Dallas Stars’ October Forecast: Chance of Clearing

Marc Crawford’s term as Stars coach will begin on Saturday night when the Nashville Predators provide the loyal opposition. And if you like what you see, the Preds will be right back a week from Wednesday!

Eight of the Stars’ 14 October games will be played away from AAC, beginning with a three-game trip to Western Canada after opening night. (Here’s the full season sked.) The Stars will play three back-to-backs: the standard Anaheim-LA double in southern California, plus Friday-Saturday home-and-homes featuring Boston-Chicago (Stanley Cup Finalists?) in the middle of the month and Florida-Nashville at the end.

(Programming note: The plan for in-game blogs this season is to spot them for particular games of interest, the Saturday night opener being one of them.)

Some observations about the Stars and Western foes:

Last season, Brenden Morrow led Stars forwards in ice time at 21:21. Don’t look for him to approach that figure early in the season as he returns from the knee injury that ended his 2008-09 season last fall.

Crawford has installed a system in which defensemen are given the green light to join the attack more often than occurred under Dave Tippett. Likewise, forwards must be prepared to retreat to cover for attacking defenders. It will be particularly interesting to see how Dallas’ developing young defenders deal with this. With the addition of Karlis Skrastins and Jeff Woywitka, it could be Mark Fistric is the odd man out of the top six blue liners at least at the beginning of the season.

Assuming the soreness that resulted in Brad Richards sitting out Thursday practice is no big deal, the Eriksson-Richards-Neal line heads into the season having put together the most cohesive pre-season. On Thursday, Crawford had an Ott-Modano-Lehtinen line together. Jere Lehtinen, with hip and groin soreness, goes into Friday’s practice with the goal of making it all the way through practice.

Looking at some of the Stars’ competitors in the West for this first month:

• Not anticipating Colorado being in the hunt for a playoff spot, though the Avs played like world beaters on Thursday night while retiring Joe Sakic’s sweater. After they host Vancouver on Saturday, they will play seven consecutive road games in the Central and Eastern Time Zones and return to the Pepsi Center on Oct. 29.

• Minnesota will play five consecutive road games over nine days, including games against San Jose, Anaheim and Vancouver.

• Columbus will come west to play four straight on the road.

• St. Louis, which will play seven of 12 at home, will face Detroit (twice, home-and-home this weekend), Pittsburgh and Anaheim.

• Edmonton will play nine home games, the only back-to-backers being a trip to Calgary and Vancouver.