The Stars prepared Tuesday for St. Louis. Derian Hatcher started preparing for Montreal.

The Dallas captain learned what he expected to learn, that he has a torn medial collateral ligament in his left knee. The injury does not require surgery and calls for four to six weeks of rehabilitation.

"If I come back in Montreal [Jan. 13] before the All-Star game, that would be missing 15 games," Hatcher said. "Now you never know, I might be back sooner, and I might not be back that fast. But I’ve been through this before, and basically we know enough about the injury that it's going to be four to six weeks."

Hatcher suffered a similar injury to his other knee at the end of the 1995 season and missed the team’s playoff series with Detroit. He leads the team in minutes played, and it was only last week that in discussing Philadelphia's Eric Lindros, coach Ken Hitchcock said, "It would be like us losing Hatcher."

Now the Stars have lost him, and it will take the work of several to fill his many roles.

"It's a great opportunity for some other guys," Hatcher said. " I took a lot of ice time out there, but some guys can come in and play some more now.

"There's a lot of players that can do the job, physically. I think now they're going to have to."

The Stars have not been an overly physical team of late. With their largest player out for a month, that situation isn't likely to improve when they face the Blues at Reunion Arena on Wednesday.

"We're not going to have the physical element we had back there, but we'll have some other elements that will be positive," Hitchcock said. "It's going to put the onus on everybody, not just defensemen. As a group, we have to respond to this challenge. He's a huge element for our hockey club, but this is somebody else's opportunity."

Richard Matvichuk, who has played mostly with Hatcher this season, will move to the right side and play with Mike Lalor. The other regular pairings - Craig Ludwig with Sergei Zubov and Darryl Sydor with Grant Ledyard will remain the same.

Hitchcock said the team's four assistant captains probably will rotate in wearing the "C." One of those will be veteran defenseman Craig Ludwig, who said this injury won't have the impact it might have had a year ago.

"If this had happened last year, you could have closed the doors in January and canceled our games. But now we know that there's nothing we can do about it; we just have to keep playing the way we’ve been playing," Ludwig said.

"The way it is now, he can come back in January and February, get ready for the playoffs and play 45 minutes a night. Start earning his paycheck."

This is not the first major injury faced by the Stars this season. Joe Nieuwendyk missed 16 games total, first because of fractured rib cartilage, followed by the death of his mother. And Hitchcock said.

Stars' fans don't realize the loss of Bob Bassen since he has never played for this team, save for 13 games at the end of last year.

Bassen has missed all of this season and isn't due to return until around Jan. 1.

"Bassen is underestimated for the impact he has in the room with this team," Hitchcock said. "This adversity is just going to help us in the long run if we can keep the pace up."

Said center Brent Gilchrist, "I don't think it's something we focus on at all. When you're not playing well, every blow solidifies the excuses you bring. Last year when we got an injury, it was like, `Look at this, we get no breaks.' But we don't look at this as the end of the world."

© 1996 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved

Tim Cowlishaw / Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News, Loss of Hatcher doesn't scare Stars.,The Dallas Morning News, 12-11-1996, pp 3B.