OPINION: Dallas Stars need John Klingberg more than he needs the Stars
Why is the 29-year old Swede so vital for the Dallas Stars and what the future might hold for him?
It was 9:57AM Nepal time when one of my favorite goals happened. Why Nepal time? Glad you asked. That’s because I watched it on my iPhone on a 7 hour long bus ride from Chitwan National Park to Pokhara, Nepal.
Pics or didn’t happen? Well, there you go. On the left, me watching Stars-Preds Game 6. On the right, a photo from some hike with picturesque scenery.
It was a rather pleasant drive — notice the modern A/C above the seats — considering the roads in Nepal from the jungle to the city of Pokhara from we (me and my wife) had to take a off road taxi and then walk to our final destination - Annapurna Eco Village, beautiful ecologic resort overlooking Annapurna Mountain in the Himalayas.
Back to the goal. Oh yes! The goal. That’s what made the drive rather pleasant. If the Stars would lose, I’d say the drive would’ve sucked pretty bad.
John Klingberg sent Dallas Stars into the second round of 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs with a wrist shot that sailed past Pekka Riine and gave Dallas Stars 2-1 OT win and most importantly 4th win in a 4-2 series win against the Nashville Predators.
The goal encapsulates everything that John Klingberg became in the Stars’ Victory Green uniform from his debut in 2014 until now. He’s been one of their best players when it mattered the most.
Many people rave about the play of a certain Miro Heiskanen, I’m sure you have the general idea who I am referring to. Especially in the bubble, Miro the Hero, as fans call him, was a Force with a capital F.
It was just his second year in the league and still on an entry-level contract, he put up 26 points in 27 playoff games for the Stars en route to the loss in Game 6 of Stanley Cup Finals against the mighty Tampa Bay Lightning.
What some people forget is that the actual MVP for the Stars in the 2020 bubble playoffs might be John Klingberg. At least for some and then some more, probably.
John Klingberg scored 21 points in 26 games that playoff run but let’s not focus on just points as a primary impact on the team. His play-driving, creativity and aggressiveness in breakouts is what makes him so special for the Dallas Stars and what pulled the Stars within a striking distance of hockey's Holy Grail.
He scored an eventual game-winner in an important Game 1 Western Conference finals against Vegas and also provided a key assist to Denis Gurianov’s series clinching goal in Game 5 that same conference final. And that’s just from top of my head.
I remember noticing and saying how surprisingly sound defensively he was during that run, which was always the main point of criticism from Stars media, fans and probably the entire hockey ecosystem. His defensive play. The criticism of Klingberg’s defensive play is still valid to this day, as we’ll see later in the article.
Coming back to this season, Stars were always somehow in-and-out of the playoff spot and basically fighting for their lives every single game. Then the shock news happened: Miro Heiskanen, arguably the Stars’ best player, was out with mononucleosis for the entire stretch of games in March.
Many people (myself partly included) dismissed the Stars' chances of making the postseason at the time of a diagnosis. That’s exactly when John Klingberg stepped up his game and essentially provided what the Stars were missing in playdriving aspect from a sick Heiskanen. That alone helped them stay afloat in playoff race.
Which brings us here, it’s the brink of 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs - that special time of the year when all the doom and gloom of 82-game marathon of regular season has expired - and we’re ready to watch the best teams in the world face each other to determine who wins the Stanley Cup.
Speaking of expiring things…
Yeah, the John Klingberg’s seven year sweetheart deal signed back in 2015 will be a thing of the past in a couple of weeks and he’ll need a new contract.
That alone isn’t a surprising thing. Stars GM Jim Nill had all that time to evaluate Klingberg’s play and impact on and off the ice to decide what should be his extension number and for how many years he’d like him to re-sign and presumably end his career as a Dallas Star. Klingberg was eligible to sign his new contract from late July last year.
Except, he didn’t. Well, there really wasn’t anything to sign as the two sides were seemingly pretty far from consensus on what the actual contract should look like. How many years? Klingberg would most definitely want an 8-year deal and I believe Stars would like to avoid handing out yet another maximum term contract, especially after how the value of Jamie Benn’s and Tyler Seguin’s contracts are evolving.
Interestingly enough, when the free agency opened last summer — that exact day Klingberg became eligible to sign a new deal — Stars opted to focus on the present needs and sign 36-year old Ryan Suter to a 4-year (!) deal which would take him directly into his forties when the contract is up. The cap hit — or AAV as annual average value — of the deal is manageable 3.65 million but the length is very much for the debate.
Imagine negotiating with a 36-year old rugged defender who just got bought out from his current deal.
Imaginary 36-year old defender:
“I want a 4-year contract.”
You, the negotiator:
“Isn’t that maybe a tad too much on the term for a 36-year old?”
Still imaginary defender:
“No, I think it's a reasonable ask.”
You, the negotiator:
“If you say so. Deal.”
Don’t get me wrong. I really like the work Jim Nill has done with the Stars since he became a GM in 2013. I just feel it wasn’t his finest hour when negotiating this contract.
If Ryan Suter has some sort of a rebirth next season — or ideally, this playoffs — I’d be happy to eat crow on that one. Then again, Joe Pavelski also had a miserable first regular season in a Stars sweater and then hit his career high in points as an almost 38-year old man this year. I’m just worried that not everybody can be Joe Pavelski. Back to Klingberg’s part of the discussion.
Ryan Suter is a lefty and John Klingberg is a righty. The Stars have a plethora of left-handed defensemen, starting with Miro Heiskanen, then Esa Lindell, our guy Ryan Suter but also up-and-coming Thomas Harley and always-ready-for-a-3rd-pair-duty-Joel Hanley. I’m not counting Andrej Sekera here as he’s not part of the next season plans but you get the picture - another lefty.
Also in the minors, there are somewhat promising guys like Ryan Shea or Jerad Rosburg, both left-handed defensemen.
With the exception of John Klingberg, who do the Stars have on the right side of D … it’s Jani Hakanpaa. In the minors there is Joe Cecconi, who I believe could be a useful 3rd liner in the NHL some day but is already 25 in a few days.
Yes, I may be cheating a bit here — if you look at the projected pairings for Game 1 vs Calgary Flames — Miro Heiskanen plays on the right side alongside Ryan Suter. That’s out of necessity though and not because it’s the best place for Miro Heiskanen. The key for the Stars long term should be to get Heiskanen play on his best side, which is the left.
This tweet thread by David Castillo demonstrates why Dallas should focus on getting Heiskanen back to his best side, which — and I repeat — is the left.
Take it this way. You can play Lionel Messi as a center-forward *if you need to* but he’s the best version of himself when playing down the right flank cutting inside.
That’s why losing John Klingberg as a natural right-hand option in the off-season could be costly for the Stars. This is what numbers of an elite defender look like (props to Andy and Rono, you can find them on Twitter or even better, support on Patreon):
These are simplified advanced metrics into digestible form for a passing by reader and I just want to focus on big numbers here. Take it’s like an overall rating in your typical FIFA or NHL game, except it’s the percentile of how many players is the player in discussion better than.
You can see that Miro Heiskanen is better than almost everybody in … well, almost everything. Now let’s look at the John Klingberg’s evaluation card:
While the offense and the transition together is elite and totally equal to Heiskanen, the defense certainly is not. Klingberg is an offensive specialist and is one of the best players in high-danger assist share — a metric that tells you his direct impact on creating big scoring chances.
To have a the full picture, he’s only other natural right-handed defenseman Jani Hakanpaa and his numbers.
He’s basically the reverse John Klingberg! And that’s a good thing. You need specialists in your team. Klingberg is an offensive mind specializing in power play and creating chances 5 on 5. Jani Hakanpaa is a defensive stalwart and your penalty killing expert. His job is to smother scoring chances and turn them into sheer nothingness.
Together it makes for a good drink, if served properly. Heiskanen is the full package, while Klingberg and Hakanpaa represent each side of the barricade. Bottom line is, Dallas Stars desperately need more 5 on 5 offense in their play if they want to be successful in the years to come and John Klingberg provides exactly that.
So why hasn't the Stars signed Klingberg to an extension already? If you need a straight answer, it’s Covid. Well, not directly the disease itself but the ramifications of it — such as the flat-cap environment. Projected cap space in 2022 was well above the 90 million mark just a few years ago. The harsh post-Covid reality? 82.5 million for the 2022-23 season and rising pretty slowly.
Simply put, there isn’t space. Having crystal ball, the Stars wouldn’t have signed Esa Lindell to a 6 year, 5.8 million a year deal in 2019. Jim Nill is already operating on the edge of cap possibilities with maximizing the LTIR space for this season and re-signing Joe Pavelski to a bargain 1-year deal of 5.5 million per.
So what should the next John Klingberg contract look like?
I don’t want to go too deep here as the main point of the article was to highlight how important John Klingberg is to the Dallas Stars. Financially, he should be somewhere between Esa Lindell and Miro Heiskanen’s contracts, maybe closer to the latter. Moving around 7.5 million looks like a win-win scenario for both sides but there’s more to that.
The Stars are the only team that can offer an 8 year deal to him, other 31 teams can only offer him a contract length of 7 years. Let’s say the Stars will offer 8 years at 7.5 million per — it would be a 60 million contract. Other rivals could match this offer only by offering Klingberg at least 8.57 million per season on a 7 year term.
If you add up a very favorable state tax conditions in Texas, similar to only a few other states in the US (Florida, Nevada, Tennessee or Washington), it’s more and more understandable why Jim Nill feels he has an upper hand in this negotiation.
Klingberg in January let the Stars brass know that he wants to feel more appreciated in this negotiation process and proclaimed that in an ideal scenario, he wants to stay a Dallas Star for years to come.
“On my side, on my agent’s side, I feel like we’ve been trying to move pieces, years, numbers and stuff like that. On our part, I feel like we’ve been trying to meet them in different ways. More and more, as it comes down to, it’s been more quiet. I don’t feel like I’ve been appreciated.” - John Klingberg, January 2022.
There were guys that were signed long before their contracts expired during Jim Nill’s tenure — Benn, Seguin and even Klingberg’s line partner on D — Esa Lindell, which makes you feel for the right-handed Swede. However, as claimed earlier in the article, those deals were pre-covid, which makes them less comparable to a current situation.
Elliotte Friedman mentioned in his 32 Thoughts column earlier in March that the team he could envision signing John Klingberg is Seattle Kraken. That would make sense from the tax perspective for him, as the state of Washington doesn’t have a state income tax, similar to Texas. Maybe more importantly, Seattle has more cap space available than the Stars.
It isn’t like the Stars are cap-strapped coming into the 2022-23 season. It’s just Jim Nill has to plan his cap management well into the future and knows there are certain players due to some hefty raises in coming years — like bonafide first-line center Roope Hintz.
Nill could (and probably will) offer a bridge-deal to Jason Robertson to alleviate some cap issues short term and wait for the expiry of some veteran contracts to sign the 40-goal scorer long term. He just cannot do the same with Roope Hintz, as he’s already bridged him in 2020. I have pondered about this earlier this year.
Final verdict, if Klingberg was to re-sign with Dallas, I can imagine him giving the Stars a little discount and I see the current Hamphus Lindholm’s contract as the best comparable - 8 years at 6.5 million. It would also be around his current market value, which is 6.2 million, according to Dom Luszczyszyn’s model over at The Athletic.
He could also sign another 7 year deal, but that’d probably cost Stars 7.5 million or more. If you’re paying attention, both ways he’d earn 52 million US dollars. Not a bad payday, if you ask me.
The only caveat is, the Stars probably don’t want to go the 8 year route as Klingberg is already almost 30 and teams like Seattle can just offer more in the 7 year possibility. It will be fascinating to watch and I’m looking forward to revisiting this and how wrong we all might be at the end.
Personally, I want him to stay, but of course, at the right number. Simply because there’s no player like John Klingberg in the pipeline for the Stars just yet. Thomas Harley is a very good NHL prospect but in the modern NHL, you have to find a place for both of them as offense is the main catalyst of a long term success. Just look at Colorado, Toronto or Florida this year.
Yes, my feelings may be misguiding me on this one as there are so many great memories attached to John Klingberg’s time in Dallas — not only the bus ride in Nepal.