Critical Mass: Why Pete DeBoer's Voice Might Have Worn Out Its Welcome with the Dallas Stars

A very good coach ended his time in Dallas in a very familiar way

On Friday morning, Jim Nill announced that the Dallas Stars had relieved Pete DeBoer of his coaching duties earlier that morning.

At noon today, Jim Nill met with the media to explain the decision and to answer questions from the media. And being who he is, Nill took nearly 30 minutes’ worth of questions with his typical poise, giving calm, good-natured answers to hard questions about a hard decision.

That presser (which you should watch) was a good reminder of how Nill has lasted as long as he has as the Stars’ general manager. He is in the process of hiring his sixth coach during his time here, and you can tell he is nobody’s fool.

You can watch the presser and pull out key quotes for yourself, but here are a couple of things that stuck out to me from what Nill said today. I’ll keep it brief, as I hopped in the car and drove down to Cedar Park right after Nill’s presser, where I’m preparing to watch the Texas Stars fight to keep their season alive tonight at 7:00pm against the Abbotsford Canucks.

One other non-DeBoer note from Nill’s conference today: he revealed some injuries we hadn’t previously known about. Those included a shoulder injury to Tyler Seguin which he will need to rehab this summer (which makes Seguin’s performance that much more impressive in Round 3), and a shoulder injury to Lian Bichsel, too.

Bichsel also had a plate removed from his ankle today. That plate was inserted after he broke that ankle two years ago while preparing for the IIHF World Championships for Team Switzerland.

Nill also revealed that Roope Hintz’s foot continued to bleed after the slash from Darnell Nurse, and that it took a couple of days after the injury to find a way to stop the bleeding. (My goodness.)

Finally, Nill confirmed that Jason Robertson’s injury in Game 82 was indeed a sprained MCL, and that Robertson was only really back to himself midway through the third round, when he scored four of the Stars’ final five goals of 2024-25.

Okay, let’s get to the DeBoer decision.

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1. “Piling on”

Jim Nill acknowledged that DeBoer’s decision to pull Jake Oettinger after two goals in Game 5 was one he understood. He points to how Oetinger understood that even franchise goalies can get pulled in those situations when the team is grasping at straws, but that it was the “piling on” that the Stars’ goalie wasn’t as comfortable with. And when you go back and listen to Oettinger’s comments last Saturday about being “embarrassed” during the game, you can see where he’s coming from.

Oettinger had to get yelled at by his coach during a timeout to get out of the net, then benched by said coach in the Stars’ final game of the season—while sitting next to Ray Ferraro analyzing Oettinger’s failures the entire time.

Oettinger is an adult with exceptional mental fortitude, by all accounts (and my own experience of him), but he is also a human being. That had to hurt. And given the troubled history between DeBoer and Marc-André Fleury in Vegas (as well as him and Robin Lehner), I think another round of goaltending drama was the last thing DeBoer needed hanging over his head as he went into the final year of his contract in Dallas.

Then, Oettinger had to hear DeBoer double and triple down on those critical remarks after the game and on exit interview day, before which time DeBoer had not reached out to speak with Oettinger. And while Nill said he understood that DeBoer may not have had time to speak with Oettinger, I think the fact that DeBoer didn’t appear to make an effort to solidify his relationship with his goalie in the day or two after the team was eliminated only worsened the perception of his leadership.

“That’s a component of it,” Nill said of DeBoer’s handling of the Oettinger situation and its aftermath. “But there’s other things that take place during the season.”

What were those others things? Well, I can think of one or two, but note how Nill comes back to the Oettinger situation and specifically calls out again how there was more to the decision.

“It was a component of it,” Nill reiterated, “But it wasn’t the final decision.”

So, let’s look at a bit more of the big picture, if we can.

2. Public Perception

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned as much today is how DeBoer also cost his organization $100,000 earlier this year by violating the NHL/NHLPA’s collective bargaining agreement.

Dallas Stars Head Coach Peter DeBoer Says Team Held Optional Practice on December 26 in Apparent Violation of Collective Bargaining Agreement

To DeBoer’s credit, he did eventually own the decision to hold a practice (of whatever kind) on December 26. But his both revealing the decision on camera and then contesting the definition of the practice as such after the fact were not a great look for the organization.

When people running an organization sit down to make big decisions like firing a manager/head coach, they look for patterns in decision-making, and how those decisions reflect upon the organization as a whole. And with DeBoer one pattern was clear: he is a pretty stubborn coach.

That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. NHL coaches don’t reach the apex of their profession by being wishy-washy, after all. But when it comes to keeping your job after a disappointing end to the season, I think a pattern of decisions that don’t work out can be a problem—especially if they lead to more and more players losing trust in their coach’s ability to lead them.

With the Oettinger comments—which Nill acknowledged that everyone had a problem with, including a purportedly remorseful DeBoer in their final conversation earlier Friday morning—I believe that players perceived that as a coach blaming one of the most longsuffering stars of their franchise for problems that were a lot more widespread and systemic. And given how much of an emphasis this organization has always placed on accountability under Jim Nill, that situation was always going to necessitate a hard conversation.

A head coach tends to be the primary representative of a team’s identity. And under DeBoer, the Stars began to come apart in uncharacteristic ways toward the end of the season. I think this is the “grind” Nill mentions after the 4 Nations tournament, which culminated in the Stars’ losing seven straight games to finish the season—something even DeBoer acknowledged “bled into” the team’s performance eventually, despite Oettinger and Mikko Rantanen carrying them into the third round (with help from other key performers, too).

For the record, Nill said the Roope Hintz slash and lack of physical response from the Stars wasn’t something he had a problem with. Nill pointed to how the game was 2-1 when Nurse slashed Hintz, and how maybe the Stars could have responded more forcefully if the game had been 5-0. But he referenced how the team didn’t want to do something “stupid,” which at least confirms that DeBoer wasn’t on an island in terms of how the Stars chose to try to win rather than pummel Edmonton in response to Hintz’s injury.

As for other comments by the coach, DeBoer even went so far as to say, after Game 5, that he wasn’t certain this Stars team was even the best one of the last three years that he had coached—a very bold statement, given the presence of Mikko Rantanen up front. It was also a bit of an indictment of his general manager, given that Nill is the one who builds the team. So it was no surprise that when Nill was asked about this statement today, he (gently) disagreed with DeBoer’s assessment. That disconnect could, like the Oettinger comments, be interpreted as DeBoer, in a moment of frustration and disappointment, blaming something out of his control rather than taking responsibility, even if that’s not what he meant. In the NHL coaching business, intent is always subordinated to the results.

Make no mistake: DeBoer is a very, very successful NHL coach. His Stars won more regular season games than any other team in the NHL over the last three years, and they won the third-most playoff games in the NHL during his tenure, too. DeBoer is, in a lot of ways, the most successful Stars’ coach since Ken Hitchock 1.0. And that’s probably why Tom Gaglardi told Tim Cowlishaw recently that he didn’t have much of an appetite to make such a change. But Nill told the media today that things went back and forth this week as he listened to exit interviews from players and took everything into account, and things apparently reached a breaking point.

When an NHL head coach hasn’t won a Stanley Cup, people spend a lot of time asking what’s wrong with their approach, that they haven’t climbed the mountain. And DeBoer, for better or for worse, never seemed to operate like he needed to prove those doubters wrong. And in the end, he won’t have a chance to do so—not in Dallas, at least.

I’m reminded of something Jeff Reese said he learned from John Tortella: “If you’re coaching to save your job, you’re not doing your job.” And in that sense, you have to give DeBoer a lot of credit for sticking to his principles, even if they ended up costing him. He never tried to compromise his principles for the sake of softening his tone.

“I can’t coach, I can’t make those decisions out of fear of doing [a press conference after elimination]. I can’t. That’s not how I’m built,” said DeBoer, in what turned out to be his final press conference as Dallas Stars Head Coach.

I have a lot of respect for DeBoer’s sticking to his guns. And I suspect he knew pretty quickly after Game 5 that his doing so was likely to end in his departure from Dallas.

3. What’s Next?

Tim Cowlishaw cites a source “close to the situation” who claims the Stars’ next coach will not be a “retread,” which would seem to rule out someone like Gerard Gallant and those of his ilk.

I’m in Cedar Park tonight, where Neil Graham (whose name is going to be discussed a lot in the immediate future, including Nill’s mentioning him as a potential candidate today) is coaching yet another highly successful Texas Stars team. We talked yesterday about how Graham might have fit into a mid-year hiring next season, but I’m not sure Nill wants to go into free agency with an NHL rookie of a head coach, especially with a Stars team that is so dead-set on winning now that they fired one of the best coaches (demonstrably) of the last three years.

Note how Nill himself kind of shook his head this morning, marveling that he had actually had to fire such a successful coach. Success is a tough taskmaster, and Nill was very forthright about that. It is a tough business, indeed.

So, if the Stars don’t go for a retread, who could they target for the head job, if not Graham? We’ll talk more about that on Monday for D Magazine, but Jim Nill did mention the success of junior teams like Medicine Hat (coached by former Texas Stars head coach and Dallas assistant coach Willie Desjardins, who left the organization to coach the Vancouver Canucks back in 2014) and the Kitchener Rangers (coached by Jussi Ahokas, who just won Coach of the Year in the OHL, and also happens to be Finnish). I’m not sure Nill was revealing any plans as much as pointing to how many great candidates are out there, so don’t jump to too many conclusions.

Nill did say the search would be one he approaches with an open mind. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have an ideal candidate in mind—he almost surely does—but if Nill approaches it like he does most other things in his tenure with Dallas, the final product is likely to look better and better as time goes by. And as with many of his decisions in the past, he’s likely to surprise us with it—much as he did on Friday morning.