed who will most likely see much (if any) ice time in Dallas this season, and his injury is a light one. Looking back, the Stars started off their last offseason already rife with some injury concerns.

Multiple players were undergoing surgeries to correct or prevent injuries, and were expected to need recovery time. Benn, Hemsky, Janmark- these offseason surgeries really hit the Stars’ offense hard.

And as the season progressed, more injuries picked the forwards (and then some) off one by one. A huge contributing factor in this, I believe, was the lack of confidence with which the Stars played. After players come back from injuries and play more gingerly, they can make themselves more prone to re-injury through their fear or being re-injured.

But beyond re-injury even, the Stars lacked a confidence in their teamwork that showed early on, which played into more careless errors and hits and, of course, injuries. And those injuries sure did add up.

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The Stars will hopefully be in a difference head space this season. The mentality is obviously different this summer from what it was just a few months ago, and it’s an encouraging factor when one sits down to gaze into the Stars’ future.

So although the Stars might be suffering some common injuries come training camp time, it seems doubtful that they’ll go down for a second season bitten by the injury bug.

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