How to Feel about the Dallas Stars after a Fairly Quiet Free Agency Day

Oh yeah, they also announced a coaching hire

Jim Nill on July 1

How you perceive the Stars after today is probably close to how you saw them yesterday, on account of the fact that not too many new faces are in Dallas now than there were then. Zero new faces, technically.

July 1 was relatively quiet, as expected. Even the biggest “news” was something we’ve already been talking about for a couple of days: Dallas officially announced the hiring of Glen Gulutzan as the Stars’ next head coach, along with Neil Graham as one of next season’s assistant coaches.

On the player side, they re-signed Colin Blackwell (2 years at $775K per season) as a speedy bit of veteran depth with a touch of scoring ability.

They also brought back longtime Star Radek Faksa on a three-year, $6 million deal ($2 AAV) because hey, somebody has to kill penalties and play defense in lieu of Mikael Granlund.

They’re also just about $1.8 million over the salary cap as it stands now, but Nill simply said “we’ll work on that,” saying there are “still some hockey things we’re looking it.” Nill pointed out that the Stars have until October to get under the cap, and given that they opted not to use the buyout window on a player like Matt Dumba, one would think they have a plan in place to move him or a similar size of cap hit.

And if they don’t have such a plan, they probably need to come up with one. Because even if they sent Lian Bichsel (their only waivers-exempt player) down to Texas to start the year along with risking Alex Petrovic on waivers again, they still wouldn’t have quite enough cap space to start the season.

So, a move is coming. And when it does, it might end up being the most noteworthy move made all summer. Because today, they let all their pending UFAs go other than Colin Blackwell, who is a fourth-line player (albeit a good one) making the league minimum salary for the next two years. And then they brought back a fourth-liner from two seasons ago in Radek Faksa. That’s it, so far.

Like we said, it was a quiet day.

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We’ll talk more about the coaching staff tomorrow (Wednesday), after Glen Gulutzan has his introductory press conference.

But for now, I want to be clear about a couple of very key things: This was the hire Jim Nill wanted to make, and I think it is as likely as any hire could be to do what he wants it to do. More on that second point in a minute.

Today, Nill said they went through a “long list” of young and old coaches of “all different variations” before eventually deciding on Gulutzan. Nill said Gulutzan’s name even came up while he was at the 4 Nations Faceoff with Team Canada, citing “some of the best players in the world” who were mentioning Gulutzan’s name at the time.

As for Gulutzan’s prior Dallas tenure, Nill said that Gulutzan would probably be “the first one to admit that it was probably too soon” when Gulutzan was hired back in 2011. But when you get offered your dream job, it’s pretty hard to say no.

Gulutzan most recently spent seven years back as an assistant coach in Edmonton after two short head coaching stints in Dallas and Calgary. Nill referred to Gulutzan’s time as an assistant by once again highlighting Gulutzan’s humility.

“He was willing to go backwards and make himself who he is today,” Nill said, “and we think that’s the right coach for the Dallas Stars.”

I’ve heard from a lot of folks asking how Gulutzan is “better” than DeBoer, and I just don’t think that’s the right way to frame things. Yes, DeBoer has proven more at the NHL level, but he’s also had a lot of clear flaws exposed, too. He tends to double down when his back is against the wall, and in doing so, he has sometimes alienated some of the players he coaches.

From what I can tell, Nill could see that some serious discontent was already starting to happen, both with players and the coach alike. Once DeBoer said he didn’t even think last year’s team was the best one he’d coached, the writing was probably on the wall.

“It’s not really a change of voice. There’s gonna be some philosophical changes. There’s gonna be some adjustments to the systems. That’s important.”

In addition to those changes, Nill also cited how coaches like DeBoer and Gulutzan have “different ways of sending messages,” as well as doing the standard bit of tinkering that all coaches like to do.

DeBoer was not the sort of coach who was likely to seek out a healthy scratch and explain his logic to them. He made his decisions—which were quite often the right ones, given his track record—and he expected players to accept them and do their jobs. That’s not uncommon among more veteran coaches,

My guess would be that, given how Gulutzan has been described, he is likely to be a bit more communicative when it comes to those hard decisions. But that’s only one small example.

When asked about whether Gulutzan could make the changes necessary for the team to win a Stanley Cup, Nill also pointed out how the Stars aren’t in a “blow it up” situation. They’re a very good team that has proven they can beat really good teams in the playoffs. That’s a great group for any coach to take over.

Really, what I think Nill was hoping to do with this hire is to re-energize the team with a new voice (as almost every coaching change in any sport is designed to do), but also to re-align the organization and the coaching staff’s approach.

Take Nils Lundkvist, for example. After Nill spent a first-round pick (and a fourth-round pick that they ended up getting back) to acquire him, DeBoer continued opting for other veterans over Lundkvist. This last season might have gone differently, but then again, the playoffs are the clearest proving ground there is, and we saw that even Ilya Lyubushkin got passed up for Cody Ceci and Alex Petrovic when things got tough. Veteran coaches like DeBoer usually tend to revert to type when the stakes get higher.

You don’t have to think Lundkvist is going to become the next John Klingberg or anything to realize that it’s not a great thing for an organization when your GM and your coach value a player as differently as that. So, I do wonder if a big part of the “philosophical” changes Nill was hoping to effect with the Gulutzan hire have to do with maximizing the players they have.

And a big part of that is figuring out how to push players to grow and be their best while also keeping the culture healthy. It’s a tough balance between complacency and fear, but Nill is betting that Gulutzan has learned enough in the last 12 years to help everyone find that extra gear that DeBoer never quite could after the second round of the playoffs.

This isn’t about asking less of the players in order to keep them happy. It’s about finding a way to motivate all the players to push themselves as far as they possibly can.

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Neil Graham could also be a very big part of that, especially with players like Justin Hryckowian looking likely to spend time in the NHL next year, too. Nill said there are a few players in Texas who are itching to make it to the NHL next season, and Graham’s familiarity with most of them could certainly be of help in the Stars’ properly integrating them into the NHL lineup.

Nill said that Graham has coached around seven or eight of the players on the Stars’ roster right now, and I don’t think it’s entirely uninteresting that Jake Oettinger is one of them. It’s good to have a coaching staff that believes in its players, and I don’t think it’s all that healthy to have a team where the players know their coach has started losing faith in a goaltender that has gotten them as far as Oettinger did.

Another one of those players is Thomas Harley, whom Graham coached in Texas during Harley’s Famous Defensive Reset of 2022-23. And hey, even Jason Robertson was on a Neil Graham Texas Stars team a couple years before that, too. There is intrinsic value in players’ seeing a former coach progressing to the next step, just as you want players to see their teammates’ being giving more responsbility once they’ve earned it.

I keep coming back to motivation. You want players to believe that things can be different next year, regardless of the fans’ perception. And as of right now, I think the players have a lot of very encouraging signs that next year could be a very special one.

Yes, the coach has to push buttons and occasionally force players out of their comfort zones. But that only works if players end up growing in that process, believing the coach has a method underneath the madness. Because we all saw what happened back in 2016-17 in the final year of Lindy Ruff’s tenure, when the team pretty clearly stopped believing anything they were doing was likely to turn things around. Ruff pivoted to a much more defensive style, and that turnabout more or less felt like a resignation, given the recent memories of success around the more high-flying style Ruff had brought so much success with just one season earlier.

Nill said that he is going to be talking with Gulutzan about whether they’ll fill the other assistant coach opening left by Misha Donskov, and if so, how they’re go about it. My read of that situation is that Gulutzan would have the opportunity to bring in someone to join the staff, if it makes sense. But it’s hard to say who that would be, if and when they’re hired.

As far as roles for the assistant coaches, Graham seems like the presumptive heir to Steve Spott in terms of the power play, but I think Gulutzan can and will have every opportunity to be Very Involved in doing what he’s done so well when it comes to the power play, so we shall see.

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As for the players, Nill said that Cody Ceci called him to ask about coming back, but in the end, Dallas just didn’t have the room, and Ceci had to do what was right for him and his family, which turned out to be making $18 million to live in California for four years. (Not a bad idea.) Likewise with Evgenii Dadonov and Mikael Granlund, both of whom signed elsewhere despite talking with Nill over the last few days.

Here are those deals:

Ceci: Four years at $4.5 million apiece in Los Angeles
Granlund: Three years at $7 million apiece in Anaheim
Dadonov: One year at $1 million in New Jersey

When you also factor in Mason “$4.5 million” Marchment’s departure to Seattle in trade, you realize just how jam-packed last year’s roster was able to be, thanks to things like extra salary retention on Rantanen’s deal before Dallas acquired him in the last year of his Colorado deal, and the Stars’ ability to exceed the cap a fair bit after putting Miro Heiskanen and Lundkvist on LTIR.

The Stars were always going to be “worse” than last year’s roster by virtue of once again having to get underneath the salary cap. And losing Dadonov’s 20 goals and Granlund’s all-around play hurts their foward depth, no question. But those Ceci and Granlund deals simply weren’t ever going to fit into their plans, and I think it’s also fair to say that with Pete DeBoer gone, it made less sense to bring back Dadonov (who hopefully won’t hold too much of a grudge for being scratched in his final game in Dallas).

So, the Stars ended up doing two things today: re-signing Colin Blackwell for two years at his same league-minimum salary, and bringing back Radek Faksa, whom they traded last summer for the same reasons they traded Marchment last month: cap space.

Because of the cap situation and the huge core of talent Dallas has, big moves were never likely without equally big subtractions. Nill said as much today, pointing out that the Stars are primarily trying to “add the pieces around that” core. And when you look at the roster, he’s not wrong.

“A lot of these guys are 22, 23, 24, 25 years of age. They’re still in they’re prime,” Nill said.

Nill also said the Stars are still looking at some things, and obviously they will have to do something to get under the salary cap by opening night, which is to say they’ll have to find a team willing to take one of their excess defensemen—something I thought Nill would have already had in place by today.

On its face, the Stars lost leverage in any potential trade by not clearing space before adding Faksa and exceeding the cap. But I think it’s far more likely that a team like San Jose would be perfectly willing to take Dumba’s contract if a draft pick were included, which means it’s more about Nill finding a team that can make him the best offer in terms of clearing space.

In other words, the Stars’ backs aren’t against the wall. They have outs, but they’ve just decided to take their time exploring of all of them rather than immediately taking whatever options they have right now.

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Brining back Colin Blackwell is a perfectly fine addition. Cromulent, even! Over the last year, Blackwell played like a third-line NHL player that the Stars could afford to stash on the fourth line.

And as you may recall, he showed that he’s got some speed and some hands and an NHL shot, too.

There was a time when I would look at a signing like this and scoff, asking why a team is bringing back a bottom-six 32-year-old rather than giving that spot to a younger player. But honestly, Blackwell was exactly what the Stars asked him to be last season, and at a league-minimum cap hit, it’s pretty clear that he’s happy to keep doing his part. It’s a low-risk signing for Dallas—zero risk, really, unless you think Blackwell is going to block the deserved NHL spot of someone like Arttu Hyry or something—and a potentially rewarding one for the bottom six, which might need a couple of veterans to shephered some younger players as they make their way into the NHL.

Blackwell is depth that fits on this team, and fits into the team’s culture. He’s a positive addition that is much more likely to make young players better than to stand in their way.

Also on the over-thirty train was a formerly beloved Stars player in Radek Faksa, who had a great playoff moment himself last spring, you may recall.

Faksa’s underlying numbers are much stronger than Blackwell’s, relatively speaking, and his contract reflects that. The term surprised me, but I assume the Stars had to go to three years to keep the hit down to $2 million.

“We missed Radek this year,” Nill said. “He’s been a big part of our team for a long time. He’s a big, heavy body. He’s very good defensively, a great penalty killer, very good on draws, and he’s got a physical element to his game, and that’s something that we thought we really missed, a little bit, in the playoffs.”

So, there you go. The Stars wanted to feel more playoff-er, and Faksa is that. He can play left wing or center, so in some ways, he’s a stronger, more veteran version of a player like Oskar Bäck.

I would say Faksa’s contract surprises me, but it’s hard to say it worries me, given its small cap hit. Faksa is 31, which means his excellent defensive abilities should continue to provide good value for Dallas, even if it’s not going to excite anyone looking for a younger version of Mason Marchment.

Of course, the Stars had to regain a Czech player at the same time they lost one, with Matěj Blümel signing in Boston on Tuesday for $875,000.

“We’ve talked to him two or three times over the last three, four days. He was excited about coming here, but this is his one chance to be free,” Nill said of Blümel. “And I just think he thought, it’s a fresh start, and a team that didn’t make the playoffs. So he’s looking at, it’s an opportunity for him.”

If I were to translate that into blunt terms, I’d say Blümel opted to go to Boston for two reasons.

First, because he’s been burned too many times by hoping he’ll crack the lineup in Dallas, only to get sent back down. At a certain point, a player doesn’t want to keep hoping the organization will value him differently, even if the coach might have changed. Boston is likely to be not very good again (no offense to Marco Sturm), which means they’ll be less likely to go with veteran NHLers in bottom-six roles than to try players like Blümel.

And second, because his deal in Boston pays him his NHL salary regardless of whether he’s in the NHL or not. Blümel was making $175,000 in the AHL last year, so there’s a genuine improvement in quality of life for him by taking the one-way deal. (Though in fairness, Dallas might have offered a one-way deal as well. We just don’t know that, yet.)

It will be easy for Stars fans to root for Blümel to became an NHL regular in Boston. Or at least, as easy as it ever is to root for someone in Boston. Given his path so far, any regular NHL job will be a hard-won victory for him, but no less a deserving one for being so.

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So, how should you feel about all that? Not very excited, but also confident. Because the excitement was never going to happen today, or at least not in a good way.

Any fan of a team that falls short of a championship wants to see the sorts of convincing changes that make you believe the next time will be different. You want things to look different before you believe they will be different. You need to re-live your past trauma and have it end with a better result before you’ll really be healed of it (just ask a Texas Rangers fan about 2023 if you don’t believe me).

For the Stars, however, their biggest moves have been made well before this offseason:

• The 2017 draft that brought in Miro Heiskanen, Jason Robertson, and Jake Oettinger

• The Tyler Seguin extension in 2018

• The Wyatt Johnston draft (2021) and recent extension (March 2025)

• Oh, and the 2012 draft, which brought in Esa Lindell and…Radek Faksa

It’s easy to forget just how good this roster is, because we tend to look at any team that falls short and ask the question: why did they fall short?

You get focused on the flaws, and you see the team through that lens. And when the team changes without addressing those perceived flaws directly, it’s hard to feel hopeful that next playoff run will go any better than the last one. After all, how can it? You didn’t fix the problem! They still haven’t replaced Chris Tanev, right??

But in the NHL more than almost any league, I really think this saying holds true: every year is different.

Think back to 2020, when the Stars made a miracle run to the Stanley Cup Final, only to run out of gas (and get banged up beyond repair) against a stacked Tampa Bay team. I don’t know that anyone in the 2020-21 season, when Tyler Seguin was out nearly all season, really thought the team was “close.” There were some calling for a major teardown right then, in fact.

Only five players remain with the Stars from that Cup run (or six if you count Jake Oettinger): Seguin, Benn, Lindell, Heiskanen, and Hintz.

Rather than blow it all up, the Stars waited for the next core to arrive, which featured players like Robertson, Johnston, and Harley, along with Oettinger’s eventually taking over the net. And that core could soon include players like Lian Bichsel and Mavrik Bourque, if they can continue their solid growth from last year.

You’re more than welcome to debate which pieces Dallas added and subtracted, but I think free agency—and especially this year’s version—tends to be like the lottery: you can’t lose if you don’t play. And forgive me, but I refuse to be anything other than mildly happy that Radek Faksa gets to come back to Dallas again.

Yes, the Stars could probably benefit from a bit more surgery and an actualy second line left winger, but man, they’re still really good, just right now.

It’s easy to lambast the Cody Ceci acqusition last year, and the Stars certainly appear to have dodged a bullet by letting Ken Holland’s Kings attempt to re-create the weird mistakes of Oilers past. But this Stars team is still one that at least 25 other NHL teams would absolutely love to trade Dallas for.

They have four legitimately good defenseman (all of whom are left shots), and two righties that look quite capable in Lundkvist and Lyubushkin, along with Petrovic, too.

And as for their top-six wingers, they have Robertson, Rantanen, Seguin, and Bourque (if someone would please politely ask one of the latter three players to try the left wing). On their bottom six, they have Benn, Faksa, Blackwell, Bäck, or even Hryckowian, or perhaps somebody else.

We’ll have time to slot players all over the place once the roster finally gets its final touches, but for now, the main bet by Dallas is that they get a bit of the coaching magic teams like Washington have gotten by bringing in a new voice, and that their new superstar in Rantanen looks as comfortable in his second year in Dallas as Duchene did in his.

Because when good players feel good, they tend to play pretty well. And if they feel pretty good about this season, then you probably have permission to feel pretty good, too.