2025-2026 Report Card: Can the Tyler Myers addition develop into something more?

Chaos (or cromulent?) giraffe.

• Cap: $1.5M (Year 1 of 2)

• GP: 73

• Goals: 1

• Assists: 10

• Points: 11

• Postseason: 0

• xSPAR: 0 extra points in the standings

There’s not a lot to say here. I wonder what Tyler Myers’ tracking data might have looked like his rookie year in Buffalo, when he scored 48 points in 82 games as a teenager. While he would never come anywhere close to that total, he would carve out a career for himself in Winnipeg and Buffalo for extended stints. Will Dallas be the exception?

There’s no point in rehashing some of the same old criticisms. Myers, like Matt Dumba and Ilya Lyubushkin before him, is a reminder that for all of Jim Nill’s strengths, he is by no means perfect. In fact, right-shot veteran defenders are a consistent blindspot. Roman Polak. Jani Hakanpaa1. Ben Lovejoy. Sergei Gonchar. Greg Pateryn. If there is a right-shot flyer available on the bulletin board, Nill will pick it up and pony up the cash.

On the surface, choosing Myers was not a disaster. There was no point in parsing through his play on a Vancouver team that had genuinely imploded into particles of locker room drama and divided loyalties. Even Quinn Hughes looked human on that team. That Myers might find new life on a contending team had some logic even if the cost was high2.

Myers has a history of providing value on the ice even if the point totals and defensive impacts will never be high quality: namely his ability to carry the puck through the neutral zone.

However, that’s where everything ends.

What we’re left with, I’m not sure. It’s really just a boatload of questions. Can Myers elevate his game in a sheltered role? Will that be next to Lian Bichsel again? Or could it be with someone else? Might he end up as the 7th defender with someone in Texas taking over that role? Or is it possible for him to find himself in an elevated position with more time to forge chemistry with others, and perhaps even the system? Or did Dallas catch Myers too close to the end of his career for these questions to be relevant?

Most of us know where this is headed. Myers will be given the opportunity, but at what point will we be seeing the head coach being courteous to a respected veteran, and how much of that will be justified by his on-ice play? Granted, there’s not a ton of competition for him. Kyle Capobianco, Luke Krys, and Kyle Burroughs are the only Texas defenders that could play their way up the lineup.

Myers and Bichsel, to their credit, weren’t that bad as a duo. Granted, it wasn’t a big sample size, and both seemed prone to big mistakes. But it might be something that the Stars can work with as a group if Bichsel can elevate his game and thus drive the defense pair, leaving Myers to do less. We did see a bit of this with the Canucks, where Myers was able to tone his game down — he is on record as quite disliking his nickname, as one would expect — and play a much more muted game. However, this would need to come with the right breaks in Dallas’ favor; namely the systems change, and Myers himself quieting the reptilian brain in him that wants to and is used to making dynamic offensive zone plays.

What’s more likely to happen is that we see Myers relegated to the healthy scratch defender at the trade deadline when the Stars go hunting for a right-shot defender. Although there’s certainly a world where injuries force him higher into the lineup. In some ways, Myers is a unique pulse for where Dallas is headed. A Jason Robertson extension all but guarantees this, since it’ll mean Dallas is moving along smoothly, top three in their division, and looking to load up for a deep postseason run that can include UFAs with term left. If not, then Myers securing a spot in the lineup means the questions are happening to everything else. Something about the chaotic mystery — skewing negative — of it all feels emblematic of the Myers experience itself.