It’s the offseason here at Defending Big D, which means it’s the time for Player Grades!
We’ll be going through each player on the Dallas Stars roster and giving a general breakdown of how their season went in Victory Green. At the end, I’ll assign my personal grade for their 2022-23 performance, and y’all can can offer up your own grades and analysis in the comments below.
Before we get started, a couple of notes:
- We’ll only be looking at Stars currently on the roster who played at least 20 games (regular season + playoffs) for the team.
- Grades will be based on both a player’s regular season and postseason performances for Dallas specifically. Since the team had a deep playoff run, that will factor a bit more into the ratings, but we’ll try not to overreact to a single games/series.
- These grades are my sole opinion, and are not reflective of the Defending Big D staff as a whole. Except for the ones you disagree with – those aren’t mine.
Ty Dellandrea (No. 10)
Regular: 82 GP, 9 G, 19 A, 28 P, +9, 54 PIM, 14:12 ATOI All-Situations; 51.5 CF%, 50.2 FF%, 101.1 PDO Even-Strength
Playoffs: 15 GP, 3 G, 0 A, 3 P, -4, 22 PIM, 10:19 ATOI All-Situations; 53.5 CF%, 51.0 FF%, 105.3 PDO Even-Strength
Contract Status: RFA
Our last pending free agent to profile is also the Stars’ only restricted free agent at the NHL level. While Ty Dellandrea was not technically a rookie this year (he played 26 games in 2020-21), he was still playing in his first full NHL season after spending most of last season in Cedar Park.
Dellandrea spent much of the year with fairly consistent linemates. He started the season next to Tyler Seguin and Mason Marchment before spending almost of the season alongside the Wyatt Johnston and Jamie Benn duo. The later trio proved especially effective: as we can see in the charts below (courtesy of Micah McCurdy of @IneffectiveMath), Dellandrea was especially strong towards the beginning of the year:
Howeve, around the 30 game mark, Pete DeBoer opted to shuffle the lineups a bit, putting Dellandrea back with Seguin and Marchment before switching out Marchment for Joel Kiviranta. That trio did not work, at least not for Dellandrea, who failed to score once in that eight game stretch. The line was broken up, his production saw an immediate bounce back, and he was soon back with Johnston and Benn.
That all changed, however, with the acquisition of Evgenii Dadonov. With Dadonov (rightfully) taking his spot alongside Johnston and Benn, Dellandrea spent the remainder of the year bouncing up and down the lineup, filling in on the second or fourth line depending on where he was needed. As you can see, this took a toll on his offensive production – Dellandrea scored only one goal and one primary assist during this time.
Come playoff time, the Stars were 100% healthy (in that no one was out due to injury) and Dellandrea settled into a fourth line role. And, well, he wasn’t really productive during that time, sans a two-goal game in Game 5 against the Vegas Golden Knights. In fact, after playing all 82 games for Dallas in the regular season, Dellandrea was a healthy scratch for the first time in the Seattle Kraken series.
That might lead you to the conclusion that Dellandrea was a product of his linemates, that he did well alongside Johnston and Benn because the latter two were so good, and that he struggled when he didn’t have their skill to fall back on.
But like most analysis, things aren’t that simple. Consider his with-or-without-you chart from this (regular) season:
You can clearly see that Dellandrea was far better with Johnston and/or Benn than he was without. Yet he didn’t drag the two players down at all. Rather, the two posted better numbers with Dellandrea than without. The chemistry was real, where every linemate helped the others be better. This is in sharp contrast to some of his other regular partners, namely Seguin, Marchment, and Max Domi, in which all parties were far worse together than they were apart.
So the takeaway for me is not “Dellandrea needs good linemates to succeed,” but rather he needs the right linemates to. And when we’re talking about a 22 year old, Bottom 6 forward, that’s kind of to be expected, no? How often do we complain about the Stars or other teams setting up young players to fail by putting them alongside weak players and expecting them to produce?
Maybe I put on the victory green tinted glasses, but I really liked what I saw from Dellandrea this year. His new deal will probably fall in the $1-2M AAV range, and there’s a good chance he offers a surplus value… if the Stars can pair him with the right players.
Final Grade: B+
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