Your Schedule to Texas Stars Opening Night

(Credit: Texas Stars)

This week begins the steady march to opening night for the Texas Stars. Out in Michigan, a collection of draft picks and prospects will play in the Traverse City Tournament. Here's a rough outline of all the events that take us to Opening Night.

September 7-11 - Traverse City Tournament
As mentioned above, Traverse is a prospect tournament pitting young players from eight different NHL teams against each other in a quick four-game tournament format. Everyone plays everyone else in their division and then first plays first, second plays second, etc. The team is coached by Texas head coach Derek Laxdal and features a boatload of current Texas Stars, including Nick Caamano, Tony Calderone, Roope Hintz, Sam Laberge, Joel L'Esperance, Niklas Hansson, Miro Heiskanen, John Nyberg, and Ondrej Vala. Another bevy of players are expected to play for Texas as early as this year, including Colton Point and Adam Mascherin.

September 14-16 - Dallas Stars Training Camp in Boise, ID
There's no rest for the Traverse crew as they roll to Idaho for Dallas training camp starting next Friday. The quick camp is capped with an intrasquad scrimmage before Dallas hits the road for a slate of preseason games over the coming weeks.

September 18-28 - Dallas Stars Preseason
Many Texas Stars will play in preseason games with some nights featuring significant lineup contribution from the AHL side. As decisions are made, players will be released to juniors or Europe and then a large cut will be made to kick off the next phase.

Week of September 24 - Texas Stars Training Camp
Exact dates aren't pinned down yet publicly, but we can expect based on history that Texas will begin training camp this week, culminating with...

September 28-29 - Texas Stars Preseason
A quick home-and-home with San Antonio is the only tune-up Texas gets before hitting the regular season on October 5th. Keep in mind though that some of these players will already be a full month into the season by the time the puck drops that day.

October 5 - Texas v. Grand Rapids
The Western Conference Champion Texas Stars open the season with a pair of home games against new divisional foes Grand Rapids and Milwaukee. The next time when either Dallas, Texas or Idaho don't have a scheduled game from this point on is the end of the season, April 20th.