On Seth Jones, Stars Thoughts, and Gratitude

It's not about the destination, and it may not even be about the journey

DFW Airport and a hockey family. PC: @seth_jones on Instagram

Seth Jones brought the Stanley Cup to Dallas yesterday, in case you missed it.

One place Jones victoriously took the Cup was to Katy Trail Ice House, a place that sounds perpetually appealing during the ~5 months of summer Dallas levvies upon its citizens each year in order to keep Blue Bell ice cream in business. But Jones also returned to the Valley Ranch Children’s Health StarCenter, one of the oldest ice rinks the Stars operate in the Metroplex.

If you’ve never been there, it’s not the most impressive location. This is partly a consequence of multiple decades of wear and tear, but moreseo because of the many other newer, bigger StarCenters that have long since been built in other neighborhoods, including the StarCenter Multisport complex in Northlake, scheduled to open early in 2026.

Jones’ bringing the Cup back to Dallas to celebrate reminded me of Blake Coleman’s doing the same thing in Plano just a few years ago. (It also reminded me of the weird trivia answer that is Brian Leetch, who was born in Corpus Christi, but whose family moved to the East Coast when he was just a few months old.) Technically, Leetch is a Texas-born Stanley Cup champion, but for Coleman and Jones, no technicalities were needed. They brought the Cup back here because it has places that mean a lot to them—including ice rinks the Dallas Stars opened and/or rebuilt, even after they started sinking into the earth.

“Without the development of Texas youth hockey and the growth that we’ve seen over the last 10, 15 years,” Jones said, “I know I wouldn’t be standing here today. I wanted to give back, show the kids here that just because it’s not a huge hockey market, things are still possible. You can still make the NHL."

It’s a cool thing, looking back at the journeys of Coleman and Jones. It also makes me think about recent NHL draft picks like Blake Fiddler, who knows the StarCenter ecosystem very well indeed.

“This is where I do all my summer skates, so it’s cool to be back,” Fiddler said earlier this year when we chatted in Frisco before the U-18 World Championships. “I know my way around here pretty well. You know, a lot of hours spent here ever since I was a little kid.”

Fiddler may or may not be lucky enough to play on an NHL team that wins it all, but measuring the growth of something like Texas Hockey by Stanley Cup visits is like measuring a player’s impact purely on how many goals he scores. Sometimes, the bigger accomplishments are happening when nobody is looking.

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Good reporting takes time, as Sean often says.

I’ve come to understand that truth in multiple ways. First and most obviously, a good story that’s well-sourced can’t be rushed. I remember one story coming out after the Jets series that, from everything we’ve learned since, does not appear to have been true. But that’s largely because this wasn’t a story proper, but a social media post, apparently meant to garner attention more than actually tell a real story, grounded in real facts.

But second, and perhaps more importantly, good reporting takes time in just getting to know and understand what you’re covering. As much as I’ve written a lot of stories in my life, I couldn’t turn around and write an exposé about Arlington public transit, because I haven’t spent nearly enough time in Arlington to really understand the history and the landscape. That doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally toss out an opinion, but I do my best to differentiate between stories and opining and, especially, speculation.

Back when Brandon Worley first agreed to let me start writing about the Stars back in 2014, I had to learn this lesson over and over. Just because you’ve watched a lot of games doesn’t mean you know everything about a group of people or an organization, much less the individual people themselves. You have to spend time digging in, reading everything, talking to everyone you can. Again and again, I’ve had to be humbled by encountering my ignorance about something, after which I have a decision to make: admit I don’t know enough and try to learn more, or posture for the sake of my ego, pretending to be more of an authority than I really am.

That second option sounds ridiculous when you write it out, but it really is a tempting one, if I’m being honest. The idea of a an insecure writer is a tired cliché, but let me tell you, it became infinitely more real when I pivoted to Substack in January of this year in order to see if I could actually sustain this level of coverage and reporting for the entire season. Almost miraculously, that’s what happened, but there are still days when I worry that everyone will tune me out if I don’t continually demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about, whether or not I actually do.

Putting the work in, however, is a good reminder that consistency, accuracy, and understanding are far more important that being “first,” going viral, or having millions of Twitter followers. Good stories take time, because they can stand the test of it. As much as we can get all kinds of frivolous on here, I also want anything you read here to be worth re-reading, by somebody, at some point down the road.

I’m trying to assure myself that people will still be here if I actually take a week off—something I might actually try in August—because it still blows me away that I’m able to pay for things like health insurance and car repairs and medication at a pharmacy because of paid subscribers supporting this work. The idea of anyone sticking with me through the summer—something that seemed impossible when I was considering the move away from an ugly old free Wordpress model onto a tad bit more respectable of a platform—continues to feel just short of insane, and just more than wonderful.

Really, every day of the summer where I don’t see hundreds of paid subscribers cancel their memberships and send me notes like “who cares dude” feels like a miracle. I’m incredibly fortunate to have gone from a volunteer blogger in 2014 to where I am now, modest as it still is. The media landscape has never been harsher, but in another sense, it’s also never been more exciting. Put the work in, and eventually, it will have results. The stories are still there to be told, even if they’re tougher to find than they used to be.

In just a year, I’ve gotten to talk not only with more Stars folks than I could ever have thought I would, but also with other folks, people like Chris Cuthbert, Doug Wilson, Jari Kurri, Gary Bettman, Jussi Jokinen, and even Derian Hatcher. That is and continues to be very, very cool, every time. These people mean something, sometimes many different somethings, to a lot of people. I try my best not to sound as though I know anyone super well after one interview or anything like that, but man, if being in Finland for a week ends up helping me understand just 0.5 percent more about NHL players who grew up in that country, it will have been worth many times the thousands of real dollars that trip cost me. Because understanding is, I believe, what Journalism is all about.

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Getting to write about the Stars is and remains pretty cool. Cyncism is an epidemic in sports journalism, but it’s treatable. We do, after all, keep showing up for these things because sometimes, unbelievable things happen. This season had more Moments than I every expected it to have, many of which have been long-overshadowed by other ones. But do you remember who scored the overtime winner after Dallas fell behind 3-0 to New York, for instance? It was just a game, but also, aren’t they all?

(That was also a really nice game from Mavrik Bourque, as I recall.)

Those Moments, capital “M,” are what keep us coming back. They’ve kept me coming back for over a decade now, and my great hope about Stars Thoughts is that it will be a place not only to report, discuss, and reflect on those Moments as they happen, but also to connect those Moments with ones in the past. That’s something that takes time, and it’s something that, as long as I’ve written for them, Stars fans all seem to want. I don’t expect that will ever change.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m going to shoehorn Nolan Baumgartner and Landon Wilson references into everything I write, but it also doesn’t mean I won’t mention that both Wilson and Baumgartner played together on the 2003-04 Penguins, a team owned and captained by Mario Lemieux, before going on to each play for Dallas later in their careers.

What it does mean is that, with a full season rapidly approaching—we’re just seven weeks away from the September prospect tournament, if you can believe it—I’m more grateful than ever that I have a space to keep writing about this team, and all its past iterations. There are few quicker ways to get me to blow off any pressing commitments than to bring up Cody Eakin, Ladislav Nagy, Donald Audette, or Manny Fernandez, the latter of whom I believe charted the course for all future Stars who would go from Dallas to Minnesota¹ later in their careers.

There is something very special about visiting the past while looking forward to the future, and sports like hockey in particular provide a special way to do that. Even as the game has changed, more things remain the same in this than in most other major sports, for better or for worse. My hope is for Stars Thoughts to continue growing as an intentional venture, dedicated to uncovering cool stories, breaking tough ones, and relaying odd ones in equal measure, all for the sake of maintaining those connections between past, present, and future.

If I had a dream, I’d say it would be for this place to be the sort of thing where real Stars sickos can waste hours and hours scrolling back through the archives, if only to laugh at how ignorant I have been. Ultimately, I don’t want to write things that I wouldn’t care about reading, whatever your motivation for doing so, even if those stories are about Moments long past. I want this place to be packed full of stories and frivolity that you couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) find anywhere else.

Independence seemed scary last year, because what would life even look like without the security offered by big companies, whom I’ve been working for in one fashion or another for 17 years? That question has been answered in stunning fashion: it looks like talking to Ty Wubker about a change in a 30-year-old tradition, or catching up with John Klingberg after his rejuvenation, or talking with Brenden Dillon about a heart-breaking trade a decade ago, and “Uncle Jamie.”

I’m really grateful to be able to write about things I care about. And nothing has been more fulfilling in this work than discovering and rediscovering that a whole lot of y’all care about these same things, too. Connecting with readers and fellow writers across the hockey landscape has been nothing short of a privilege, and I hope I keep making that clear.

Many of the links back to Stars teams of decades past seem like they’re fading, but I’ve been overjoyed to find out that they’re still there, if you put the time in and talk to the right people. So, to all of you who are sticking around to hear about them, even during the summer: Thank you. I’ll keep digging if you’ll keep sifting through the nonsense, as always.

(And hey, maybe subscribe.)

1. The Dallas-Minnesota thing really does feel like some weird hockey version of a salmon run, right? I mean, from Warren Peters and Antti Miettinen to Greg Pateryn and Devin Shore, and everyone in between like Klingberg, Goligoski, and Jordie Benn, it’s clearly A Thing. But I suppose it’s run both ways, at times, like with Granlund, Steel, Nystrom and Parrish. This has mostly just been an excuse to put Warren Peters in a footnote.