One of the less talked-about aspects of the NHL season has been the utter failure of the Dallas Stars, a team that was one win away from a Conference Final just last year.

They’re 5-4-1 in their last 10 games, but that includes a three-game losing streak. In fact, the Stars have seven streaks of at least three losses this season. They’ve only won three in a row once.

The extent to which this club struggled was, as I’ve said many times, foreseeable. You knew the goaltending situation was going to be horrendous, and here we are with a team .900 save percentage versus a league average of .913. Kari Lehtonen and Antti Niemi have cost the team a collective 28 goals, probably about nine points in the standings, give or take.

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But those nine points only get the Stars to 80 in 74, which still isn’t close to a playoff spot here. You’re not wrong to blame the goaltending, but the problems go much deeper. The loss of Jason Demers and Alex Goligoski to free agency for what ended up being effectively nothing (Arizona gave up a fifth-round pick for the rights to negotiate with Goligoski) had a huge negative impact on this team’s ability to remain competitive, especially because GM Jim Nill had no plan to deal with their loss.

Esa Lindell went from having 56 minutes of TOI in the NHL to being the team’s No. 2 defenseman. It hasn’t gone well: he has a negative possession impact, only 14 points despite well over 21 minutes a game. Dan Hamhuis has been a somewhat effective replacement for Demers insofar as he’s performing well enough on the second pairing (though providing only one goal and 15 points doesn’t help much), but after that it’s a mess. Jordie Benn and Johnny Oduya, before they were traded, were having more mediocre years in a long string of them.

The other guys? Well, clearly Lindy Ruff didn’t trust many of them. Julius Honka only got about 16:30 a night in his 10 games. Greg Pateryn, coming over from Montreal, is getting less than that. Jamie Oleksiak isn’t doing much of anything in sporadic appeances.

So the question for Nill quickly becomes: How do you move this team forward without just committing to a full-on rebuild? The idea that you’d in any way bail on a Seguin-and-Benn-in-their-primes group with a solid support cast is foolish, as is the idea that you’d trade either Seguin or Benn (or both?) in pursuit of worse finishes. Probably safe to say, too, that just continuing to fly by the seat of your pants as you did this year is a waste of everyone’s time, energy, and money.

The good news is they have some money coming off the books. Patrick Sharp, Ales Hemsky, and Jiri Hudler save you $11.9 million if you don’t re-sign them. And they only have to retain role players and lower-end guys coming off their ELCs. Maybe you even buy out one of these awful goalies. That gives you money to spend.

But here’s the problem for Nill: You need a couple top-six forwards, clearly. You need at least two middle-pairing defensemen, but ideally a top-pairing and middle-pairing guy. How many of those are going to hit the market this summer?

The list of pending UFA defensemen isn’t exactly star-studded this year. That’s going to become increasingly true as time goes on, because the ability to draft, develop, and retain puck-movers is the Next Big Thing in hockey, if it’s not already. Who do you identify as a guy — ideally in his mid- or late-20s — who fits that role? The amount of money someone’s going to throw at Karl Alzner this summer is already unconscionable, and after that your best option honestly might be Brendan Smith. At least Nill already knows Kris Russell isn’t worth pursuing.

The picture is also pretty bleak up front. Unless you want to throw yourself into the Alex Radulov sweepstakes (assuming there is one, and you can get Lindy Ruff to actually play him despite his nationality), what kind of difference-makers are you even going to find up front to fill out that top six? T.J. Oshie? Thomas Vanek? Teddy Purcell? These aren’t good options either. And you probably have to dramatically overpay for them given the small number of options available to you.

Then there’s the goalies. Even if you buy out one of your two current problems in net, what do you spend the rest of the money on? Not Ben Bishop, right? A Steve Mason reclamation project? Maybe Brian Elliott or Chad Johnson? There just aren’t a lot of good options here either.