The early returns on defenceman Connor Carrick have been promising for the Dallas Stars.
Carrick has three assists in two games for Dallas since being acquired in a trade from the Toronto Maple Leafs on Oct. 1.
The 24-year-old was the odd man out when cuts were made at the conclusion of training camp and he’ll get a chance to face his former team when the Leafs visit American Airlines Center on Tuesday.
It’s a date he didn’t need any help finding.
“I knew right away,” Carrick told Mark Stepneski of NHL.com of when the Leafs were coming to town. “It was after playing in Chicago, and I am from Chicago, and I knew where we were going with the Leafs, and I am excited to be on the other side of it.”
The 5-foot-11 rearguard looked like found money for the Leafs when they got him from Washington, along with Brooks Laich and a second-round pick, as part of the trade that sent Daniel Winnik to the Capitals in 2016.
But he never found a consistent role in Leafs coach Mike Babcock’s top six last season, appearing in just 47 games.
The Stars traded a seventh-round pick (that upgrades to a sixth-rounder if Carrick plays in 50 games this year) in order to jump ahead of the waiver queue and land Carrick, a strong-skating defenceman who’s currently playing alongside another former Leaf: Roman Polak.
“I think (Carrick)’s been really good. I thought in the second game he was better than the first,” Stars coach Jim Montgomery said. “He’s really starting to grasp how we want to play. His biggest tools work well with the way we want to play.”
“It’s a mental struggle that can become very physical. Momentum is a funny thing. You can either get the ball rolling for you or against you,” Carrick said of finding his groove in the NHL. “Personally, it’s always been to block the mental and keep the physical as strong as possible, so you are playing above a seventh role or whatever it is and hopefully when you get in and get your shot, you run with it.
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