Jamie Benn returns for league minimum and $1.15M in performance bonuses. Here's why it's a good deal despite his puck warts.

Plus more captaincy talk.

This morning, the Dallas Stars announced that Jamie Benn would be returning for one year. His price tag is an absurdly low cap hit of $850,000. He will receive $1.15M in bonuses. Per Puck Pedia, Benn receives an additional $200K for the following milestones: 10 games played, 20, 40, and then $150K for making the playoffs, along with an additional $100K for each playoff round won.

I suppose we can jump right into the controversy of it all, starting with his diminishing returns as a player. The playoffs have been particularly rough. Not only has he had trouble taking penalties in general, but that problem has continued in the playoffs. He had a stretch from 2022 to 2024 where he was shockingly productive in his advanced age, tallying 11 points in the 2023 postseason, and 15 in the 2024 playoffs¹. Since then he’s only managed three points across two postseasons and is a minus-7 in penalty differential.

Then there is the whole captaincy debate, likely made more pronounced by seeing what Jordan Staal did for Carolina. I still lean towards the captaincy as being mostly symbolic. A good team is like a good house. When it comes time to collect, what ultimately matters is the foundation and location. There is rarely consistency in who fits the profile for a captaincy role to begin with. Was Staal suddenly a good captain because Carolina won or was he a bad one when they lost last year? If outcomes are the only thing that define good from bad captains, then there’s only one good captain in the NHL, and that’s whoever wins the Cup in any given year.

I know, I know. Dallas is less positioned to win a Cup and we’re losing the plot not even two graphs into this piece. Nonetheless, Dallas has more questions they have to answer in order to be discussed as a Cup contender. Benn’s captaincy is low on the list of on-ice fixtures. We’ll dig more into that in a bit. For now, Benn’s profile is what we already know: he found some PDO juice last season with a high shooting percentage, actually made a slight rebound in defensive impacts, but suffered in terms of shift-to-shift offensive impact.

Dallas lacks depth scoring. They lacked it so much that they couldn’t even get a single goal from a non-top six forward in the playoffs. Over the last four seasons with Benn already well into his 30s, has scored 85 goals, never going below 15 for the season. And that’s with only playing 60 games last year. He still has a solid shot, and overall he’s a net positive in offense.

It should also be said that he was part of Dallas’ rare success stories in terms of line chemistry.

Together with Matt Duchene and Sam Steel, the ‘DJ Steel’ line outscored opponents 10-5, and rocked a 56 percent expected goal share in their 157 minutes together. This was by far Dallas’ most potent line outside of their top trio of Jason Robertson with Roope Hintz and Mavrik Bourque (RIP to their 68 percent expected goal share). It’s possible Dallas could have kept them together, but it’s also easy to see why they didn’t with the postseason injury to Hintz.

The picture forming is palatable IMO: Benn can still score goals, and there are chemistries he can form with others. Dallas doesn’t have any other depth that can claim that. Especially now.

However, I don’t want to set aside the very real debate about who he is as a captain. While I doubt that organization has the appetite for having him hand over the captaincy to someone else, they should. It’s the only way that Benn and the team can enter this season with the mindset that Benn is a depth player at this point in his career. Him being a healthy scratch should be on the table as an option, and that’s harder to do as long as he wears the C. I know I’m contradicting what I wrote previously on the importance of captaincy, but I’ve never claimed that captaincy is unimportant; only that it’s ill-defined. Distinguish for me causation from correlation, and we can have a more sensible conversation instead of simply relying on which way the wind blows.

The less palatable element is how Benn performs at his current age. As we saw with Joe Pavelski, when players hit that proverbial wall, they tend to do it violently. Some may see this move as overly sentimental because of that. They want Benn and Seguin to play together for one last ride. I think that’s overly cynical. The more likely explanation is that their depth at wing has diminished with the loss of Bourque, their current crop has no offense to offer, and Benn at least adds that element. Combine that with some of the deals that were offered — like Tampa Bay paying $2.5M a year for an enforcer — this silly season, and you have some very logical reasons for bringing Benn back, warts and all.

It’s not a great move. One could just as easily make the case that it’s a questionable one. But the cost is minimal and hopefully Benn, seeing what Staal did for the Hurricanes, perhaps even feels inspired to make a difference in the postseason for a recent change. Teams are taking much more dangerous, and more expensive gambles. If nothing else, this is an inexpensive one.

1. This really felt like the year Dallas had as a genuine contender.