A missing 24:53 cannot sensibly be dropped onto one player’s shift chart. Dallas will be without Miro Heiskanen again Thursday against Winnipeg, after coach Glen Gulutzan confirmed his absence Wednesday. The defenseman skated by himself; joining team practice remains a step he must complete before playing. For the Stars, replacing that much ice time should be a collective job.
Heiskanen was averaging 24:53 over 15 games, along with three goals, eight assists and 11 points. That is more than a line on a deployment chart. It is a large collection of defensive shifts, puck movement and responsibility at difficult moments. Dallas should replace those duties across several defensemen rather than hand the entire assignment to the closest statistical match.
Thomas Harley is the obvious candidate to absorb attention because his average ice time is 24:57, nearly identical to Heiskanen’s. Harley has also produced 11 points in 17 games, with two goals and nine assists.
His recent offensive work against San Jose underlined that ability: in Dallas’ 4-3 victory on Nov. 7, he scored once and assisted on two goals, including involvement in all three Stars power-play goals.
That performance makes Harley important, but it does not make him a replacement part that can be installed and left running. His existing workload is already heavy. Asking him to take every difficult minute would turn a reasonable starting point into a concentration of risk, especially when the club needs Harley’s mobility and offense over more than one game.
Esa Lindell offers a different kind of support. He is averaging 22:24, considerably more than Nils Lundkvist’s 17:41, Tyler Myers’ 16:16 or Lian Bichsel’s 16:19. Those figures do not identify a new pairing or promise a specific deployment, but they do describe a defense corps with several players already accustomed to substantial work.
The practical answer is a series of smaller increases, with each player taking on a little more of the night instead of one player taking on all of it.
The offensive side is less tidy. Lundkvist has three assists, compared with two for Myers and one for Lindell and Bichsel. None of those totals qualifies anyone as Heiskanen’s puck-moving duplicate.
Dallas cannot replace his contribution by dividing 24:53 into extra shifts and expecting the scoring to divide just as neatly. The club needs its forwards to help turn those possessions into offense, while the defensemen protect the structure that has kept the team competitive.
So far, that defensive floor has been sturdy. Dallas has allowed 39 goals in 17 games, or 2.29 per game, while the club has maintained a positive goal difference. The penalty kill is at 89.7 percent.
Those numbers do not make Heiskanen dispensable, and they do not guarantee that the next several games will be comfortable. They do show why a desperate reshuffle would be a poor response to a temporary absence: the existing group has something worth preserving.
The strongest case for loading up Harley is straightforward. He is already playing at Heiskanen’s average level and has matched the absent defenseman’s 11 points, despite doing so in two more games. Harley can carry an important share of the work.
