The worst kept secret in the league is official now, but what does it mean for the Dallas Stars?
The NHL announced today that Seattle will get an expansion team, and the biggest change for the Dallas Stars is the addition of a new divisional opponent.
Well, it’s more of a reunion with an old divisional opponent.
The Arizona Coyotes will move to the Central in 2021-22 when Seattle joins the league, reuniting the Stars and Coyotes.
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Dallas and Arizona (then Phoenix) were Pacific Division foes before the realignment in 2013-14. They were split up when Dallas moved to the expanded Central while Arizona stayed in the Pacific.
There is a lot of time for things to change on the rosters in the next few years, but Arizona has a few former Stars right now. Kevin Connauton spent some time with both the Texas Stars and Dallas Stars, but his deal expires in 2019-20. Jason Demers and Alex Goligoski were both regulars on the Dallas blue line for a while, but they’re also on deals that expire right before the expansion.
The Stars have a pair of former Coyotes as well. Joel Hanley had a stint in Arizona, while Martin Hanzal spent most of his career there. As with the three in Arizona, both of them have contracts expiring before the expansion.
Of course, there is plenty of time to make some more trades happen between now and 2021-22, so who knows which players could end up switching teams by then?
The big question as we get closer will be who is exposed in the expansion draft. This announcement is significantly further out than the one for Vegas, so fans should prepare to be even more exhausted by draft speculation by the time it happens.
We might as well get things underway in that regards, and take a few guesses at who might be exposed.
The players currently under contract for that long are Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn, John Klingberg, Alexander Radulov, and Ben Bishop.
Bishop would be on the last year of his deal. With the upcoming goaltender prospects, it’s certainly possible that the Stars expose him and get ready to move on to the new era of goaltending for the Stars.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Seguin, Klingberg, or Benn get exposed, but Radulov could be a possibility. He’s already 32, and while age hasn’t slowed him down yet, it could be a factor three years down the road.
The three-year window also means the Stars have more than enough time to hand out some bad contracts, whether they started good and turned bad or were terrible from the start.
It could be an extension for someone like Brett Ritchie or Valeri Nichushkin, but it’s more likely that it’s a panicked July 1 free agency deal.
I’m calling my prediction right now; the player picked in the expansion draft three years from now is going to be a bad July 1 signing of an overrated older player by the GM who takes over after Jim Nill leaves. If I had to pick a specific player, the Stars give James Neal a terrible deal to come back to Dallas after the Flames buy him out, and he gets picked in the expansion draft once again.