Does Miro Heiskanen need to kill penalties?

A chat with the Stars head coach about how his top defender needs to be deployed.

Jerome Miron -IMAGN Images

Before his knee injury last season Miro Heiskanen was on pace for the busiest season of his NHL career.

The Stars franchise defender was averaging 25 minutes, 10 seconds per game of ice time. That ended up being the fifth-highest usage per game of any defender in the NHL, trailing Zach Werenski, Quinn Hughes, Cale Makar, and Brock Faber.

Let’s think about those names, and let’s add in the sixth most-used defender last season, Mikhail Sergachev.

It reads like a list of modern defensemen, puck movers that thrive because of their skating ability and how well they can control the puck with the puck on and off their stick.

Heiskanen fits that mold, but he’s probably the best pure defender in that group. When it comes to actually defending, I wouldn’t pick any of those players above the Stars defenseman.

This is where things get interesting, of those six busiest players when it comes to NHL usage last season, where did Heiskanen rank when it came to time shorthanded?

Probably would be first or second based on context clues, right? If he’s the best defensive player of the defenseman, he should be used in that realm, right?

Let’s look at the numbers.

1. Mikhail Sergachev, 3:02 per game shorthanded

2. Cale Makar, 2:08 per game shorthanded

3. Brock Faber, 2:01 per game shorthanded

4. Zach Werenski, 1:36 per game shorthanded

5. Miro Heiskanen, 0:41 per game shorthanded

6. Quinn Hughes, 0:11 per game shorthanded

Fascinating, right? The best defender of the group, is one of the least-used on the penalty kill.

In fact, amongst Stars defenders, Heiskanen was the sixth-most used on a per game basis all season. In the regular season he only killed penalties in situations where Esa Lindell, Ilya Lybushkin, or Thomas Harley had gone to the box and they needed him to step up.

Context matters, so we should note that Lindell is an outlier when it comes to NHL penalty kill usage. His average of 3:35 per game on the kill was by far the most in the league, which allowed the Stars to push Heiskanen’s power play time to match that exactly — 3:35 per game — only trailing Hughes and Makar in power play usage.

But the bigger question that I have, and I’m curios of how the Stars will tackle things this season, is this: does your best defender have to kill penalties?

I can look at this two ways, from one standpoint Heiskanen not killing penalties unlocks his minutes for more of an even-strength impact, and might keep him healthier for the playoff run.

From another, are you limiting your penalty kill if you aren’t using your best player in that role? And is Heiskanen really that much better offensively to justify sacrifice using him less in defensive situations?

These are the questions that new Stars coach Glen Gulutzan and returning assistant coach Alain Nasreddine will have to tackle this season. Nasreddine ran the defense last season, but I’ve also been told many things the Stars did were more based on what Pete DeBoer wanted, rather than allowing assistants to dictate direction of their position group.

So I asked Gulutzan this past weekend while watching the Stars and Red Wings prospects play in Frisco.

Does Miro Heiskanen need to kill penalties?

“He needs to be part of the penalty kill, period,” Gulutzan said. “What you don’t want to do with him is have him not involved in the game for long periods of time. And it can happen if you’re not playing all sides of the puck. And when you’re able to, I want him on the penalty kill …. he’s too good not to, I want the best defenseman in the league to touch all areas of the game.”

So what does that look like? Are we talking about Lindell-esque minutes?

“No, he’s not gonna be rolled out first every time, we also need (Thomas) Harley to kill more penalties, we’ll have another guy that needs to be rolling too,” Gulutzan said. “But he’ll be part of it, he needs to be, if you have Miro Heiskanen on your team, he needs to be playing in the most important minutes that decide games.”

Gulutzan has been practical about not criticizing what DeBoer did before, he’s chosen his words carefully in that regard and he’s been very respectful of what the Stars built before. But he is coming in with his own opinions and alterations, he has specific views of why his old team, the Edmonton Oilers, were able to beat the Stars in the past two Western Conference Finals and he sold the Stars on those ideologies in his interview.

And Gulutzan is a huge believe that Heiskanen is top all-around defender on the planet. In our conversation Saturday, and in prior conversations, he spoke about how some of the Oilers best players, regarded Heiskanen as the NHL’s toughest defender to plan for, how entire gameplans in Edmonton would be spent talking about how much Heiskanen controls the game.

Now that he’s in charge of Heiskanen’s deployment, well technically he subcontracts it to Nasreddine, Gulutzan is going to make sure the Stars best player is actually playing in all situations.

Is that the right call?

Personally, I’m not sure, the Stars penalty kill was really good last season, it ranked fourth in the league at 82.0 percent last season, even with Heiskanen being a bystander for that unit.

But in the playoffs, against the power play Gulutzan ran, the Oilers scored a power play goal in each game of the Western Conference Finals, including a 2-for-4 performance in Game 4, which really swung the series from close to an Oilers eventual romp.

Heiskanen average 22 seconds per game on the penalty kill, including just four seconds of penalty kill time with Dallas’ season on the line in Game 5. For Gulutzan, that won’t happen again, in his mind, high-leverage for a top defender means killing penalties.