A Fairly Exhaustive Look at the Changes Glen Gulutzan's Dallas Stars Sound Likely to Make on the Ice This Year

The lines, they are a-changin'. Maybe.

Things will be different this year. That’s by design, as you don’t generally fire a successful hockey coach of a very good team unless you want things to be different.

So when Jim Nill brought in Glen Gulutzan to replace Pete DeBoer, it’s clear that the two have something of an aligned vision when it comes to what those changes are. But while it’s easy to typify new and old coaches from an outside perspective and project how one might shift the team towards defense or offense or safe or risky play, the Stars are in a very unique situation.

They know full-well that having the best record in the NHL during the three years of DeBoer’s tenure didn’t happen by accident. And Gulutzan has been exceedingly deliberate, from everything I’ve heard, to reiterate that message. He isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but rather to make some tweaks. To add that “one degree” or “one percent” (he’s used both terms at various times) that will get them past clubs like Gulutzan’s former team in Edmonton, giving them a real chance to win a trophy that will vindicate all the work that Nill, et al. have done over the past decade and more.

This summer, I’ve been reading and listening to everything Gulutzan has said since being hired. And today, I wanted to lay out what I think we’ve learned from all of his public messaging thus far.

Gulutzan knows how to stay on-message. He’s pointedly keeping some things under wraps until he has a chance to implement them on the ice, but some clear themes have nonetheless emerged that I think we can safely point to as changes the team is going to make, even before training camp arrives in a few weeks.

As Gulutzan himself joked about in his introductory presser, most new coaches tend to espouse the same virtues upon being hired: Play fast, be hard to play against, be physical, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

But those are just basic themes. The real changes are the “tweaks” he and his team are planning to make under the hood, as much or even more than ones they’ll clearly outline in response to questions from media members.

I don’t think anyone really expecting him to lay out his entire system in detail, complete with X’s and O’s and an accompanying Prezi. But I do think that we have a little more info when looking at the entirety of what he’s said so far than we might realize. So, I’ve tried to put together everything we’ve heard from hours and hours of interviews over the last couple of months in order to lay out what we know (or can safely guess) up to this point.

This is a long piece with lots of quotes and clips, and it wound up being over 4,000 words. But dagnabbit, this is Stars Thoughts, and we don’t do things halfway. I’m citing my sources and giving you my thoughts with as much clarity as I have them right now, because that’s the whole point of being my own editor. (Thank goodness for Substack’s audio feature that allows you listen to these things rather than only read them, right?)

For example, if you listened to Gulutzan’s interview with Bob Sturm and The Hardline on The Ticket last month, you might have heard this bit when Gulutzan was asked about how the Oilers approached the Stars from a tactical perspective:

“Yes, when we did play [the Stars], we had certain things that we thought we could do against Dallas to give us the advantage. You know, it’s not a hundred things. It’s two or three little things that we tried to implement. We knew it was gonna be tight. Our players knew it was gonna be tight. But if I sat Leon [Draisaitl] and Connor [McDavid] down right here, and we all had a chat, they would both tell you, ‘It’s not just about putting us on the ice.’ They’d tell you that. You have to have a plan.”

[…]

“The thing I like the most about this game, is when you get into the playoffs, you’re dissecting, and you’re looking for the one little thing that can help. So on the inverse of that, I’m certainly coming in here, and I want to try to correct maybe some of the things that we tried to exploit.”

-Glen Gulutzan on The Ticket

So, it’s pretty clear that Gulutzan isn’t planning to just figure things out on the fly, but that we sees the Stars as a good team, but one with a few things that made them vulnerable to the Oilers in the last two years, when the Oilers won eight games to the Stars’ three across two Western Conference Finals. They had a plan to beat the Stars, and it worked.

Gulutzan is coming to Dallas directly after presenting his plan to address those same liabilities to Jim Nill and Tom Gaglardi. They seemed to like that plan enough to hire him, so I think it’s entirely worth some efforts to piece that plan together with the bits and pieces we have so far.

We don’t know that entire plan yet, but I think there are four big themes that Gulutzan has either mentioned outright or alluded to that we can really dig into with more than general guesses. We’ll begin with the most obvious one, which has more nuance to it than you might have realized.