A Word on the First Anniversary of Stars Thoughts on Substack
It's been quite a year. Thank you, for all of it.,
This weekend marked a full year since I moved Stars Thoughts from a Wordpress site over to Substack back at the end of January 2025.
That was a pretty nerve-wracking day, if I’ve never said it here. Asking people not just to read, but now to invest in this place was a very big risk. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the failed Kickstarters or GoFundMe pages I’d seen over the years, all the short-lived promises to deliver something that never get off the ground.
But we’re a year into our time here on Substack, and it’s been an unbelievable success. Beginning the nightmarish process of doing my taxes is made far less so by the plain fact that so many of you all have chosen and keep choosing to help this place exist. Now, one year is hardly an accomplishment worthy of hanging a banner, but please know I’m celebrating just a little bit, inside. It’s very cool, what has happened here over the past year.
I’m also grateful that Substack plays nicely enough with Wordpress to allow all the older, pre-Substack stuff to be migrated to the archives here. The downside of that migration is that most of the embedded images and videos got either lost or severely downgraded in resolution, making it seem though the 2024 version of this place operated on some kind of old Compy 386.
But overall, it’s been a delight to have everything in one place. It’s been great to take the leap of pouring time and effort and money into this place full-time, and it’s been even more rewarding than I dared to hope for to see so many people keep signing up to support this work. To have a one-team hockey blog in Dallas, Texas sticking consistently on the Sports Bestsellers leaderboard continues to be preposterous, and this is probably the first and last time I’ll mention that fact in this space. But it means a great deal to me, and I will never take it for granted.
Growth is good for me personally, because actual revenue allows me both to live and, more importantly, to pour more time and resources into getting good stories, traveling on more road trips, and even partnering with other independent creators to use sweet, licensed photos for stories like this one:
Turns out, y’all really like the Dallas Stars. Who knew?
As this site has kept growing, I’ve tried to be responsible with balancing high expectations and hustle, to look for smart ways to keep growing without making growth the telos of the whole thing. If what we’re writing and discussing here is worth a few of your bucks to support—and apparently, to a surprising number of you, it is—then I feel like I’ve accomplished something meaningful.
It remains delightfully unbelievable that this place has become the biggest part of what I do for a living, and I try not to oversaturate the air with gratitude for that fact every time I write. But please, know that gratitude is a fundamental part of the ecosystem here, always.
Ultimately, my goal is for ST to keep on being a fantastic place to read and learn about the Dallas Stars. And I hope that this past year has been at least a start towards that goal, and that this place is something that all you supporters can take pride in, too. If you’ve shared even one story from this place with someone else over the past year, then we’re doing something right, I think.
I am only a normal man, but I’ve learned a heapin’ helpin’ of things about the gap left by the continued disappearance of the old landscape of advertising-based media models over the past years. Here are a few things that stick out to me from the past season-and-a-half on the beat, after a decade (more or less) before that as a blogger:
If you show up in Finland and say you’re a writer who covers an NHL team, the Finnish press will foolishly listen to you and write about your exploits. You will be very grateful that the language difference will suppress these search results.
Bill Daly and Gary Bettman, like most NHL GMs and some players and coaches, are both very good at answering questions without answering them, so being in a scrum with either of them makes you think way too hard about exactly how you phrase a question. It won’t matter; they’re slippery by design.
The most fun stories don’t always have to be dramatic or overserious, but they do take time. In fact, even a very lighthearted story can still be just as much fun to write as to read, so long as you take the time required to get all the facts.
Sean Shapiro says this all the time, but it’s true: Good stories often come from standing around for long, long periods of time. And one of those times, you’ll happen to be in the right place. You can almost know when those times will be, but my commitment is that I will always do my very best to be in those places, as much as I can anticipate them—even if it means driving 45 minutes across the icy roads last Sunday to get to practice in order to hear Mikko Rantanen talk about his flu symptoms. Lovely stuff, really.
That means patience is, as ever, a virtue. Sometimes, you will just happen to be up inordinately late on a Saturday night, and you’ll end up being at your computer at the right time, with a decent enough platform, to write about an earth-shattering (and heartbreaking) trade.
Respect is earned, but it isn’t a quid pro quo thing. Treat every player (and person) the way you would want to be treated, and you might end up getting some really good stories. But also, you might not. Either way, treating people the right way is still worth it, because it’s the right thing to do.
Wyatt Johnston’s story about how he learned this lesson as a kid from an interaction with a Canadian hockey legend really sticks with me, by the way.
Despite what one of my journalism professors told me in college, not every interview has to be done with an eye towards a story. Sometimes, you just need to listen and learn in order to be more prepared for the next interview and the next story. This will mean resisting a whole lot of FOMO, and it will make for a lot of agonizing drives back home where you feel like you didn’t pin someone down to really squeeze a better quote out of the interview. But if you learned something, it’s never a waste of time.
Getting to hear Tyler Seguin talk at length about everything from housing economics to old teammates to what his time in Texas has meant was a great example of that. Talk about learning something:
This is getting saccharine, so I’ll end with this: It’s always important to be just as certain about what I do know as it is to be certain about what I don’t know. Social media creates a lot of pressure to have “takes” on stuff, and there is certainly a time and a place for such things. But overall, I want to do my best to write stories that readers learn things from—but stories that are true. I want to do justice to players, coaches, and executives, rather than just mining for soundbites and “engagement.” The very best journalism stands the test of time, because it tells real stories about real people. And because readers are also (mostly) real people, that’s a worthwhile endeavor, every time.
Thank you all for your support, truly.
As far as highlights in the near future, we have a Founder’s Choice piece requested by Matt coming out this month, as well as plenty of coverage on the Stars and the Olympics in February. And as far as the even nearer future, Gavin and I will be driving down to Cedar Park this very weekend for what we hope will be a fascinating bit of Texas Stars coverage, so look forward to that.
Anyway, here’s to Year Two at this place. May I get slightly less ignorant with each passing day. (Miracles happen, right?)
Dude - you’re the best reporter covering the team - and maybe all time. Outstanding.
You're killing it, kid. Congratulations.