The Dallas Stars began their preseason schedule on Monday night when they lost in overtime to the St. Louis Blues. However, for most in the Dallas market, tonight will be the first chance they will get to see some new faces for the Victory Green squad. The game held at the American Airlines Center will drop the puck at 7 PM CDT and be available on Bally Sports Southwest PLUS locally and ESPN+ outside of the Dallas area.
As is the typical way in preseason, the roster playing in front of the home crowd has more of a NHL-quality player selection than road games. Here were the lines the Stars ran at morning skate per reports from Matt DeFranks from the Dallas Morning News:
Jason Robertson – Wyatt Johnston – Joe Pavelski
Jacob Peterson – Tyler Seguin – Alexander Radulov
Michael Raffl – Jamie Benn – Denis Gurianov
Riley Tufte – Ty Dellandrea – Joel Kiviranta
Ryan Suter – John Klingberg
Thomas Harley – Andrej Sekera
Ryan Shea – Alexander Petrovic
Jake Oettinger and Braden Holtby will once again split time in the net. It would have been interesting to see how Holtby looked behind a more NHL-like roster, but head coach Rick Bowness said plan is for the net to be Oettinger’s for the full game.
Holtby stopped 15 of 16 shots in St. Louis, recording a 1.50 goals against average and a .938 save percentage. He’s looking to round back into form after two consecutive rough seasons behind teams that had less defensive structure than the Stars’ system provides to their netminders.
Here’s the roster the Florida Panthers are coming to town with:
Panthers will counter with: pic.twitter.com/0Yp5qLQXpq
— Taylor Baird (@taylordbaird) September 29, 2021
A fun change this preseason is the fact that both teams can elect to practice a shootout at the end of the game, regardless of outcome. The Blues and Stars did not do this for the first game but we will see it tonight at the AAC. Place your bets on who gets called to shoot for the Stars in the comments and maybe we’ll pick a winner to send some Defending Big D swag to.