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The month of September is approaching, which means the start of the NHL regular season isn’t too far away.
After last year’s run to the Western Conference finals, the Dallas Stars gave local hockey fans plenty to look forward to in the fall. The team’s young playmakers will enter the new season with more playoff experience and an inkling of what to expect under head coach Pete DeBoer. Who stands out among those players? Names like Miro Heiskanen and Jake Oettinger come to mind.
NHL.com recently released rankings of some of its top players by position group, including Jason Robertson and Roope Hintz among the best wings and centers. Now that rankings are out for defensemen and goalies, it may not be too surprising for Stars fans to see Heiskanen and Oettinger rank highly.
Oettinger came in at No. 7 on a list of top 10 goaltenders, ranking ahead of Vancouver’s Thatcher Demko, Minnesota’s Filip Gustavsson and Colorado’s Alexandar Georgiev.
The Stars goalie had the best season of his professional career last year, posting a 37-11 record with 1,633 saves and five shutouts. Before the start of the 2022-23 season, Oettinger signed a three-year contract with Dallas worth $4 million annually. He finished the postseason with a 10-9 record, and until Game 6, he had proven to be fantastic in elimination games.
“That game isn’t on him,” Pete DeBoer said. “I feel bad for our group. I feel worse that he ends his season on that because he doesn’t deserve that.
“We put him in some tough spots. We can’t ask him to win that game by himself. He went to that place a lot for us through these playoffs and down the stretch — to get seeding, we had an injury to [Scott] Wedgewood. We asked an awful lot of him. I thought he had a hell of a postseason. He was our backbone all year.”
Heiskanen ranked third among the league’s top 20 defensemen, sitting behind New York’s Adam Fox and Colorado’s Cale Makar.
Last season, Heiskanen posted 73 points (11 goals, 62 assists) and made team history when he surpassed Hall of Famer Sergei Zubov’s mark for points in a season by a Stars defenseman in April.
With the skating ability, he reminds me, and I don’t say this very often, he reminds me a lot of Scott Niedermayer, who was one of the very, very best to ever play that position,” NHL Network’s E.J. Hradek “I’ve been very impressed with Miro Heiskanen right from the start and it was only a matter of time before those numbers started to jump up. I think we’re going to be seeing this year in and year out for many years to come.”