An Afternoon with Tom Gaglardi and Dallas Stars Media

The team's owner spoke with a few of us before Game 2 this week. Here's what that was like, from my perspective.

Tom Gaglardi has always been a hockey fan. And as the owner of the NHL’s Dallas franchise since 2011, that means he’s also been a big Stars fan for well over a decade now. So when the Stars began this playoff run last weekend, Gaglardi came to Dallas, as many other fans did.

And while he was in town before Game 2 against Colorado, Gaglardi agreed to sit down with me and the other media members who have been covering the team with regularity this season: Sam Nestler from DLLS, Lia Assimakopoulos from the Dallas Morning News, Taylor Baird of NHL.com, and Mike Heika of The Venerable Mike Heika. Also, he works for the Stars.

Note: I’m going to unlock this piece for everyone, which I normally don’t do for exclusive interviews. But this one feels different, given the group setting, so feel free to pass the link along to anyone interested.

Compared to other recent Media roundtables in Dallas recently, it couldn’t have been more relaxed. Gaglardi welcomed us at a table in MOXIE’s in Uptown, which was appropriate, given that the Gaglardi family owns Northland Properties, which owns said restaurant chain.

The five of us walked in to find Gaglardi seated behind a table in a corner booth. The billionaire Stars owner was dressed in a gray blazer and light blue shirt without a tie. He was probably wearing jeans—I’m not enough of a sartorialist to notice these things—but it was his shoes that stuck out: Gaglardi was wearing the white sneakers designed by his number one center, Roope Hintz, whose proceeds from shoe sales¹ go to helping underprivileged children play sports in his native Finland.

I’m not sure how many billionaires you’ve met, but I haven’t met many. (I run a Substack, not a luxury condo leasing company.) This is a man whose net worth exceeds that of Tom Cruise, who owns three different professional sports franchises, and who has coached youth hockey back home in Vancouver.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a billionaire “type,” except insofar as they all have a lot of confidence in their ability to make things happen. And given what Gaglardi has done in over a decade in Dallas, it would be hard to argue with that confidence. He bought a team enmired in backrupcy, and it’s now worth $2 billion, nearly ten times what he paid for it.

We were told by a member of the Stars’ PR team that we would have around 25 minutes or so, but Gaglardi himself spoke up toward the end to extend that time. You can do that when you own the whole thing, I suppose.

Another media member started off by asking about one of the most recent developments in local sports ownership: the Mavericks’ announcement that they’re looking to move out of the American Airlines Center after their lease as co-tenants with the Stars expires in 2031, when the arena will be thirty years old (which is hard to believe).

Gaglardi made two things clear: first, that the Mavericks are the ones actively exploring leaving downtown after that date, not the Stars. And second, that nobody really knows what’s going to happen then.

“My heart would say we should stay in the city, and downtown. It’s a beautiful arena.” Gaglardi said, “You know, it’s gonna have to be reimagined for another 30 years [after 2031], but there’s been work done to that effect, some really cool concepts and plans, and I believe the AAC has a bright future.”

Gaglardi is positive but noncommittal. He’s also a realist, and someone who has bought and developed a lot of land downtown in Dallas. But when asked whether his investment in downtown would commit him to staying in the AAC past 2031, he demurs a bit. The investments are solid ideas on their own, but they don’t dictate where the Stars will play.

“I’ve always thought we would be playing there [the AAC] post-2031,” he says, “and now we know the Mavericks are going to do something different, and so we’ll deal with what that new reality might look like.”

Gaglardi speaks of his fellow owner Patrick Dumont in collegial terms. He talks about how several months ago, Dumont had met with him to talk about both teams potentially going to a new building together. But more recently, that’s changed. The Mavericks’ owner has a vision for the basketball in basketball-only arena, while the Stars are doing their own research.

One thing that is helpful, however, is that the Mavericks have made their plans clear far in advance.

“We didn’t create the topic. The topic’s been created by the Mavericks, and that’s fine. I appreciate that,” Gaglardi says, “versus coming out in 2029 and saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ To have six years of runway to know where they’re going to be gives us lots of chances, lots of time to figure out what we’re going to do.”

Will that post-2031 plan be in the AAC, somewhere else downtown, or in another area around the Metroplex? Gaglardi says cities have reached out to the Stars, given the Mavericks’ public hunt for a new home, but he’s not necessarily looking to go anywhere.

When I reflect on the conversation, it seems pretty likely that the Stars will play in a much nicer arena in six years; whether it’s a highly renovated AAC or a completely new arena, however, truly hasn’t been decided yet.

Gaglardi also points out that only 11 NBA and NHL franchises share a building now. “And that number’s not going to increase.”

In my reflection, I also make a mental note to write about the specific sounds of the hockey-to-basketball floor conversion in the AAC that have been the backdrop to more than a few of my postgame stories this season.

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Gaglardi is surely hoping the next six years are a lot less tumultuous than the last half-dozen, which featured a global pandemic that made life difficult for two of his main industries: sports and hospitality.

During the COVID-19 days, people weren’t traveling or staying in hotels, and teams couldn’t have fans in the building, and then only in limited amounts.

“A strong balance sheet,” answers Gaglardi, matter-of-factly. He answers some of these questions by looking ahead at nobody in particular, probably remembering details and trying not to exclude any individual person at the table, but also, I think, because billionaires don’t need to use their gaze to keep your attention. He knows that he is the reason we are there, and he has no need to command a gaze, because his presence does that all on its own.

Gagalrdi goes on to point out how a lot of other business didn’t survive the pandemic, crediting cost-saving measures and Canadian financial incentives to allowing the Gaglardi family to survive a rough couple of years.

image of Dallas Stars year-by-year revenue and operation income via forbes.com/teams/dallas-stars/

“Hockey was painful, no question about it,” Gaglardi says. “We continued to honor the players’ contracts even though we weren’t playing, and then we were playing in empty arenas. It was painful.”

But the Stars made it through that pain, including a Stanley Cup Final run in a bubble up in Edmonton five years ago this summer. And even though they didn’t get any of the financial windfall that usually accompanies a deep playoff run for NHL teams, Gaglardi isn’t dwelling on what could have been.

“What I’ve learned is, you’d have a hard time filling a phone booth of people that feel sorry for sports teams owners,” he says with a smile. We all laugh.

When asked about potential NHL expansion, Gaglardi says the Board of Governors hasn’t discussed it yet, but agrees that expanding to places like Houston has been discussed in the media.

“I don’t know if we’re gonna expand or not,” Gaglardi clarifies. “I just hasn’t been a topic discussed at the board level.”

For what it’s worth, Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly has been one to do so, after meeting with another billionaire a few months ago about potential Houston expansion.

“I don’t have any comment on it other than Houston would be an interesting market, and it’d be fun to have another team in the state, sure. But I’m just not aware of it being on the radar screen.”

Internally, I wonder if Gaglardi would lobby against expanding to Houston behind the scenes, given the Stars’ #texashockey marketing push in recent years. The Stars are at an apex of their competitive cycle, and they still have to compete with the Cowboys for even the smallest bit of oxygen in major sports media. Cutting potentially half the state out of their fanbase surely isn’t an appealing thing for the business of the Stars, but I suppose being diplomatic is better than appearing jealous at this point.

As my good friend Cameron always likes to say: Desperation is a stinky cologne.

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Speaking of the business of hockey, Gaglardi sees it as pretty similar to any other hospitality industry, really. You just have to think about it the right way.

“I’m in the business of selling inventory that expires daily, if you think about hotels. And hockey’s the same thing,” he says.

“I’ve got a ticket, I got a seat I gotta sell tonight. And if I don’t sell it tonight, it’s worth nothing tomorrow, right? So it’s providing service and a great product, and you’ve gotta get paid for it. It’s always kind of come naturally to me.”

That aptitude, natural or otherwise, hasn’t kept Gaglardi from trying new things, either. Some have been less more controversial, like having Jim Lites publicly trash Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin in a famous rant back in 2019. Others have been more prescient, like the decision to abandon a regional sports network last year in favor of launching their own streaming service in Victory+.

Gaglardi sees the NHL team business divided into three big “buckets”, to use his term: tickets, sponsorships, and media.

As for tickets, the business is healthy. The Stars have sold out over 100 consecutive home games at American Airlines Center and made deep playoff runs in two consecutive years. They’ve won the second-most playoff series of any team in the league since 2019, and in the NHL, success is always the biggest factor in ticket sales.

Ticket prices are also going up next season, so the revenue will only continue to look good on that front.

As for media, they’ve also made it through a full NHL season with a broadcast model that abandoned the certainty of exorbitant RSN contracts in favor of betting on themselves.

“We feel like we’re on the right track,” Gaglardi says of Victory+. “You talk to other owners, and they don’t know what to do.”

But unlike other owners, the Stars jumped ship from the crumbling RSN model, and Gaglardi says all signs are that it’s been a big success, so long as that third bucket—advertisers—follows the viewership to a digital platform.

That’s where that third bucket—sponsorships—comes into play.

“If I’m an advertiser, you wanna know digital, because you know who’s watching. You know about them. And you know how many they are, exactly. You know how many guys saw your ad. You can’t say that when you’re watching on traditional television.”

According to Gaglardi, the Texas Rangers owners (with whom he had lunch the other day) are “thrilled” with how the platform has worked for them early in the MLB season. The Anaheim Ducks also jumped on board the Victory+ platform this year, as well as an entire junior hockey league in the WHL—a league which includes the Kamloops Blazers, which are also owned by Gaglardi.

So, after a full season, is Victory+ instead of Bally/FanDuel/FoxSports a viable economic media model?

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Gaglardi says. “We have more eyeballs watching our games today than we did under the RSN.”

I ask about the playoff numbers from Game 1, but Gaglardi says he hasn’t seen those yet. My understanding is that the team isn’t getting game-by-game raw numbers from the Victory+ side of the business, but that they rather get reports on viewership over longer periods, with the data made a more presentable and digestible.

That’s just good business.

***

But again, Gaglardi is a hockey fan, always. And while he’s largely avoided the overinvolvement of some sports owners in DFW, he’s even further from the detachment that allowed Dumont to co-sign the Luka trade. I’ll forever remember the story from the summer of 2014 (when the Stars acquired Jason Spezza) about Gaglardi writing down Stars line combinations alongside his case notes during a trial for harmful alteration of fish habitat.

He loves hockey, and it shows. When asked about the Mikko Rantanen trade, Gaglardi did not defer to his General Manager, Jim Nill. He talks of the trade in the first person, making it clear he was part of the discussions about the trade before any decision was made.

“I don’t like trading first round picks. I’ve traded three of them this year,” Gaglardi says. “It just kind of felt like this is what we had to do.” He pauses for a few seconds, thinking. “Those are the decisions we made. I guess we’ll see in a couple weeks or so whether they were worth it.”

If you sense a tinge of uncertainty there, you’re not imagining things.

“All the contract is, is a bet on future performance. That’s all it is. So, did we make a good bet? That’s TBD. I mean, he’s a hell of a player,” Gaglardi points out.

He also points out that keeping a roster like the Stars’ together with the new $12 million addition is a bridge they’ll cross later, because the price for acquiring Rantanen was not only first-round picks. It was also trading away a young, cost-controlled player with deep ties to Gaglardi: Logan Stankoven.

“Oh man,” Gaglardi says when asked about Stankoven, in a tone that shows how much the memory of the trade still stings. He will use the word “tough” around ten times in talking about the trade. He starts by mentioning how he has a son the same age as Stankoven, and how the two would play against each other as young as eight or nine years old.

“I’ve known that family. I drafted him twice!” Gaglardi says with a wry chuckle, referring to drafting Stankoven for his WHL franchise as well as for Dallas in 2021.

“It was terrible. The timing of it, with Dallas coming to Vancouver, and it couldn’t have been worse. It was a tough day, because I always thought Logan would be playing here.”

Gaglardi tells about how 300 of Stankoven’s family and friends had already scheduled a trip out to Vancouver to see Stankoven play for Dallas in British Columbia, only for Stankoven to be traded away right before the Stars arrived in town.

According to Gaglardi, the 300 fans showed up anyway, filling up one of his bars (he’s in the hospitality industry, remember) in downtown Vancouver to watch Stankoven’s debut with Carolina on television.

“I’m like, I can’t go there, I can’t face these people, but I did,” Gaglardi says. “I went there and I think I bought everybody a round, all the 300 Stankoven jerseys. Just, ‘I’m sorry.’”

I had wondered back in March how much input Gaglardi had given before the Rantanen trade. Jim Nill, after all, is about as highly respected a man as there is in hockey, and Gaglardi has retiterated this many times—not to mention keeping him for 12 seasons and five different head coaches.

“It’s like, ‘Jim, there’s gotta be somebody else that they want. There’s gotta be,’” Gaglardi recalls. “But that’s the guy they wanted. It was tough.”

My belief after this conversation is that Nill, Gaglardi, and everyone else agreed that the chance to acquire Rantanen was too good to pass up, and they swung big. But I also can’t help thinking that if Stankoven and the Hurricanes make a deeper run than Rantanen and the Stars this year, it’s going to make for a bit of an uncomfortable summer.

Not to mention the eight seasons after that, at $12 million apiece.

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How does someone like Gaglardi measure players like Rantanen? Well, one thing that becomes clear: he’s not just looking at sports analytics to give him the answers.

“I certainly am in hockey meetings, and there’s more analytics than there were,” Gaglardi says. “I don’t know where we would sit in terms of the other teams, how much we rely on them. That’s a question for Jim [Nill].”

Gaglardi hazards a guess that the Stars are probably average in terms of how analytically focused their organization is. He points out that he was one of the early investors in SportLoqiq, but confesses he “more old school.”

“There’s guys in the league, owners in the league that will tell me all about my team,” Gaglardi says with a laugh, “Tell me, ‘this guy’s analytic, he’s unbelievable, we love your guy,’…that’s not me.”

“I think at the end of the day, that’s Jim Nill’s…he’s a gut guy,” Gaglardi says. “He looks in analytics, we all look at it. I would be surprised if we’re an above-average analytic team, but that’s just my guess.”

I decide that now is not the time to point out the Stars’ precipitous drop in expected goals over the last month.

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As for the present, which features an eight-game losing streak by the Stars that wouldn’t get broken until later that night (actually early the next morning), Gaglardi says the team hadn’t been playing well for a while, which echoes much of what Pete DeBoer had been saying long before the losing streak began.

He also points to the absence of Miro Heiskanen as an exacerbating factor.

“When you have your best player out of the lineup for three months, it’s going to take a toll on you,” Gaglardi says. “That’s 24, 25 minutes that’ve gotta get picked up by other guys. I just think we kinda ran out of gas a little bit.”

And while Nill made moves at the deadline to fill the holes left by Heiskanen along with long-term injuries to Tyler Seguin and Nils Lundkvist, the Stars’ owner points out the issues with trying to patch those holes on the fly.

“We brought three guys in, and that’s always interesting,” Gaglardi says, with a word choice that is highly ambiguous.

“I think you bring a guy like Mikko in, it can be a distraction in terms of, ‘this guy’s so good, it’s gonna make us way better.’ There’s lots of history in these types of things where teams don’t really respond right away.”

Gaglardi says that while the injuries and big trades aren’t a path he would have chosen in a vacuum, he did like the team’s effort in the first game of the playoffs, calling the last month of the regular season “irrelevant.”

“Obviously I believe in the group,” Gaglardi says. “I traded three first round picks, right? This is a team that I believe can win this thing. That’s what this is all about, trying to figure out a way to win. It’s a tough trophy to win.”

“I’ll tell you, in the playoffs, there’s days you feel great, there’s days you think you’ll never win again.”

When asked a hypothetical question about whether injuries would be the team’s main reason for losing, if they do, Gaglardi makes it clear he isn’t going to talk about losing the series unless that actually happens.

“I think we will win this series.”

Again, I can’t help but reflect on how another team in Dallas that didn’t even make it into the playoffs just traded away their best player less than a year after making it to the NBA Finals.

The Rantanen trade shouldn’t be completly judged for years from now—remember Joe Pavelski’s first season?—but if Rantanen doesn’t start materially helping the Stars win games (i.e. scoring), the judgments will come all the same.

Gaglardi is too good of a businessman not to know that—he called all trades “a bet on future performance” after all—and like anyone who places a bet, you can see he’s not immune to some nerves after his team goes down 1-0 in their opening series.

Interestingly enough, when sports gambling comes up later, Gaglardi says diplomatically that he simply sees gambling as another line of advertisers for the business, “which is welcome.”

But he seems to have a much more mixed perspective on gambling than Dumont, whose own empire (as the son-in-law of Miram Adelson) is the casino company Las Vegas Sands.

“I’ve got my personal opinions of gambling, which I won’t talk about,” Gaglardi says. “It’d be, I think, good and bad for Texas. But I don’t really get a say in that, so we’ll see what happens.”

This surprises me, in the moment.

Perhaps it’s just my assumption that all hyper-rich people see gambling as an easy revenue stream they’d be fools not to use. Or perhaps it’s just my resignation to the proliferation of gambling in the sports world, the biggest dollars are which are generated by people suffering from addiction.

I wonder at that moment, and not for the first time, if we’ll someday have the sports gambling versions of the black-and-white anti-smoking ads I grew up watching. And I am surprised to hear a billionaire businessman hinting at some reservations about the gambling industry, whatever they might be.

Maybe the bar is so low for sports ownership in this town that I am making too much of a cryptic statement about not saying anything. But that moment has stuck with me.

***

In terms of the hockey landscape in Texas, Gaglardi talks with pride about the Dallas market as a whole, pointing out that Dallas has become a go-to market for USA hockey, as shown by the under-18 World Championships taking place in Frisco this spring.

Gaglardi also says something intriguing about the future of big hockey events in Dallas: “I’d love to see an outdoor game. And that’s gonna happen. I believe that’ll happen.”

When or where such an event would happen isn’t clear yet. The success of the January 2020 Winter Classic held in the Cotton Bowl, however, is recent evidence that such events can work in Texas, though. After all, the hockey landscape as a whole is, from folks I’ve spoke with in the hockey world, probably better than it’s ever been in Texas.

That fact has led to players like Blake Fiddler growing up skating in places Frisco, where he’s back skating again in the Under-18 World Championships this week.

Fiddler grew up here, even finding himself in the same locker room as Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn back when his father was teammates with them over a decade ago. Fiddler still skates with Benn on occasion, including last summer.

“This is where I do all my summer skates, so it’s cool to be back,” Fiddler told me last week after a Team USA practice in the rink adjoining the Stars’ practice ice. “I know my way around here pretty well. You know, a lot of hours spent here ever since I was a little kid.”

Fiddler could well be a first-round pick as a Texas hockey product. That would be pretty remarkable indeed.

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While Jim Lites and others had been looking to build more rinks and grow the hockey landscape in Dallas long before 2025, or even 2011—a fact Gaglardi points out himself—the Stars owner also takes some credit for rejuvenating the growth in Dallas hockey after his arrival.

“Pretty exciting, what’s happened in grassroots hockey in Dallas. You know, the Elite program, the rinks. We got so much demand to build more rink facilities, so it’s really cool to be involved with building hockey from the ground up. It’s great for the Stars business too, right?”

With the topic of local rinks being brought up, I can’t help but asking a more controversial question: what does he think about the USA Today story about three former Stars executives who were profiting by running an LLC that acted as an intermediary between hockey families traveling to tournaments in Texas and the hotels they were required to book?

“It was a very unfair article, in terms of what it was trying to say,” Gaglardi says. “There was an internal issue with it. Once we became aware of it, we addressed it, and so we’ve got a new team of folks running that business now, and they’re fantastic.”

My belief, which is only an inference from the team’s employee list on their website, is that the Stars may have “addressed it” by cutting ties with the three employees named by USA Today, as we discussed back in March.

“The old team just made some mistakes and didn’t tell us about them,” Gaglardi says. “But the article was really flawed, quite honestly. But we’ve addressed it, and off we go.”

There’s a momentary pause where it seems like he’s done talking about this issue, but Gaglardi adds one more thing.

“If you ask USA Hockey for a quote about our operations, we’re the gold standard,” Gaglardi says. “So it was a silly article, honestly. It didn’t even make sense to me. They didn’t even understand what was really the issue.”

Gaglardi does not elaborate about the matter, and the group moves on to a different subject before I can follow up. Alas, the perils of group interviews.

***

The final thing we talk about it the only player who has been a Dallas Star since before Gaglardi owned the team: Jamie Benn.

“I think we want Jamie, and Jamie wants to be here,” Gaglardi says of the captain’s future in Dallas. “And you know, pretty clear he can still play.”

(I make another mental note—they are stacking up at this point—that Gaglardi has chosen not to refer to Benn’s 17-game goalless streak to end the season stuck on 399 career goals.)

“I put Jamie in that category of player who, we saw it with Joe Pavelski,” Gaglardi says. “Joe would tell you at some point, ‘Okay, I’ll come for another year.’ And then you kind of go year by year, because the last thing a guy like Joe Pavelski would wanna do was sign a term that he didn’t think he could contribute.”

Gaglardi sees Benn going through a similar process at some point this summer.

“The two parties are gonna sit down, and Jamie’s gonna decide if he wants to play, how much longer,” Gaglardi says. “I don’t think it’s gonna be a difficult, you know, contentious process, but I don’t know. There just hasn’t been any real conversation other than the fact that we love him, and he loves us.”

Not for the first time, I opt not to ask about the 2019 Jim Lites diatribe in a group setting. Actions speak louder than words, and the team has clearly come around to appreciating the captain.

As for the player, it’s been clear that Benn has taken a reduced role on the team to keep helping them win: A little less for a lot more, and all that. I tend to agree with Gaglardi, in that I wouldn’t be shocked to see Benn take a reduced salary for one year at a time to keep doing the same.

Benn will be 36 in July, which is a number that continues to shock me. I’ve scoffed before at the idea that Benn would retire if the Stars go all the way this year—I think he’ll play at least another couple of years, to the end of Seguin’s current deal.

But like Gaglardi, I truly don’t know what Benn is thinking, and nobody will until the end of this season.

“If he’s playing hockey, it’s gonna be as a Dallas Stars. That would be my firm guess,” Gaglardi says in a turn of phrase I appreciate. “He saw how it worked for Joe, and we think the world of Joe. What a player to have.”

We wrap up, and the polite small talk and natural interview elongation happens. We shake hands and thank him for his time. Gaglardi stays in his seat as we get up and leave his restaurant to go write about his hockey team, which will win dramatically just after midnight.

I’m sure Gaglardi was cheering as loudly as anybody.

1. Gaglardi asked if we’d all gotten our pairs of Hintz’s shoes, yet. I chose not to go into detail about how I have not yet taken the 99 Euro plunge, but you should tell me how you like them, if you do.