Friday Dallas Stars Roundup: Glen Gulutzan Speculation, Nils Lundkvist and Mavrik Bourque Return, and the NHL Buyout Window Opens

The next ten days will be interesting ones

So we could keep on tryin'
Or we could sell the farm
Just buy me out
Buy me out

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One week from today, the NHL draft will begin. It’ll be weird and remote this year, thanks to Gary Bettman basically doing the “smoke this whole pack of cigarettes” thing to teach his NHL teams a lesson.

Until then, the Dallas Stars still have a few decisions to make. But two they won’t have to make involve their only two NHL restricted free agents: Nils Lundkvist and Mavrik Bourque.

Both players re-signed with Dallas on Friday for one year at around their qualifying offer numbers, though technically speaking, both contracts were just extensions, not QO’s. Lundkvist re-upped for the same $1.25 million he made last year, while Mavrik Bourque’s $950K deal is a slight raise from what I believe would have been a qualifying offer of around $938K.

Bourque was at least a mildly possible candidate to be targeted with an offer sheet, given the lack of flexibility the Stars have against the cap. And while Jim Nill is about as respected a general manager as there is in the league, St. Louis’s heists of Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg last year surely got some other teams thinking about repeating that formula. Nice guys do not tend to finish first in sports.

But now, any such offer sheet won’t happen. Not this summer, at least. Bourque took a one-year deal that is a sensible bet on himself after an up-and-down rookie year on a crowded roster. So in 2025-26 (which is an insane number to realize has actually arrived), there’s every chance Bourque could parlay that contract into a multi-year, multi-million dollar extension if he continues the trajectory he showed in the second half of what is now, officially “last” season.

With the departures of players like Mason Marchment, Logan Stankoven, and (perhaps) Mikael Granlund and Evgenii Dadonov, there should be a bit more room for Bourque on the wing. And in a pinch, he could also center a line, like we saw last season. The Stars will still need to fill out the rest of their forward group, but at least one or two of those vacancies will need to be taken by low-cost players like Justin Hryckowian, so Bourque should be able to win a spot in the starting twelve without too much trouble—so long as he doesn’t injure a groin muscle again, like he did last fall.

In Lundkvist’s case, it’s basically a do-over from last season. Lundkvist could well find himself partnered with Lian Bichsel or Esa Lindell¹, and if he stays healthy, there’s every reason to think a fresh start under a new coach could see him taking a big step. But if he doesn’t, the Stars aren’t locked into anything long term, and his deal would still be one most teams would at least consider taking in a trade, should it come to that. As usual with Jim Nill, the deal makes sense for both sides.

When I talked with Lundkvist during exit interviews, he mentioned that he had just been cleared for game action right before the Stars lost Game 5 against Edmonton. He didn’t play, of course, and he probably wouldn’t have beaten out either Cody Ceci or Alex Petrovic for a spot in Pete DeBoer’s lineup late in a playoff run regardless. But the fact that his shoulder was good to go before the summer means he can get a full regimen of offseason training without any hindrances. And if Lundkvist continues to put in the sort of offseason work that saw him record some of the best scores on the team during strength and conditioning tests in training camp last summer, he may arrive at training camp in, as they so often say, the best shape of his life.

Lundkvist isn’t naive, though. He knows it’s getting to that now-or-never point in his NHL career, and one would think he was extremely honest with Jim Nill in his exit interview about what he wants to prove, and how he plans to do it. This is the same player who requested a trade out of New York when he was sent down to the minors a few years ago, so it will be interesting to see how well he fits into the Stars’ lineup under a new head coach, whoever that may be.

Right now, the Stars’ defensive depth chart is a bit crowded, particularly if you assume Alex Petrovic will start the year in the NHL rather than being exposed on waivers at the end of camp, when he might be more likely to be claimed that he was last year, given his longer playoff campaign this time around.

Here’s what the Stars have in the fold right now, with Lundkvist now signed:

Harley-Heiskanen
Lindell-Lundkvist
Bichsel-Lyubushkin
Petrovic-Dumba

Last year, Nill chose to get Brendan Smith as a presumptive seventh defenseman. Petrovic could likely serve that same role next season, while Dumba’s $3.75 million cap hit is one the Stars pretty clearly would like to move, as we’ve discussed.

Nill will surely explore any trade avenues he can in the next few days, but the buyout window closes on June 30, the day before free agency begins. So if no palatable deal for Dumba is to be found—and even in a thin market for right-shot defensemen, it’s hard to see him drawing a ton of interest—then the Stars probably need to buy him out unless they want to make a more major subtraction. Though given the wealth of playoff revenue the Stars have raked in over the past three years, a buyout is probably not going to cause too much financial hardship for the club.

Buying out Dumba would give Dallas another $2.3 million in cap space this year, and suddenly things get a lot cleaner, as we talked about the other day. Doing the below would give the Stars a 12 forward/7 defensemen lineup to start opening night in 2025-26 (still crazy). In fact, let’s just cross off some of the completed items on this checklist, shall we?

One example: if the Stars moved Marchment for his full cap hit and bought out Dumba, that would give them over $7 million in cap space to use as following in 2025-26:

~$2 million to Jamie Benn (with further performance bonuses)
~$1 million to Mavrik Bourque
$1.25 million to Nils Lundkvist (his qualifying offer)
$870K to bring up Justin Hryckowian
$775K to Colin Blackwell (or a similar player)

Given that a two-years-absent Jonathan Toews just signed a (rather generous) deal with Winnipeg for $2 million in base salary plus millions more in games-played incentives (just about the easiest ones there are to achieve), I think the Benn prediction above is likely to be pretty close to what ends up happening, at least in base salary.

But that’s one the Stars don’t need to rush, as Nill can probably tweak the base salary up or down as needed once the Stars know exactly how much room they’ll have. Nill never tends to be in a rush, and you might recall that the Stars didn’t buy out Ryan Suter on the first day of the window last year, but rather the next day—though it was a much shorter window than this year’s.

If Nill thinks it’s doable, then it makes sense for him to keep exploring options to unload all of Dumba’s contract in trade until the buyout window ends. Again, no sense rushing what needn’t be rushed.

Lastly on the defense, I’ll just reiterate what we’ve been saying: I don’t get the talk about trading or buying out Ilya Lyubushkin. He was a useful player for Dallas last season, and unless they have secret plans to sign Aaron Ekblad or something, it doesn’t make sense to move Lyubushkin out the door, no matter how much confidence you have in Lundkvist and Petrovic. Defensive depth is crucial, as the Stars found out last year, and Lyubushkin is that. If he goes, I can’t see it happening until they have a better right-shot defenseman coming in to replace him. They don’t have that, right now.

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Finally, I thought this note from Greg Wyshynski told us bit more than it might have seemed at first glance:

No, this isn’t explicit confirmation by the Oilers that the Stars spoke with Glen Gulutzan. But Bowman’s word choice here seems rather odd, as Wyshynski notes. There are plenty of ways to say “we don’t comment on coaching stuff for other teams” or something like that without using the word “announcement.”

In other words, this verbiage makes it sound at least possible that the Stars have asked to speak with Gulutzan and perhaps more than that, and why wouldn’t you at least explore that possibility, if you’re Jim Nill?

After earlier stints as a head coach in both Dallas and Calgary, Gulutzan has spent the last seven years as an assistant in Edmonton, so you’d think he’s champing at the bit to step back into the head spot after being passed over as recently as two years ago. Players change a whole lot from their rookie year to their thirties, so why wouldn’t we expect an NHL coach to grow and change, too?

Gulutzan runs Edmonton’s power play, though it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to say he facilitates Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl’s power play. He’s also got a pleasant sort of swagger to him these days that he didn’t quite have 13 years ago, when he took over a Dallas team not yet out of bankruptcy. It wouldn’t be shocking if he’s benefited a ton from gaining the sort of confidence that comes from being a fixture on one of the premier teams in the NHL.

Additionally, with Steve Spott’s departure to Boston being confirmed this morning, the Stars now have two coaching vacancies. Would it be so very crazy to see someone like Gulutzan return to take over his old head coaching spot, now with a wealth of experience and acquired knowledge under his belt? And would it be so very unheard-of if he also had Neil Graham as one of his assistants?

After all, who better than Gulutzan, who coached in the ECHL with Las Vegas before moving to the AHL with Texas and then the NHL with Dallas, to work with Graham, who is on a very similar pathway? If there’s one candidate whom I don’t think would be at all threatened by an up-and-coming candidate like Graham standing next to him, it would be Gulutzan, who knows better than most what Graham has already learned, and what he might still need to know.

This is just speculation, of course. Nill is surely interviewing candidates we won’t hear about, just as he did three years ago, when he interviewed a European coach² for the Stars’ vacancy following Rick Bowness’s departure—an interview we only found out about two weeks ago, when Nill mentioned it.

The biggest question of all for Nill is what he actually is looking for a new head coach to do differently than DeBoer would have done. That is something we probably won’t hear for a while, if ever, and without knowing that, it’s really tough to handicap the coaching search at this point. But whatever candidate Nill hires, I still expect that it will happen before July 1, just so that free agents know what kind of team they’d be signing up to join. NHL players are just as human as the rest of us, and I think most of us have had a boss at some point in our lives that we absolutely would never work for again, given the choice. And free agency is, by definition, just that.

1. We don’t know how the new coach(es) will see things, but I do wonder if Lundkvist can find chemistry with anyone other than Lindell. I actually think he and Lyubushkin could be a pretty good pairing, except for the fact that they’re both right-shots, which nixes that possibility. I’m not sure Bichsel and Lundkvist are a great match, as Bichsel has tended to be put with more “stay-at-home” types thus far, allowing him to roam with more freedom. But if Lundkvist can channel his inner Sam Girard, maybe there’s a path there.

2. For what it’s worth, I initially thought that coach might have been Ralph Krueger when Nill mentioned it, but some other people have since pointed out other possibilities that seem more likely candidates.