Photo credit : Dallas Stars
The cornerstone of any strong sports team is its captain, and the captain of the Dallas Stars is no exception. It’s a title that has belonged to names like Broten, Hatcher, Modano and Morrow; notable names to fans of the team since its establishment in the city in 1993. But for anyone new, or even relatively new to watching the Stars, the only name that’s been attached to that prestigious title, is Benn, who will don the “C” for the 11th season in a row in the 2023-2024 season; the longest of any Dallas Stars captain in the team’s history.
In the 2013 offseason, when the Stars announced Benn’s captaincy, general manager Jim Nill stated, “He conducts himself each and every day in a professional way and continually leads by example. We fully believe that he will be a driving force in getting this team to the next level – and now he’s our captain.” Benn was coming off a stellar season as one of the team’s alternate captains, leading the team in points and shots on goal.
But by most statistical standards, Benn wasn’t someone many would consider an early standout to be a future team captain when he broke into the NHL. The Stars drafted him in the fifth round, number 129 overall, in a class that included many well-known names in the league today, like Patrick Kane. And while he had accomplished a lot in his hockey career to that point, including winning the gold with team Canada in the World Junior Championships in 2009 and leading the AHL in goals in the 2010 Calder Cup playoffs with the Texas Stars, his leadership presence on the ice was a shift from his most recent predecessors in Morrow and Modano. Where Morrow was known for his heart, grit, determination and never-give-up mentality on the ice, Modano was known as the man who put the points on the board.
And Benn is an interesting combination of both. He has established himself as a physical, quiet but intimidating and imposing presence on the ice, known to incite the occasional scuffle to rile up his bench, much like Morrow, and even broke a pane of the rink’s glass finishing a check on Niklas Hjalmarsson in 2011. His own brother, Jordie Benn, who was just offered a professional tryout offer from the Stars, was quoted in 2016 as saying, “He’s the type of person that you want to keep quiet. You don’t want to wake him up. If you wake him up and piss him off, then it’s over for everybody. He’ll run you over. He’s a beast if you piss him off.”
In contrast to that physical, gritty play, Benn has also recorded more points in a season than any other captain in Stars history, overtaking the record from Modano in his first season as captain, and four more times since, including the 2022-2023 season. His team speaks highly of him constantly and praises his leadership and his heart for the team both on and off the ice, and inside and outside the locker room. Even Modano was quoted in 2020 as saying, “I think he’s more comfortable in his own skin when he’s around his teammates.” Which also means he’s not much of one for post-game interviews, so don’t look for any long-winded responses or feedback on a game’s outcome when he’s faced with cameras and microphones.
While Benn went through what many would call a few unexceptional years from 2018 to 2021, the 2022-2023 season signaled a re-emergence in his goal scoring and his hard, often questionable, hits, and the season became lovingly known in the Stars community as the Bennaissance. With the anticipated return in line-mates of energetic rookie Wyatt Johnston and fellow veteran presence Evgenii Dadonov, it’ll be interesting to see if the Bennaissance was a fluke for a year, or a return to the Benn Stars fans fell in love with more than a decade ago.
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