Stars Have 24 Active Players

The Dallas Stars cut defenseman Andrew Hutchinson from their line-up on Sunday, trimming their active roster down to 24 players, including Andrew Peters, who is now on the Injured Reserve. The Stars claim to have another active player on their roster, but I'll be damned if I could find him. So, for now, I'm going with this line-up, as that extra "hidden" player likely doesn't carry a lot of value to the team at this point in time.

It's been quite some time since the last team update for the Stars, so this is well overdue.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Mike Ribeiro	Matt Niskanen	Marty Turco
Loui Eriksson	Stephane Robidas	Alex Auld
Brad Richards	Trevor Daley
Steve Ott	Karlis Skrastins
Mike Modano	Jeff Woywitka
James Neal	Niklas Grossman
Fabian Brunnstrom	Mark Fistric
Jere Lehtinen
Brian Sutherby
Brendan Morrow
Toby Petersen
Krys Barch
Warren Peters
Jamie Benn
Luke Gadzic

The Stars didn't make a great deal of additions to their everyday line-up. The inclusion of Alex Auld to the system give the Stars a brand new look from the back-up goaltending angle, while Jamie Benn (pictured) is looking to give the offense a spark and hopefully get a Calder Trophy out of this campaign.

Injuries were a big part of last year's team and it looks like Brendan Morrow is back to (or close to) 100%, while Jere Lehtinen struggles to get back to 100%, but should be getting closer.

Also, notably missing from the Stars line-up is Sergei Zubov, who ended up going back home to Europe in the summer, after a very tumultuous season of injuries.

The Dallas Stars are nowhere near cap troubles this season, with a very cap friendly list of players on their roster. Even with the injured Warren Peters in their line-up, they only have a cap hit of $47.4 million for 24 players. This isn't to say they don't have a lot of talent, it's just the Stars didn't go out and spend a lot of money in the summer to make up for the loss of Zubov or upgrade their forward ranks too substantially.

If the Stars can stay healthy for the better part of the season, they'll be a pretty tough team to play against. They have plenty of playmaking centres on the team that can dish out the puck to some talented wingers, so they should be okay when it comes to scoring goals. Marty Turco is going to need to bounce back from a terrible year, but he's the kind of guy that should be able to do it. The Stars' season, in all honesty, really does rely on Turco's play and how far he can carry them.