Given a chance to play through mistakes, Stephen Johns is finding his ideal role with Stars

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Stephen Johns is allowed to make mistakes.

He can play his game and take risks. He can learn from certain situations, and he has the confidence that when he makes a mistake he’ll have a chance to be better for it.

“When you allow mistakes to happen, less mistakes happen,” Johns said. “You don’t worry about making mistakes, and when you make a mistake you’re not worried about going to the bench and having (a coach) screaming and hollering at you, he’s just letting you know what you need to do better. When you’re allowed to make mistakes you have a different feeling, where you just have that feeling you can make plays.”

It’s a new luxury for Johns, who was on an imbalanced scale of healthy scratches and meaningful minutes during his rookie season. While playing on a team with eight defensemen during the 2016-17 campaign, Johns appeared in 61 games and looked scared at times.

There was one stretch where he made a mistake, a delay of game penalty for putting the puck over the glass, that led to a healthy scratch. In his first game back he played like he was trying to avoid mistakes, and made even more, quickly leading to another scratch.

This season Johns has developed a healthy relationship with assistant coach Rick Wilson. Even when Johns struggled a bit with a switch from the right to the left side — a move caused by Marc Methot’s knee injury — Wilson was working with the 25-year-old and helping him learn from miscues.

“He’s got a great way to approach us about the mistakes we made,” Johns said. “(Also) opportunities that we have that he sees that we could have made, and I think he’s done wonders for our D-core this year, and it’s been fun.”

It’s been a particularly good week for Johns. He has points in back-to-back games, has been more physical lately, and the Stars have back-to-back wins heading into Thursday’s game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.

“Just playing, I mean seriously, I’m just playing,” Johns said. “I’m just playing and having fun. I think that’s the key to it. When you have fun, you have a lot more composure and a lot more confidence with the puck, and it’s fun.”

For Stars coach Ken Hitchcock it’s been an evolution in Johns positioning and footwork under Wilson. According to Hitchcock, Johns is better reading the play and is keeping the game in front of him, he’s not chasing and isn’t getting caught out of position in a quicker, speed-based NHL.

“When you chase from behind you look vulnerable and you look like you lack the IQ to play,” Hitchcock said. “Now the play is in front of him and he’s done a hell of a job being (an) effective player.”

He’s also entrenched as one of the Stars top-six defenders, that’s been proven during Methot’s absence. When the coaching staff had to put two right-handed defenders on the same pairing, they entrusted Johns with the more difficult assignment over Julius Honka.

Not only that, the Stars are now going out of their way to help Johns further succeed over Honka. Honka will be scratched in favor of Dillon Heatherington on Thursday, a rookie playing his first NHL game, a move that will allow Johns to move back to his natural side in a lefty-righty pairing.

It’s a pairing that Johns believes could have some early success.

“I played against him when he was in Lake Erie and I saw him a lot in camp, and I know he’s a big boy and he can skate well,” Johns said. “He plays physical solid game, which is good, and hopefully he gets a shot and shows us what he can do.”

After playing with Honka, Johns will be the primary puck-moving defenseman playing with Heatherington, who is more of a stay-at-home defender. Hitchcock didn’t discuss that in depth on Wednesday, but earlier this season he said Johns had progressed from a “red light” to a “yellow light” offensively, and at some point he’d Johns would have the green light to do more in the offensive zone.

“When you’re allowed to make mistakes you have a different feeling, where you just have that feeling you can make plays,” Johns said. “Like Hitch says, everyone has to have that feeling that every guy can score every night.”