Shap and Tiffin: A Survey of Coaching Candidates for the Dallas Stars

What sort of coach do the Dallas Stars want? Possibly one of these people.

Photo Credit: Christina Shapiro

The Dallas Stars may not be in the Stanley Cup Final, but that doesn’t mean there’s any shortage of discussion topics around the team these days.

To discuss one of those topics today, I partnered with my old pal Sean Shapiro, who has quite literally written the book on the Dallas Stars (two of them, actually). You can find him writing about everything (including, but far from exclusively, the Stars) at his own Substack, Shap Shots.

Sean, Jim Nill is currently looking for the next head coach of the Dallas Stars. He’s said he’ll look at a wide variety of candidates, but that sounds more daunting than his task probably is. In reality, there’s a finite pool of people qualified to coach an NHL team, and Nill probably had an idea of his top candidates well before he called Pete DeBoer into his office last Friday morning.

When it comes to coaching hires in the NHL, there are a lot of routes a team can go, but there are also some broad similarities in terms of the “type” of coach a team brings in. Generally, teams hire coaches with specific goals in mind, whether in terms of culture, playstyle, communication, or all of the above.

For today, let’s look at a few of the coaching candidates Dallas is likely to consider, grouping them all into those sorts of categories. Even within those categories, of course, each coach is different, but there are certainly some broad patterns that you can recognize when it comes to how NHL teams are usually run. So let’s look at those patterns and see if we can’t decipher some of the key things Nill might be looking for.