The Dallas Stars suffered a devastating blow this week as key veteran Tyler Seguin suffered a season-ending torn ACL. The two-way star forward had contributed 17 points and a plus/minus rating of +10 thus far to Dallas’ terrific 18-5-5 start. He will be greatly missed.

And to that end, the Stars are going to put their trade efforts into overdrive going forward, as noted on TSN’s Insider Trading by Chris Johnston. 

I think where it leads them now is, they’re likely to be even more aggressive buyers than they were already going to be at this year’s trade deadline… I would expect the Stars will be combing the market for forwards as we get closer to March 6th and would be quite aggressive ahead of that deadline.

Just exactly how aggressive will also depend on if/when they get the word that Seguin is definitely out for the entire season including the playoffs. At that point, the Stars can place him on the new Season-Ending LTIR (SELTIR) which will get his entire $9.85 million cap hit freed up to make a really big splash. If they can’t confirm that he won’t be back at all and just keep him on regular LTIR, then they’ll only get $3.8 million in cap relief to work with (last year’s average NHL salary) under the new rules. 

Dallas currently has $3 million in cap space available.

One would expect that the Calgary Flames’ Nazem Kadri and his $7 million cap hit would be among the prime targets for the Stars under the SELTIR scenario. Earlier this week, even before Seguin’s injury,  insider Jeff Marek linked the veteran center to Dallas on Daily Faceoff’s The Sheet.

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