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WHEN TEAM CANADA has found itself a man short on ‘D’ recently, Thomas Harley has been the guy who steps up. At the 4 Nations Face-Off, he famously wasn’t allowed to practise with the team before his tournament debut, which came when Colorado’s Cale Makar was ruled out due to illness. Harley went on to have a smashing tourney for Canada, who took the championship in a classic showdown with archrival Team USA. From there, he came back to the NHL and put up career offensive numbers with the Dallas Stars.

The Stars also needed Harley to play well down the stretch that season, as No. 1 defenseman Miro Heiskanen missed a bunch of time due to injury.

That takes us to the Olympics. While Canada won decisively against the Czechs in their opener, blueliner Josh Morrissey left the game with an injury after playing just over seven minutes for the Canadians. Enter Harley, who picked up the slack and played 20:35 that night, leading his team in ice time (even more than Makar, it should be noted).

So what is it about Harley that allows him to step up when his team needs him the most? “I just love playing hockey, and getting to do that for my country is a pleasure,” he said. “Anytime I get to do that, I’m going to enjoy it. But I remind myself that, at the simplest level, it’s still hockey, and you’ve just got to go out there and do what you’ve done your whole life.”

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In the end, Team USA got revenge on the Canadians in the gold medal game, but Harley ended the proceedings as the second-highest-scoring blueliner on the team, with four points in six games, two back of Makar. “He’s a very good player,” said Los Angeles defender and Olympic partner Drew Doughty. “I love playing with him. He’s still pretty young and has a lot of hockey left in him. He’s just good at everything. He’s sound defensively. He’s good at breaking pucks out, and he can score.”

With Heiskanen back full time this season, the Stars haven’t needed to lean on Harley’s offense as much, though he’s still put up solid numbers despite having a diminished role on the power play. What he has given Dallas is an excellent top four to contend with.

Heiskanen and Esa Lindell are the Fantastic Finns on the top pairing, while Harley has played more than 23 minutes per night, often with Nils Lundkvist, and their 5-on-5 results have been strong. The trade-deadline acquisition of towering Tyler Myers from Vancouver gave Dallas another option, and he’s fit in well on the third pairing.

This is all key heading into the playoffs, where the Stars have practically been locked into a first-round meeting with the ascendent Minnesota Wild for months, thanks to Colorado running away with first place in the Central Division and nobody else within shouting distance of the top three squads.

Once again, that takes us back to the 4 Nations Face-Off, where Harley came in as a band-aid and left as a key contributor. It’s not like he was regarded as a scrub before – he was taken 18th overall in the 2019 draft, after all – but hanging with the best of the best clearly paid dividends for the 24-year-old. “To prove to yourself and the world that you can play at that level is big,” he said. “And then you go back to the NHL, and it’s a bit slower for you.”

That pace will ramp up in the playoffs, but Harley has already proven he can be a big-game player.

Dallas is looking for its first championship since 1999, and if the Stars are going to find their way to the promised land, they know they can rely on Harley to be there when the stakes are highest.

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