Game 5 WCF AfterThoughts: Sorting Through the Rubble in the Words of Pete DeBoer

Let's do some forensic work together

And I wonder
When I sing along with you
If everything could ever be this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again

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Coaching in the NHL must be one of the most impossible jobs in sports.

Question: Do you feel stunned right now?

DeBoer: I think so. It’s a good question. I’ll tell you what I told our group. I think it’s possible to be two things at the same time. I’m really proud of the resiliency of our group through the first two rounds. We scratched and clawed and found a way to beat two really good teams. And I’m also disappointed that we didn’t find another level, another gear here, another way. Getting back here to this point, how hard it is to get back here. I would say I’m both those things. I think that’s OK, and I think our group needs to go and — coaches, players — and reflect in the summer on what we can do better when we get to this point against the best teams. But there’s no doubt the two best teams are playing for the Cup.

You strategize, motivate, chasten and humble your players night after grueling night. And if you make it through the 82-game grind, you then have to take whatever your team has left and channel it into series after series, hoping you keep outfoxing and outplaying the very best that the other very good teams are throwing back at you.

Imagine for a minute, you are Pete DeBoer. You’re in the third year of a four-year contract, and you know this playoff run needs to prove your team hasn’t topped out just yet. Your GM just traded three first-round picks at the deadline to help this team keep its championship aspirations alive, and you know that many of the players on this roster won’t be back next year.

Miraculously, it almost seems, your team has made it through two rounds already, past the most intimidating team in Colorado and the best team in the league in Winnipeg. You finally have both Miro Heiskanen and Jason Robertson back to what looks like relatively good health.

And then you play Game 1, and after Tyler Seguin heroically ties the game back up in the first period, you surrender bang-bang goals to Nugent-Hopkins and Bouchard. Another shot goes off a post right after that. In a way, you feel lucky to only be down 3-1 at the end of the second period.

Then you get three power play goals in six minutes, and once again, your team has pulled a game out of the fire. Maybe this could be the year.

Question: Given that your team fought back after the early 3-0 hole, how do you evaluate the game in its totality?

DeBoer: I don’t know. Again, I don’t have an answer for that. It’s a little of the reflection we’ll have to do as a group. It’s been a group that always needs to get pushed up against a wall before we come out swinging. In my mind, I felt that’s always been a little bit of the case. It bit us tonight.

Then in Game 2, you surrender three goals (and another post) through two periods. You never score one. Series tied, heading to Edmonton.

Game 3 comes, and bang-bang again, two goals by Bouchard and McDavid in the first period put you in another 2-0 hole. Then your team musters an incredible push, hitting four posts in the first 22 minutes of the game, and a Lian Bichsel/Jason Robertson goal finally halves the deficit after you kill two Edmonton power plays. This feels different, in a good way. Maybe the team has found their legs.

And then McDavid scores a third goal in the 40th minute of the game, and you’re down 3-1 again. Edmonton piles it on in the third, but that McDavid goal was the backbreaker.

Game 4 will likely be the series, you know. Again, you start with a huge push in the first, hitting two posts amid a flurry of shots and chances. But Edmonton gets a power play, and bang, Draisaitl does his thing, and you’re trailing yet again. But this time, Robertson ties the game back up early in the second with a genuinely nice power play goal,¹ and your team has a chance to take their first lead since Game 1.

Then Mason Marchment takes a clear interference penalty, and Corey Perry is wide-open on the back porch for a tap-in. You never get another look at the game. In your heart, you know that was probably your season, right there.

But Game 5 comes, and you ask your team to summon everything they have left, to finally grab a lead for the first time in four games. You’ve even inserted Mavrik Bourque for what will be his second straight season-ending game. Now is the time to make bold changes in search of something different.

Then Bourque takes a careless penalty on his first shift, and Cody Ceci leaves Perry alone for the second time in as many games for Perry’s second power play goal in the same span. After the penalty kill kept you alive for two straight series, it’s finally run out of gas against Edmonton.

Question: It is the coaches’ or players’ responsibility to have a strong start?

DeBoer: I think it’s on everybody. Listen, we couldn’t have started stronger than we did last game. I don’t think our starts have been crazy bad. We haven’t capitalized on our chances and we’ve given up the first goal every game in the series. There’s a lot of things in there. It’s not as easy as oh, the guys aren’t ready to play. I don’t think that’s the case. It’s a lot of things. Tonight, we stick a young guy in there, he takes a penalty. That’s not on him. We’ve got to get a kill there, we’ve got to get a save, we’ve got to get something.

Like every game in this series, you’re trailing from the outset. And then, just a few minutes later, Ceci and Lindell have another breakdown/miscommunication, and your most relied-upon defensive duo through the first two rounds continues their nightmare of a series, with Mattias Janmark² of all people undressing Jake Oettinger to make it 2-0 in an elimination game.

So you call a timeout. You yell at your team, saying (according to multiple players afterward) that they need to wake up, to start playing. I am going to guess there were two other words between “wake” and “up” during that lecture.

And then, after you shout at your team and Jake Oettinger prepares to turn back to take his net, you shout again, telling him to get out of the net. Casey DeSmith is going in.

Question: What was the thinking behind pulling Jake Oettinger?

DeBoer: Any time you pull a goalie, the reasoning’s always to try and spark your group, so that was the number one reason. We had talked endlessly in this series about trying to play with a lead. And obviously we’re in a 2-0 hole right away. And you know what, I didn’t take that lightly, and I didn’t blame it all on Jake. But the reality is, if you go back to last year’s playoffs, he’s lost six of seven games to Edmonton and we gave up two shots on two goals [sic] in an elimination game. It was partly to spark our team and wake them up and partly knowing that status quo had not been working. And that’s a pretty big sample size.

So, there it is. You’re a coach, and you’ve just made the biggest move you can make—yanking the American goalie who might well have usurped Connor Hellebuyck in the last series. It’s a huge, almost unfathomable wake-up call in your last, desperate hour.

It won’t work. Because 58 seconds later, Jeff Skinner scores a goal in his second career playoff game, knocking a puck through DeSmith’s five-hole in a maze of bodies. So much for changing the momentum.

Starting the second period, DeBoer could put Oettinger back in. And in any other playoff game, I think he probably does. But perhaps the combination of how distraught Oettinger clearly feels and how frustrated DeBoer has become at his team giving up three goals in every single game to Edmonton makes that a foolish proposition either way. If pulling Oettinger was desperate, putting him back in at this point would be downright frantic, admitting your move didn’t work. And do you really think Oettinger can recover from a goaltending change you know full well to have been devastating? That’s a big ask for any human being, even a professional athlete.

Question: Do you think this the best one of the three Stars teams you’ve coached?

DeBoer: I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I’m not sure it was. (emphasis added) Maybe on paper. I’m not sure it was the best team. I’ll have to look at it.

Listen, the way we ended the season I think bled into the playoffs a little bit for us. Which I think still doesn’t sit right with me. Although we found a way to get through two really tough teams. That was a little bit of a red flag for me that it went on that long and the way it went on. But that’s stuff I’ll have to look back in summer. Your question, on paper, it might have been the best team we’ve had here, I”m not sure it was the best team we’ve had.

Sure, you get a look at the game. Wyatt Johnston makes a great play on the forecheck to set up Jason Robertson, who scores his three goal in three games, which is also the Stars as a team’s third goal in four games.

You’ll get a penalty kill after that, finally. And after starting the second period with a power play you don’t convert, Mavrik Bourque goes to the net and gets cleaned out by the returning Mattias Ekholm to give you what will be the last power play of the game for either team. Wyatt Johnston will make another nice play to set up Roope Hintz for a power play goal, and you’re back in it, just maybe. DeSmith has steadied the ship (or maybe Wyatt Johnston has), and it’s 3-2.

Then two minutes and one second later, Hintz sets up Thomas Harley for a one-timer that feels dangerous. Harley will hammer the puck into Ekholm, and the puck will head out to the neutral zone, where a fresh Connor McDavid and Roope Hintz race up the ice, with Hintz actually catching McDavid. But catching McDavid and stopping him are two entirely different things, and the best player in the world fends off the backchecker while also dekeing and bypassing your backup goaltender, and he scores what will turn out to be the game-winning goal.

Question: You’ve been to three straight Conference Finals but not beyond. How do you reconcile where you are as a franchise?

DeBoer: You’ve got to keep knocking on the door. Listen, the examples are endless in this league. The Washington Capitals, a decade of knocking on the door. On and on. It’s a really, really hard league to win in. When you get down to the end, to the final four here, it gets exponentially tougher. And all your weaknesses get exposed.

I give our guys credit, I thought we fought. We chased every single game in this series, and that’s a tough way to play hockey against that team. It was the story of the entire series, but the fourth goal, Connor’s goal, we’re pushing to try and get back in the game and puck bounces into the neutral zone. He’s coming off the bench, he’s not missing that, it’s game over.

You go into the second intermission down 4-2, and yeah, it doesn’t feel very possible at this point. But you actually get what seemed impossible: an early goal to start the third. Jason Robertson scores yet again on what is, frankly, an ugly goal for Stuart Skinner to allow. (But then, Robertson has made Skinner look bad before.)

It’s 4-3, and…maybe?

Or maybe not. Once again, Stars fans barely even manage to finish singing along with Pantera before the Oilers restore their two-goal lead on what will be the cruelest blow of all: a goal from Evander Kane below the goal line, banking a puck off of one of the best defensive defensemen in the NHL on most nights, but not this one. 5-3, and game over.

The playoff run will end with Mikko Rantanen having scored 9 goals and 22 points in 18 games. Thomas Harley is second, with 14 points. Both players will end up with three assists in the Edmonton series, but no goals. They will be far from alone in (or rather out of) the goal-scoring department.

Harley also has a -10 on that same scoreline, which is flattering compared to the -16 sitting next to Wyatt Johnston and Matt Duchene’s names.

Question: Last year, you’ve said you think you were a better team than Edmonton. Did you think you were better than Edmonton this year?

DeBoer: I didn’t feel like we were better than Edmonton in this series. It sounds crazy to say with the goals scored and things like that, but I think this was a closer series than the numbers are going to say, or the five games are going to say. But I don’t think we were a better team.

In five games against Edmonton, the Oilers scored 13 goals at 5-on-5. The Stars scored just five goals at 5-on-5: three by Jason Robertson, and two by Tyler Seguin (both of which came in Game 1).

That’s it. The only production in a normal game state came from a player on a damaged knee and a 33-year-old who rebuilt his house to speed up the healing process after rebuilding his hip.

My goodness, did Tyler Seguin ever give his all to this team, this year. Even in Game 5, Seguin was finding some extra jump, looking for that extra burst. He worked for over four months to play at this time of year, and he played. And some day, you might hear everything he had to do just to prepare for each game.

Robertson likewise shook off the rust and soreness of a wantonly injured knee in the final game of the regular season, but he will say after the game that his only clear feeling about his scoring in the last couple of games is that he wishes he could have started doing it sooner.

As for the start, Robertson was equally candid.

“Yeah, it was a disaster. I mean, you go down three goals, bang bang bang. A couple years ago we did the same thing when we went down by a lot. I mean, we fought back today. We weren’t letting that happen. ‘Case kept us in it. We were able to get a couple looks, chances. And then they just countered with one, two goals right after. So that’s unfortunate."

-Jason Robertson on the Stars’ start in Game 5 against Edmonton, 5/29/25

In what seemed like a Monkey’s Paw twist, the Stars’ power play was excellent in the series. Along with winning them Game 1, the power play ended up 5-for-14 after its disappearance last year, but Edmonton’s six power play goals were spread out in every single game, and sequencing/distribution/timing is everything in life.

Matt Duchene, the Stars’ leading scorer in the regular season? One goal and five assists—all of which came on the power play. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you’re getting the even-strength scoring from elsewhere. But in this series, the Stars were not getting what they needed.

Question: How do you explain that start in an elimination game?

DeBoer: I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that. We’ve got to look in our room and at our group. We didn’t roll over. I think that’s the good news. The start obviously wasn’t good enough, but we didn’t roll over. If you look at the playoff trail, there’s a lot of teams that would have lost that game going away. We worked right to the end.

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Early in the season, the Stars had a young reporter show up to ask questions in a mock press conference (or perhaps an above-average press conference, depending on your perspective). I remember DeBoer was asked a question about why he likes coaching.

His answer started with this: coaching is the closest thing there is to playing. And I think when you’re watching a team unravel, or at least get rolled over, you want to do everything you can to change the momentum. But coaches are not players, and they can’t get out there and finish a check or bust down the ice and fire a shot on net.

As a coach, all you can do is remind people of your game plan, yell at them a bit, and change the lineup here and there to try to find something.

And after five games of repeatedly falling behind, DeBoer had finally had enough.

That chart isn’t perfect, as Micah or any other member of the analytic cognoscenti would tell you. No chart is intended to tell the entire story of every goal, but with a growing sample size (a phrase DeBoer mentioned when talking about Oettinger’s goaltending all the way back to last year’s Edmonton series), one thing was clear: Dallas was suffering disproportionately for the chances they were allowing.

Of course, the converse was also true: On offense, the Stars weren’t just breaking even—they were finishing their chances at a below average rate. Now, I don’t know how many of you out there are math wizards, but when you are doing something below average while your opponent is doing it above average, you are going to lose, on average, every time.

The Stars, at least, won that first game in what turned out to be the final encouraging word in their high-drama 2024-25 postseason. There are great memories, for sure. We’ll reflect on those soon enough. But you will take a lot of those great memories for years to come.

It feels greedy to say that the Stars needed Mikko Rantanen to win them another series by putting the team on his back after his historic performance to end the Colorado series and begin the Winnipeg round, because it is. But when you have a superstar player on the team, a bigger appetite for heroics tends to come along with them.

Connor McDavid was outstanding in this series after being quieter in the first two rounds, by his standards. But the Oilers, even when they were pulling Stuart Skinner for poor play for the second time in two postseason runs, got more than enough help from others in the lineup to get back up the mountain. As a result, they’re back in the Stanley Cup Final.

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DeBoer’s usage of “scratched and clawed” to describe the Stars’ journey through the first two rounds was very purposeful, I think. This Stars team was dramatic, but they were never dominant in this postseason for any long stretches. When they lost, they lost badly. When they won, they won dramatically, which is to say barely.

The numbers? Among 16 playoff teams, Dallas was 13th in goals scored per game, and they allowed the 5th-most goals per game. Pete DeBoer’s job is to look at events and data and turn them into actionable game plans from night to night. And after four games of playing from behind, I think DeBoer saw what was true: the Stars didn’t have any miracles left, so it was time for a defibrillator. But instead of restarting the team’s heart, it might only have ended up breaking Jake Oettinger’s.

Ray Ferraro and Sean McDonough³ hotly debated the goalie pull at the time, and we’ll continue to do so all summer. Fans have largely made up their minds to blame the coach, as fans usually prefers to do, given the choice between a beloved franchise player fresh off two outstanding playoff series performances and a coach who is, by virtue of his occupation, a bit of a mercenary.

Mark Lazerus excoriated DeBoer for his decision, and you can’t really disagree with much of what Lazerus is saying there. But I think Stars fans can also agree with the fact that this team looked cooked outside of the crease, so getting too riled up about what happened inside of it is probably a bit of a red herring when it comes to the game’s outcome, let alone a series that was 3-1 going into Game 5.

Any sort of comeback was only ever a faint hope to begin with. And given how good DeSmith was this year, the change in net didn’t feel nearly as drastic a downgrade as national reporters made it seem. But when you make a dramatic move as a coach, you are inviting intense scrutiny, and that invitation has been accepted many times over.

The real debate around the goaltender switch is what it says about DeBoer’s leadership. Because even if that decision didn’t end up changing the eventual outcome of the series, it was a brutal blow for Oettinger by a coach who is no stranger to getting on the wrong side of his goalies. And when you consider that Oettinger was not letting in soft goals by any stretch, it feels like the coach exercised his prerogative to do anything it takes to win a game at a cost that could reach beyond this season.

In the grand scheme of things, I think you could argue that Oettinger deserved to see out Game 5 almost regardless of what Edmonton was doing, much like Joe Pavelski continued to start games last year even as his body showed it couldn’t keep up with the demands of playoff hockey every night, while the Stars progressed deeper into last year’s playoff run.

Oettinger got them as far as they got, and then two wide-open players got Grade-A chances after Edmonton continued getting Grade-A chances. NHL players are in the NHL for a reason, and their ability to convert those chances is one such reason.

In the context of the game, DeBoer’s decision was understandable. In the context of the series, it’s debatable. In the context of what Jake Oettinger means to this team, it felt downright risky, and in the context of which goaltender has the higher ceiling, it’s undeniable: if this Stars team wins a Stanley Cup in the next five years, Jake Oettinger will surely be the goalie who lead them there.

Had the Stars somehow come back, we would have seen Oettinger in perhaps his biggest mental test as a Stars goalie, returning to the lineup for another elimination contest in Game 6 after enduring the harrowing experience of being pulled so quickly in Game 5. But of course, we never did.

Or at least, I think DeBoer would have put Oettinger back in. But when he didn’t put Oettinger back in for the second period, it really hit me just how clear of a message DeBoer was sending. Oettinger’s goals were excusable, but DeBoer was done with excuses. It was time for results, and he was willing to burn the forest down to find the culprits in the ongoing case of mediocrity, by the high standards the Dallas Stars have set.

Jim Nill isn’t speaking with the media at cleanout day tomorrow, but he will before too much longer, I’m sure. For now, we’ll have to wait to hear his thoughts on how the season ended. But no matter how inevitable the Stars’ defeat may have been against this Edmonton team, the way DeBoer chose to face that defeat has raised a lot more questions than most of us were expecting to be asking, even when the series began to seem lost after Game 4.

In poker, you have to get good cards, but you also have to play them well enough to win. There’s no doubt that Dallas has a great roster, but the salary cap will dictate some pretty big decisions in the coming days. Even so, there will be a very good team in Dallas come October. But given the dramatic way DeBoer played his final hand, the questions might end up being split a lot more equally between the cards in the Stars’ hand and the one whose job it is to play them.

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Then again, perhaps the biggest takeaway here is how courageous a decision this was by DeBoer. Certainly the easiest thing to do as a coach is to let the players dictate things, to never demote veterans, to never scratch underperforming players, to let your starting goalie play every night.

DeBoer certainly didn’t take the easy way out of any lineup decisions this year, and I think he deserves credit for that. Jim Nill gave DeBoer latitude to use the roster pieces as he saw fit, and DeBoer used every acre of that latitude, and it got the Stars back to the final four despite some huge injuries.

All three of Jim Nill’s offseason defense acquisitions on the blue line were healthy scratches in Game 5, including Ilya Lyubushkin, who hadn’t suffered that fate all season or for the first two rounds of the playoffs.

Evgenii Dadonov sat, too. He’s a player DeBoer loves, but the coach put in Mavrik Bourque instead. That’s a gutsy, gutsy call, just like moving Jamie Benn down the lineup and taking him off the power play. You can disagree with DeBoer’s moves, but you can’t say he isn’t willing to be bold. Fortune did not favor that boldness in this series, though.

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So, what did Jamie Benn have to say about Pete DeBoer after the game?

“He’s meant a lot. A great coach,” Benn said, “and I think he’s done a hell of a job with our group, and it’s been a lot of fun playing for him.”

Benn also gave some short answers about his future in Dallas, generally with the theme that he wants to return, but also that he doesn’t want to talk about his future right now, right after this game. You can understand that, certainly.

Being an NHL coach is, indeed, an impossible job. You’re supposed to build relationships, to command respect, to make hard choices, but all while making players feel at home. You’re ultimately accountable for what happens on the ice despite never making a single play yourself. You can do everything right, but it doesn’t matter if your team doesn’t score, or if your goaltender doesn’t make the save you need.

Jim Nill, now, has a lot of things to think about. The trust between a general manager and a head coach is a vital thing for a healthy organizational culture, and we will find out soon enough if that trust is still intact.

DeBoer is heading into his final contract year, and until Game 5, I would have said he would be all but guaranteed to finish that year in Dallas. Now, it feels much more uncertain.

Nill has never fired a Stars coach, but he has made some uncharacteristic moves in general over the last 365 days. I never saw the Ryan Suter buyout happening, and I definitely never saw first-round picks being tossed into trades the way Nill did this season for Mikko Rantanen, Cody Ceci, and Mikael Granlund.

Maybe that’s because Nill, too, isn’t big on excuses. He is looking for results. All that remains to be seen for now is whether he trusts DeBoer to play the cards he’s giving to him. I mean, when your coach isn’t even will to say that this team, with Mikko Rantanen on it, was the best one he’s had in the last three years, it sure seems like there are things to be discussed.

We won’t be in the room for those discussions, but it will be pretty easy to deduce how they went, soon enough.

1. I talked to Robertson about this goal the other day. He agreed with my suggestion that this felt more like of a typical goal, for him. He also said he was feeling back to himself when the scoring chances were coming, even before the goals followed. Guess he knew what he was talking about.

2. Frankly, how dare he.

3. In listening to the broadcast after the fact, I am baffled at how critical McDonough is. It’s enjoyable to hear broadcasters have an earnest debate, but McDonough was downright harping on the call while just completely ignoring the action playing out on the ice. It felt like he was personally affronted by the decision—though I suppose he’s far from alone in that regard.