Tollbooth Willie would call me unoriginal, but one of my favorite transactions this offseason was the Dallas Stars re-signing Matt Duchene to another one-year, $3 million contract. The 34-year-old is coming off of a stellar season with the Dallas Stars, who fell short to Edmonton in the Conference Finals. The Stars led the league with seven different 20 goal scorers including Duchene and his line mates, Mason Marchment and Tyler Seguin. Duchene tied for the third-most points on Dallas’s roster with 65. According to Evolving-Hockey, many of his analytics were better than the previous season in Nashville including GAR, SPAR, and WAR. He outperformed many of the expected analytics in the ’23-24 campaign; xSPAR:1.7 xGAR:5.4 xWAR:.9 by effectively doubling them with SPAR:3.3 GAR:10.2 WAR: 1.7. 

Duchene anchored and fulfilled his role as the 3rd line center; his offensive zone start percentage was 51.5 which demonstrated his ability to create offense from all areas of the ice including off the rush from the defensive zone. Duchene flexed a confident face off win percentage with 56.5, illustrating his impact to facilitate the play in all three zones. The 3rd line was dependable, Duchene posted a +15 while Marchment and Seguin finished with +22 and +10 respectively. Another impressive stat showcasing Duchene’s playmaking ability was twenty six of his forty assists were primary apples. Evolving-Hockey’s SPAR model evaluated Duchene’s value to be $8.15M while looking at his SPAR being 3.3 against an expected 1.7. That value is closer to triple what his contract is worth for $3M for one year while his SPAR doubled the expectation. Another year of Duchene in Dallas and arguably the most dynamic 3rd line in hockey sounds worth a lot more than what they are spending.