Dallas Stars: Uncertainty Surrounding Injuries Hurts Nill’s Decision Making

Dealing with injuries is never good for a team, but it’s inevitable that the Dallas Stars would have to face adversity in the form of hurt players.

The Dallas Stars aren’t alone in this issue. Every team has injured players every year.

However, what’s particularly problematic for the Stars is that they are dealing with a lot of questions once again this season.

Last year, Marc Methot and Martin Hanzal were in and out of the line-up with various problems. This is frustrating to begin with, but it also brings with it the issue of opportunity cost.

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In going out and signing Methot and Hanzal, Jim Nill was bringing in two players he thought would help the team improve. When they were healthy, that was true, but no one could predict if they would be ready to go or not for any length of time.

Signing the two of them meant Nill didn’t go out and sign other potential free agents, or make trades for other available options. It didn’t just hurt the team in that moment that they had two roster players injured, but it hurt them because they didn’t know if it would be long-term and worth making a move.

When a player needs surgery and goes down for the rest of the season, the team can figure that out and adapt. The GM can make a deal to replace them. The same goes for something like broken bones, where it’s typically a relatively predictable recovery. It’s straight-forward for the GM to know what solution they need to pursue.

When the player is fighting something that isn’t straight-forward and has no idea if they can play or not, the GM has a tough decision. They can wait and see, or they can make the risky decision to replace them, and potentially give up important assets unnecessarily.

They also have to take the cap into consideration, especially when the injured players have considerable cap hits like Methot and Hanzal do. They have a combined cap hit of almost $10M, and that’s a lot of money to be tied up in questions when the team needs to make decisions quickly before the season gets away from them.

This season, it’s starting to look like that once again. Hanzal is still out, Methot’s injured again, and now Stephen Johns and Alexander Radulov are in the mix. The team is doing well right now, but that isn’t necessarily sustainable with the defense in the position it’s in and Radulov missing.

Hanzal is out for another month or so in theory, but there’s no telling what the situation will be when and if he returns. Methot has played most of the season, but now he’s day-to-day and missing games again. Radulov has been in and out of the line-up over the last few weeks, and now he flew home from the road trip. That’s basically $16M of the cap that the Stars aren’t sure about right now.

However, the biggest concern by far right now is Johns. He hasn’t played this season, and with the nature of his injury, there’s no telling when he’ll be ready to come back.

Anything head or concussion related is a messy injury, both because of the long-term issues like CTE and because of the immediate uncertainty of the recovery time. Some players bounce back pretty well and some players never recover, and there’s no telling which way things will go.

As with last season, there’s decisions to be made with these injuries. Nill went out and traded for Connor Carrick right before the start of the season, knowing Johns wouldn’t be ready to go. It seems like the right call, since Johns is still out indefinitely, but now Carrick is injured as well, though his injury seems more predictable for recovery. There’s no way the Stars could’ve known that Carrick would get hurt after bringing him in, but it’s certainly adding to the frustration of the team.

This is a team that currently has almost a quarter of the league’s $79.5M salary cap tied up in five injured players, and that’s a serious problem when it comes to both lost opportunity cost and the current state of the team.

Some of them will recover fine from their injuries and get back on track, but Nill has decisions to make right now and he’s in a tough spot since he doesn’t know if or when they’ll all be back this season.