Colin Blackwell is dealing with a lower-body injury in training camp, but the Dallas Stars still expect him to be ready when the regular season opens against the St. Louis Blues on Friday, Oct. 2, at American Airlines Center.
For Dallas, that makes this more of a brief setback than a real alarm bell. The 33-year-old forward has built a career on being useful in ways that don’t always jump off the page, and this latest issue does not appear likely to keep him out of the opener.
Blackwell spent part of the 2021-22 season with the Seattle Kraken, where he put up eight goals and nine assists for 17 points in 39 games. Seattle got him from the New York Rangers during the 2021 Expansion Draft, then moved him to the Toronto Maple Leafs with Mark Giordano at the trade deadline in March 2022.
Since then, he has kept finding ways to stick in the league as a dependable depth forward. He’s the kind of player coaches trust because he brings energy, work rate and competitiveness, even if he is not expected to drive the offense night after night.
Dallas got a reminder of that during its 2025 playoff run. Blackwell scored the overtime winner in Game 2 of the Stars’ first-round series against the Colorado Avalanche, pouncing on a rebound to deliver a dramatic victory. The Stars went on to eliminate Colorado in seven games, and that goal stood out as one of the defining moments of the series.
His route to the NHL was far from straightforward. Blackwell was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, grew up in nearby North Andover and developed through youth hockey with the Valley Junior Warriors before starring at St.
John’s Prep. In his final high school season in 2010-11, he exploded for 66 points in 25 games and won the Mr.
Hockey Award from ESPN Boston.
Even with that kind of production, he still had to wait until the seventh round of the draft. The San Jose Sharks took him 194th overall in 2011.
More than a decade later, that pick has turned into a veteran NHL forward with 368 regular-season games and 106 points on his résumé. For now, Blackwell’s focus is simple: get healthy, get through camp, and be ready when Dallas opens against St. Louis.
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The bigger takeaway may be how Nelson has continued to trend for the Kraken during training camp, enough to draw praise from assistant coach Aaron Schneekloth. Seattle is still sorting out the bottom of the roster, but nights like this give the organization a little more reason to believe its younger players can push for real roles rather than just fill exhibition minutes. [Read more 🡒]
Kraken Camp Cuts Just Reshaped Seattles Fringe Roster Battle
The Kraken trimmed their training camp roster to 25 players ahead of the Sept. 28 deadline, a move that immediately clarified the shape of the teams fringe competition. Four players were placed on waivers and are in line to potentially head back to the AHLs Coachella Valley Firebirds, where all four spent significant time last season and remained familiar pieces in the organizations depth picture.
Jon-Randall Avon, John Hayden, Logan Morrison and goaltender Victor Ostman are the names now at the center of that squeeze, with Morrison standing out after leading Coachella Valley in scoring a year ago and Ostman working as the Firebirds primary netminder. For Seattle, the decisions are less about surprise than about sorting out which hopefuls are ready to keep pushing for NHL runway and which ones are likely to continue their development in the desert. [Read more 🡒]