Monday Dallas Stars Musings: On Mike McCarthy, Jim Nill, and the Freedom of Creativity
On this here online web site, I sometimes forget to play as much as I should. Part of that is out of respect for the reader, because the last thing (or one of) that I would want to do is to force you to wade through a bunch of nonsense just to get to the, you know, Stars Thoughts of it all.
But play is important for us, too. That’s what you always hear when a player is going really well, right? They’re just “having fun out there,” and so on. That sort of “play” is sometimes seen as the opposite of working, but the reality is that ingenious creativity (which is the commonality among all the best hockey players, I think) is pretty fundamental to success in any sort of venture.
So today isn’t a piece about hockey, per se. It’s about how to be creative, and how the Cowboys have thoroughly failed at doing so while the Stars have continued to foster it. And also, an excuse to share a video that lives in my memory from years ago:
Creativity is a bit of a catch-all, particularly in management, whether in the office or in sports. How could someone like Mike McCarthy, whom the Cowboys have decided to move on from, not be a good enough manager/coach for a team so enmired in underachievement that their owner and self-appointed GM can just brush off a disaster of a season by pointing to the fact that they’ve been the sixth-winningest team over the last 15-20 years, as if that’s “good enough” for the most lucrative sports franchise on the planet?
Well, the obvious answer for how Jerry can do that is that he has more money than the devil with twice the ego. The wealthiest people don’t have to be creative, because they can implement every idea they come up with, for good or for ill. McCarthy was a notoriously less risk-averse coach than his predecessor when he was hired, and the Cowboys have been very good under his reign, to the tune of a 49-35 record in the regular season. But as the roster became more and more pointed towards a specific end (whatever Jerry thought that was on any given day), the coach’s ability to “play,” to employ his natural creativity, diminished. There’s only so many jokes you can make at gunpoint, after all.
Cleese, in that video, talks about the “open” vs. “closed” mode of operating. It’s that openness, that sense of curiosity and wonder that exists almost outside of time. The ability to really make beautiful things and to solve complex problems is always stronger when we’re not “pressing.” This bears a surprising similarity to what athletes all tend to learn intuitively: when you’re “thinking too much” or “gripping the stick too tightly,” you’re not able to think and react as expansively as you could, and your execution tends to be worse as a result.
Execution is its own thing, of course. After a GM, say, has solved a complex problem, then the move has to be made with ruthless efficiency. You can’t wonder forever. No, as Cleese says, in order to be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch back and forth from “open” to “closed” mode. The only problem is that we often get stuck in the “closed” mode, succumbing to tunnel vision and desperation when we need expansive thinking more than ever.
So the Cowboys, about whom I loathe to speak at the best of times, are owned and generally managed by someone whose ability to efficiently transition from the creative (open) to the executive (closed) mode is clearly limited. Hence the mess of contract situations with franchise players like Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb. Hence the delay in deciding whether McCarthy is the right coach to bring back until well past the last face-saving moment of a lost season. The two modes, for the Cowboys, have been entirely indistinct for the entirety of Jerry’s reign. As Bob Sturm has said for years, nothing changes because nothing really changes.
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One thing you’ll notice is how rarely Jim Nill has pointed to the Stars’ success under his steady hand. The team has put up just shy of a .600 points percentage since 2013-14. That’s been good for top-ten status in the NHL, and that includes five different coaches and multiple seasons decimated by injuries to key players like Ben Bishop and Tyler Seguin (multiple times).
More impressively, the Stars are actually fourth in the NHL in playoff wins since 2013-14. Yes, they haven’t won the Stanley Cup, but they’ve usually had a decent crack at the Cup when they make the playoffs under Nill, and that’s something the vast majority of NHL teams can’t say. But Nill doesn’t tend to cite that as “good enough,” because the goal is to win the Stanley Cup, full stop. And until they do that, they know they have work to do.
In fact, many GMs with even a modicum of success tend to use it to protect their job, to show why they shouldn’t be questioned, making decisive statements blaming other factors for failure. Under Nill, the motto has been “no excuses,” as he reiterated during our conversation in Finland. Here are the three quotes from that November chat that have really stuck with me:
“Over the last five or six years, I’ve really seen our team evolve,” said Nill. “Two or three years ago, we had some really tough travel things. It would have been easy for your team to say, ‘you know what, tough travel, if we lose, no big deal.’ Our guys don’t have that attitude. Our guys are like, ‘You know what, it happened, we’re gonna deal with it, and we still gotta go win the game.’ I see that in this group. No complaining, you just deal with it. Those things really galvanize your team.”
“These are the things that mold your team,” said Nill. “It’s easy when you’re winning, but somewhere during the regular season or the playoffs, you’re gonna hit a rough spot. And that’s where these types of trips come into play. When the players have been together and bonded, there’s a love for each other. And those things start to pay off, especially in the playoffs.”
“The most important thing is to take away the excuses,” said Nill. “You start to realize, okay, in life, things happen, and it’s gonna be okay. But you still gotta go perform and do your thing, and that’s the attitude our team has now.”
As Cleese says in the above video, the people who have a need to project a decisive image of themselves tend to do so by demonstrating great confidence in their decisions, loudly and adamantly. And that purported decisiveness tends to strangle actual creativity. The solution, Cleese says, is to allow yourself “pondering time” before the actual deadline, and to proudly take that time to allow your mind to wander, to take a walk around your oasis while it does the more playful (open) work of experimenting with various solutions in “what if” scenarios.
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When I was working in a school, our leadership team spoke often about creating a “walled garden,” a paradise for the students and teachers that was protected from the pressures of the outside world, a place in which the true pursuit of leisure could take place. The best learning, the deepest thinking, and (I would argue) the closest friendships tend to be forged in times of mutual leisure. It is no accident that we often tend to stay in touch with our closest school friends for decades afterward.
Likewise, it is no accident that Jim Nill is widely viewed as one of the most respected GMs in the league. Despite hardships of his own, he has created something in Dallas that makes people better, and he’s done so without resorting to cruelty or oppression. He has built one of the deepest teams in the league not out of ego or fear, but out of love.
Nill used that same word specifically when talking about how trips like these galvanize your team. And he knows full well how costly a playoff run is, having seen his team through the 2020 Bubble, the 2016 heartbreak, and the 2023 and 2024 Conference Finals defeats in similarly discouraging circumstances, not to mention the multiple seasons of missed playoffs altogether. This game takes a heavy toll the higher up the mountain you climb, and it can be easy to lean on fear and intimidation to try to squeeze more out of people. But while Nill expects hard work from everyone on his team, fear-based management has never been his way.
That’s where perspective and humor come into play, as Cleese says. Laughter brings relaxation, which allows for that leisurely sort of wandering. And humor begets laughter, which is why maintaining that sort of “open” mode for a good chunk of the time often makes the best managers seem more affable, at least until it’s time to actually make the tough decisions. Then they buckle down and do the best they can with all of the ideas they’ve spent time pondering, but only after having allotted themselves time to properly mull over every possiblity they can conceive of, without the pressure of having to appear perfect and brilliant. Humor is an integral part of that, keeping you humble and lighthearted even while weighing heavy decisions.
Cleese puts it like this just before the 25:00 mark:
“The self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is gonna be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat, and so, dishonestly, pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial, when it only makes them feel bigger.”
This is why I remain so utterly uninterested in whatever drama surrounds the Cowboys in any given year. They’re ruled by self-importance, and no matter how jolly their owner and his retinue try to be, it’s clear that they don’t have a plan for the forest beyond the biggest tree they can see, so Jerry snaps at reporters when they point this out. They have trouble even trying to come up with a plan, and the most decisive thing they ever do is to test the media waters before implementing their plan in hopes of gauging the temperature for whatever move they might make. It’s fear, plain and simple.
Nill hasn’t been perfect. It’s a humbling business, and he’s never going to say every move he’s made has turned out to be the right one. But what he has created in Dallas is special, and that’s something you can say with confidence halfway through what looks like another pretty solid playoff team (with every likelihood of further upgrades coming in the next seven weeks). It may work out to be very special, in fact. Or it may not.
But more than the success, it’s the culture of confidence and creativity that you can see around the team. DeBoer is in his third season as a coach, and there’s obvious pressure to get this thing over the finish line, or at least back to the Cup Final. But it’s also clear that he’s still willing to experiment, to try different combinations and tactics, because he knows that he will be judged by his merits at the end of the day, not on whether his work massages the ego of his superiors sufficiently.
In a weird way, the Nils Lundkvist saga last playoffs proves that. There is no way the organization planned to go with five defensemen (effectively) for the majority of the first two rounds, but the coach was allowed to do that for a while, and it got him only so far. But the GM brought the player back, and the coach has seen the player continuing to improve this year with barely a hint of the same mistrust we saw last year, with Lundkvist now averaging nearly as much ice time per game as Ilya Lyubushkin. How many other organizations in the NHL would be able to bring a player back in that situation, with the same coach, and to see him thrive the next year?
Nill’s ability to spin that dysfunctional straw into roster…well, if not outright “gold,” at least a useful metal like aluminum or something. There have been other players on the roster who the coach knew had be played in certain situations, and sometimes, the coach tries flipping the script. But there’s a healthy tension there that Nill has managed to navigate without turning things into a Vancouver circus, and that’s been no small feat.
Switching effectively between the creative and executive functions is the secret sauce for managers, or coaches, or owners. Coaches tend to have a much shorter shelf life (as McCarthy discovered today), and that will naturally be in the back of their minds most of the time. But GMs are there to survey the landscape from higher up, to think as creatively as possible about both short- and long-term problems. And the best ones find ways to deploy their people with freedom, and the potential for joy. That’s where creativity is really born.
In hockey, the pressure to win creates a lot of fight-or-flight decisions. A stable leader who can be both calm and decisive, creative and incisive, is worth their weight in gold (or aluminum). The Cowboys obviously, desperately, need a GM to meditate between the egotism of the hyper-rich owner and the day-to-day decisions of the coach. McCarthy was as veteran and respected a coach as you could have asked for at the time, but he couldn’t parlay three 12-5 seasons into another contract after one embarrassing year of a poorly built roster. Probably, McCarthy will be happier for not having done so.
Jason Garrett was given far too much time without getting results, while McCarthy showed that he could get the team to the right side of the scoreboard two out of every three games, when the roster was there for him to do it with. But that wasn’t enough for ownership, because you can’t fire the GM who built the roster when the richest guy in the room has never seen the two Spidermans pointing meme that he ought to be referencing. And so the Cowboys will pretend they’re reinventing themselves again, pretend they know how to fix (or even identify) the problems, and the media circus will continue, because the team’s existence is a justification unto itself.
The Stars aren’t immune to instability, as everyone found out in the two years from 2017 through 2019. Any team’s ownership, by rights, is able to put its thumb on the scales here and there. But by and large, Nill has been the perfect person to hold the line in both directions, to weather storms of bad seasons or temper tantrums while building a strong foundation all the while. And he’s shared the credit for success liberally, at all levels, rather than hoarding it for his own protection, because there is a freedom in humility that pride can never attain.
It’s been a tough balancing act in ways nobody but Nill may ever know, but the Stars’ position through 42 games of this chaotic season is as good a testament as any to how good Stars fans have had it since 2013. Nobody’s perfect, but then, good leaders don’t have to be. Leaders just have to be willing to solve problems, to look in the mirror, and to do their best for the people they’re charged with helping. They have only to foster creativity at every level by building walls in the proper places: not to imprison, but to protect. Because if you believe in what is happening with your team, then your job isn’t to force them to make your favorite food, but to guard them while they cook. And no coach is every going to be able to build those walls until the Cowboys get their own version of Jim Nill. They should probably start by creating the job description.
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Here’s how Cleese wraps up his talk, while employing a bit of Screwtapeish irony. I’ve transcribed it below if you prefer reading, but you can watch it starting at this point of the video:
Here’s how to stamp out creativity in the rest of the organization and get a bit of respect going:
First, allow subordinates no humor. It threatens your self-importance, especially your omniscience. Treat all humor as frivolous or subversive, because subversive is, of course, what humor will be in your setup, as it’s the only way that people can express their opposition, since if they express it openly, you’re down on them like a ton of bricks. So let’s get this clear: blame humor for the resistance that your way of working creates. Then you don’t have to blame your way of working. This is important, and I mean that solemnly: your dignity is no laughing matter.
Second, keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable involves cutting everybody else down to size, so don’t miss an opportunity to undermine your employees’ confidence. A perfect opportunity comes when you’re reviewing work that they’ve done. Use your authority to zero in immediately on all the things you can find wrong. Never, ever balance the negatives with positives; only criticize, just as your school teachers do. Always remember: praise makes people uppity.
Third, demand that people should always be actively Doing Things. If you catch anybody pondering, accuse them of laziness and or indecision. This is to starve employees of thinking time, because that leads to creativity, and insurrection. So, demand urgency at all times, use lots of fighting talk and war analogies, and establish a permanent atmosphere of stress, of breathless anxiety, and crisis. In a phrase, “Keep that mode closed.” Now, in this way, we no-nonsense types can be sure that the tiny, tiny, microscopic quantity of creativity in our organization will all be ours. But let your vigilance slip for one moment, and you could find yourself surrounded by happy, enthusiastic, and creative people whom you might never be able completely to control ever again. So, be careful.