Monday Rundown: Coaching Volatility, Marner vs. Robertson, and Gurianov vs....Benn?
Perspective!
Edit: Right after publishing this, Cameron Hughes was recalled from AHL Texas, ensuring Dallas will have 12 healthy forwards for Tuesday’s game against Boston (for whom Hughes played his prior two career NHL games).
Hughes is one of two forwards (along with Matthew Seminoff) who seemed most likely to get called up with all the injuries to Dallas wingers lately. He was an AHL all-star this year, and he’s having a fantastic season for Texas, with 66 points in 63 games.
If he gets into the lineup in Boston, it will be his first NHL game in about five years. Personally, I’m rooting for it to happen.
The most shocking news from this weekend was easily the fact that Vegas fired Bruce Cassidy with three weeks left in their season. They brought John Tortorella aboard in a move that is Totally Not Trying to Copy Columbus, who hired their own veteran coach in Rick Bowness in the second half. The Blue Jackets have surged since then, as has been well-documented elsewhere.
(And as has been incorrectly documented on Google’s AI search result for this query, a fact of life on the internet in 2026 that continues to depress me. Take today’s search result, for instance:
That’s wrong, of course. So many of the AI search results are often wrong. But for whatever reason—it’s money—every giant tech company is just okay with rolling out these products that should still be in beta testing as if the false information they propagate is just part of progress, and that it’s our job to sift and sort the truths from the untruths. I miss the old internet.
Right, yes, the hockey. Anyway, Vegas fired Bruce Cassidy, and one thing you have to say for the decision is that it’s consistent with their organization approach in general. After all, Vegas has only missed the playoffs once in their history, and they fired Pete DeBoer for that failure after they finished with just 94 points in 2021-22.
This year, they have 80 points with 8 games left to play, meaning the absolute best they can do is finish with 96, if they win out. But teams don’t usually win eight games in a row, particularly with the store-brand Kleenex the Golden Knights have been calling their goaltending this season. (Not that Dallas has noticed, as all three of their games against Vegas were one-goal margins of victory or defeat.)
So on the one hand, kudos to Vegas for being ruthless and brutally honest with themselves about just how bad their season has been, even with the lower bar for entry in the pathetic Pacific Division this year. On the other hand, they brought in John Tortorella, who notably does play goalie.
Their hope will be that Tortorella can channel a bit of Bowness in two senses: First, by energizing a room that had begun to check out under Cassidy; and second, by going on their version of a 2020 bubble run, likely by employing the usual Tortorellian ways to turn playoff games into mucky affairs that give the team a puncher’s chance every night, hoping they win four out of seven a couple times. It is absolutely possible that Torts could do that, with that roster. It is also possible that you could do that, with that roster. (Especially if you happen to be an NHL goaltender.)
All right, let’s talk about the Dallas Stars. That’s what we’re here for, I’m told.
One other thing on Glen Gulutzan
In addition to what I said about Gulutzan at D Magazine last week, I wanted to touch on something that came up when a couple of folks asked me yesterday if the Stars would consider hiring a suddenly available Bruce Cassidy.
The question(s) shocked me, but maybe they shouldn’t have. After all, the Blues pulled a similar move last year when Jim Montgomery suddenly became available, and St. Louis canned Drew Bannister in order to Get Their Guy. Is Bruce Cassidy the sort of coach a franchise should do literally anything to get?
Yes, Vegas’s ruthlessness is one of their best weapons as an organization. But Jim Nill has never operated that way, and I think the Stars have been better for it. In a way, Vegas had to have that mentality, because they didn’t enter the league with five years’ worth of prospects to use in bolstering their team. And with an expansion draft juiced in their favor (and made even more favorable by some truly incredible decisions by other GMs), Vegas immediately launched themselves into their competitive window. They’ve had to do some unique things to keep it open, but they’ve largely worked, with 2023 being the notable apex of those efforts.
Bruce Cassidy is, by all accounts, a great coach. If he had been available over the summer, I’ve little doubt the Stars would have interviewed him. But what Gulutzan has done in Dallas this season is impressive in ways that go far beyond the on-ice product. He’s tried to instill a new mentality as well as a new system, and in both cases, he seems to have succeeded (with the perennial caveat that the playoffs will be the true proving ground). The Stars are 2nd in the NHL with eight games to play, and they’ve suffered among the worst injury luck of any team in the league. They also play in the Central Division.
Just as the Pacific skews the talk of “playoff quality” for those teams, so also should the immensely high bar in the Central remind us just what the Stars have done this year. Gulutzan has brought a looser approach and a tighter defense. His confidence, and I think that of his team, really feels like it’s rooted in something deeper this year than last. That he’s done so despite having to roll basically two fourth lines for much of the season only becomes more impressive the more closely you look.
There are flaws in this team, certainly. They aren’t playing their best hockey at the moment, but playing your best hockey in March is wildly overrated. They just need to grab 60% of the points down the stretch and keep the Wild at bay. That seems doable, even if motivation is understandably not at its pinnacle right now. This team feels more complex than in past years, and that brings a (possibly specious) optimism about their chances to do something more than they did last year, come the postseason.
I just don’t think you ought to bail on the hard-earned success and progress of this season for any coach in the world, even one as high-quality as Cassidy. And more to the point, I don’t think it’s something Jim Nill would do, either to his team or to his current coach. Gulutzan and his team have more than earned the chance to justify that faith.
Show some love to Sean Shapiro
If you haven’t heard the news, Sean announced today that the All City Network who run DLLS will be moving on from him. He penned a thoughtful, big-hearted piece today explaining all the ins and outs of that decision, and it’s worth your time.
Sean and I have collaborated on some articles and things before, and we’ll continue to do so. Still, I’m sad that he won’t be on the DLLS show anymore. Other than the venerable Mike Heika, Sean is the writer who has most closely covered this organization for over a decade now, from the AHL to the NHL. I’m far from unbiased here, but any outfit purporting to cover the Stars would be better off for having him around. Thankfully, Sean is still doing approximately 37 other things in the wider hockey world, so his voice will still be out there. But it will be in one fewer place, and that’s a bummer.
Assist Wars
As you know, Miro Heiskanen grabbed the team lead in assists last week when he tallied his 50th helper of the year, passing up Mikko Rantanen’s 49 while the superstar winger was still recovering from his Olympic injury.
That lead lasted until Rantanen’s first game back, when he set up Jason Robertson’s power play goal against Pittsburgh to get to 50 himself. However, Rantanen was his own worst enemy three minutes later, because his dynamite one-timer came with a secondary assist from Heiskanen, putting the defenseman back in the lead with 51.
Neither player tallied an assist in Philly, because no Stars player got an assist yesterday, with Arttu Hyry opting to take assists from Jamie Drysdale and company instead when he scored his first NHL goal.
So with eight games to go, does Rantanen catch Heiskanen again? Is this a more dramatic scoring race than the Johnston/Robertson race for the goals lead? Are we just trying to gin up drama because these last eight games might well end up being a bit of a slog, if recent results are anything to go by? Some questions are better left unanswered.
Also, Jason Robertson is lurking just below the two of them with 47 assists, which isn’t even close to his career-high. Do you remember what that was? Well, it was 63, back in 2022-23. Robertson’s been an elite playmaker for a long time, even if his elite shooting ability sometimes gets more press. You can see why the Stars have kept cap room open for his deal next year. Players like him are extremely hard to find. Vegas’s Mitch Marner, for instance, has 51 assists himself…but just 20 goals to Robertson’s 40.
Who would you take, between the two?
Random fight of the week: Denis Gurianov vs. Jordie Benn
This is exactly what it sounds like. Do you remember where you were when the Stars celebrated their 2019 trip to Tom Gaglardi’s town with this dustup?
Despite the Vancouver broadcast, it was actually Nick Caamano who got hit by Jordie Benn before the fight there. Still, credit to Denis Gurianov for standing up for his teammate, even if he couldn’t stop himself from cracking up multiple times during the fight. I mean, look at this:
You can’t tell me Gurianov wasn’t thinking back to some moments from development camp three years prior while the two were mixing it up here. Still, the best part of the scrap has to be how Gurianov’s smile immediately evaporates once Benn starts throwing punches. You can see the realization in Gurianov’s face as it dawns upon him that this will not be a mere wrestling match. Jordie Benn didn’t work his way up to the NHL just to let some first-round draft pick boss him around, and Benn ends up winning the fight.
This was one of two fights in Gurianov’s NHL career, though the other one didn’t go much better than this one. Someday, we’ll get both of these players on a talk show to go through this dust-up frame by frame with commentary. Or at least, to find out what Gurianov said right here:
I would have loved to see Gurianov really put it all together as an NHLer. He had the physical tools and the competitive will to do so, as well as a much more stable life off the ice than certain other Dallas first-round picks out of Russia. But sometimes, that just isn’t enough. The NHL is such an elite league, compared to every other one in the world—another reason to watch other leagues—that even being insanely gifted and having a great work ethic still might not keep you in the NHL, if you don’t also have enough of an X factor (“Hockey IQ,” if you must) to put it all together.
Anyway, this is probably my third-favorite Weird Stars Fight of all-time, behind two different fights by Spezza and Seguin. I am open to suggestions for other candidates, though.