Taking A Deeper Look at the Pete DeBoer and Jake Oettinger Situation

Let's read between (and into) the lines a bit

This week, we’re going to cover a few other notes from Saturday’s end-of-year media availabilities. Today, we’ll start with Jake Oettinger and Pete DeBoer, but we’ll get into Seguin and Duchene and some other folks later this week—including Jim Nill, whenever he holds his end-of-year media session.

This will be more analysis than breaking news, so let’s dive in and see what we can glean from what was said. I think there’s quite a lot to be learned.

One other note: I’m going to bold certain quotes for emphasis, but that’s all my own bolding, not the speaker’s. Just so you know.

Anyway, let’s start with the person under the most scrutiny right now.

Pete DeBoer

Here are the things that stuck out to me from DeBoer’s comments on Saturday:

• “Sometimes the other team’s better. Sometimes, a lot of times, they’re tighter, they’re better defensively. You know, they’re getting better goaltending, or they wouldn’t be in the final four. I think they kinda go hand-in-hand. That’s why a lot of those games are 2-1, 3-2. They’re tight, tight games.”

  • I think it’s fair to say that DeBoer doesn’t expect even a high-scoring team like Dallas to be scoring 3 or 4 goals every game in the playoffs at this point. So, I think one foundational assumption of his is clear: the playoffs require you to give up fewer goals, because you’ll probably be scoring fewer goals. And the Stars were only fulfilling the second half of that equation.

• DeBoer goes on to talk about how his team didn’t score enough, and how other teams considered Dallas a “rush team,” and that in the playoffs, rush opportunities dry up, so you have to get what DeBoer called “The hard offense. That’s in-zone, getting to the net, the kinda offense that Florida’s creating a lot of, and has won with. We’ve gotta get more of that in our game.”

  • The first question you ask in the moment is: how do you get “more of that in [their] game”? Is this a commentary on the roster the Stars have, or a commentary on the way the players approached the games? I suspect it’s a bit of both, but DeBoer has made no secret of the fact that he prefers skilled players with size to skilled players without it. Of course, size is only one component in creating in-zone offense, along with things like speed, tenacity, and creative vision.

• DeBoer also adds that the other factor in the Stars’ lack of rush opportunities was that they were trailing early in every game. And I think it’s clear from his comments after Game 5 (as well as his pulling of Jake Oettinger) that he sees goaltending as one of the big factors in why the Stars weren’t getting leads. One big save can cover a multitude of defensive sins.

  • I found it interesting that DeBoer points to the scouting reports of other teams that called Dallas a rush-based offense. He doesn’t say that he saw Dallas as a rush offense, but that other teams viewed them that way. He doesn’t argue with the perception either. We’ll touch on this more in a bit, but it’s a little curious that he pointed first to how other teams perceived Dallas when diagnosing the causes of their falling short.

• “Every team’s built differently. There’s not one way to do things. You know, because Florida won, we can’t go, okay, let’s become the Florida Panthers. I mean, they’ve got some special ingredients there that you just can’t go out and get, to play that way. I just think we probably need to be more of a hybrid. I think we relied too much on that piece [i.e. rush offense, I think?], and when it became tough because of the circumstances, behind in games, other teams taking that away…we had trouble getting to that secondary way of creating offense.”

  • I think a fair summary of this section is: When they fell behind in games and Jake Oettinger stopped playing out of his mind like he did in the first two rounds, Dallas wasn’t able to pivot to another way of playing to make up the gap in goals. That was especially true against Edmonton, who defended too well with the lead for Dallas to generate rush opportunities that would help their offense get back in the game.

  • It’s also worth noting that DeBoer isn’t blaming this totally on the roster or Oettinger here, but he’s not letting them quite off the hook, either.

  • Then again, the way the Stars play is kind of primarily dictated by the Stars’ head coach. So, it seems to me that this was DeBoer’s way of saying the Stars need to tweak their system a bit for next year. But that’s not really a thing you can do in the middle of a series—or at least, Dallas wasn’t able to execute those changes to large-scale success in the third round.

• “This group faced a lot of adversity this year, with injuries and different things thrown at them, and they found a way to have a really good regular season. Despite that, it didn’t go off the rails. They found a way to get through two excellent hockey teams, in Colorado and Winnipeg, in two series where we probably weren’t favored in either one […] so, there’s a lot of pride in the work we did there, but you know, it’s hard when you’re singularly focused on a Stanley Cup to get past the disappointment of not getting there.”

  • Again, I can’t help but go back to the postgame comments on Thursday, when DeBoer basically said he’s not sure this Stars team was the best of the last three years or not. In fact, I might even say that I don’t think it’s entirely disingenuous to interpret this quote as DeBoer saying the Stars overachieved just by getting as far as they did.

  • Shoot, is this the worst Stars team of the last three years? That seems crazy to say about a team with Mikko Rantanen, but they sure did look it in those last four games, didn’t they? Even the 2023 team won two games after the Benn suspension.

• “I think from a coaching perspective, we’re one-and-seven against that team at this time of year, in the Conference Finals. So everything’s on the table: lineup decisions, goaltending decisions, system decisions. Everything’s on the table. You’re looking for some type of way to flip that momentum, because it’s not a small sample size. One-and-seven is not a small sample size. That’s not just on Jake; that’s on our entire group. We scratched veteran guys in order to try and change that. We moved guys up and down the lineup. We switched lines. We switched power play units. I mean, you’re looking for solutions in order to try and flip that momentum, and the goaltending is one piece of that. I think Jake is the best young goaltender in the league. But that doesn’t mean there’s not still a learning curve and growth. That’s all part of the journey.”

  • It sounds as though, in DeBoer’s view, the Oettinger pull was just one of many last-ditch changes the Stars made in order to try to get past Edmonton. They needed to find something that would “flip that momentum,” and they could never quite find it.

  • I don’t think he’s entirely off-base to try to downplay the goalie switch in the moment, and I’ve even said that it probably didn’t make much difference, given the series was already 3-1 and the Stars were down 2-0. But it was a shocking move, and remains the biggest talking point of that game—even if the offense was the deeper problem.

• About seven minutes in, DeBoer answers a question from Sam Nestler about whether he consulted with Jeff Reese before making the call by saying “sometimes you don’t have time.” And while Reese is able to communicate with the bench coaches through the coaching staff’s earpieces, you kinda get the sense here that the pull was DeBoer’s decision—albeit one based on a lot of pre-existing factors they had all discussed before the game.

  • One thing I can’t stress enough here is that DeBoer has taken responsibility for the call to pull Oettinger from Thursday night onward. He also goes on to talk about how that move wasn’t a panic move in the moment, but a decision made after a lot of discussion even going back to before Game 4. We’ll get to that in a minute.

• When asked whether the goalie decision might have affected his relationship with Oettinger, Deboer is adamant that he doesn’t think so. He points to how he moved Jamie Benn to the fourth line, and how he healthy scratched Evgenii Dadonov, whom he’s known since he coached Dadonov when the rookie was 20 years old in Florida. “Does that ruin our relationship? No. Those aren’t easy conversations. As a player, you don’t like that. I’m sure there’s always some hard feelings. Those are the decisions we make, and we try and keep it as professional as we can. And it’s all with one goal, and that’s to try and keep the group moving forward.”

  • On the topic of relationship repairs, DeBoer also said he hadn’t had a chance to talk with Oettinger since Game 5 at this point, which I found surprising. At the very least, you’d have thought he’d have anticipated this question and had at least a brief text exchange or phone call, but maybe he wanted to give Oettinger space, knowing how frustrated he must have been.

• We asked DeBoer if he’d considered putting Oettinger back in the game after the first period, and he starts to answer what sounds like “We considered it” before referring back to his prior comments about “everything’s on the table at that point.” He then gives us a little more insight by revealing some of the things that had come up in conversations between DeBoer and other people in the organization, including the fact that Oettinger was battling a cold or some other upper respiratory infection earlier in the series, which Oettinger later confirmed.

  • The insights DeBoer gave us (see next paragraph) only came after a few questions on the same topic. Sometimes, you wonder why a coach doesn’t just tell the media these things right off the bat, but I think the persistent questioning (as long it’s varied up enough to be genuinely different questions on the same theme) can draw out good info like this, and I appreciated what DeBoer told us after a few minutes of talking about the subject, rather than shutting it down and moving on. I think he decided beforehand that it would be best not to be too defensive about this topic, and to his credit, I think he was pretty forthright. As far as we know.

• “We had talked going into Game 4 in Edmonton, Jake had played more than other goalie in the league, and I think still has. And really, every other team had used two goalies, other than Florida, who had [played] less games. So there was conversation in our coaching group about, should we give this guy a rest for a night? Everyone else is using two. Obviously Edmonton had used two. Is their guy fresher? That’s all real conversation that goes on. So, that was on the table as a conversation as early as Game 4. We didn’t make that decision to do that, but we were talking about that.”

  • Wow. Can you imagine if the Stars had actually started Casey DeSmith in a playoff game? People would have been screaming about that decision all game long, and there probably would have been questions about how such a move affected Oettinger even if the Stars had won. I wonder why they ultimately decided not to start DeSmith in Game 4 or 5, but I would love to have been a fly on the wall to hear how close they came to doing so.

  • I think there’s merit to the idea that you can’t ask a goalie to be superhuman while also asking him to do all the work every single night. I think the league is rapidly moving in this direction in terms of sharing the workload even in the playoffs, but we’re probably not there quite yet, especially if a team has a great goalie like Oettinger to lean on. (Though the 2015-16 Stars sure tried to be!)

• “And when you’re in that moment, and you’re making that decision [to pull Oettinger], what’s going through my mind is, we need to stop the bleeding here. You know, our team looked tentative. We’re down two-nothing […] is he a little bit fatigued? He’s been through a lot. He’s carried us through two rounds. Is he gonna be a better goalie in Game 6 and 7 for us, fresh? Can Casey come in and flip the switch for us here and give us a shot of energy, which he’s done all year for us? That’s the thought process, right or wrong. But I don’t make those decisions lightly. And I don’t make them not to hurt feelings. There’s nothing personal in it. No one’s a bigger fan of Jake Oettinger or Casey DeSmith than I am.”

  • It really is that simple, I think, for DeBoer. They wanted to “stop the bleeding,” and that means you push on the wound no matter how painful it might be. But the coagulation failed to happen, and the Stars never got back to level in the game.

  • I think it’s fair to say DeBoer didn’t push all the right buttons in the series, but it’s also fair to say that the Stars as a whole put themselves in a tough position by constantly failing to score first in the playoffs, hitting posts, etc. You just can’t keep getting away with that against great teams, and they didn’t.

• “I have to live with those consequences. If it works, then we’re in Edmonton tonight, and you guys are telling me how awesome a move it was. And when it doesn’t, I’ve gotta stand up here and do this. And I understand. But I can’t make those decisions out of fear of doing this. I can’t. That’s not how I’m built.”

  • No matter what you think about DeBoer’s decision, you can’t say it wasn’t bold. And fortune sometimes favors the bold! In this case, the Stars needed a whole lot more fortune than they got.

  • Still, I think you have to admit that having a coach willing to scratch veterans, willing to bring Bourque back into the lineup, willing to consider starting a different goaltender…well, you want a coach with the courage to make those decisions in big moments. And DeBoer certainly has no shortage of confidence when it comes to doing what he thinks is right—even if it might end up making him look bad if it doesn’t work out. That’s a virtue, even if the results weren’t there. I really believe that. The last thing you want is a coach too scared of perception to make tough calls.

• DeBoer calls Connor McDavid the best player in the world, but he does say he thinks the Stars player McDavid fairly well, overall. DeBoer calls the blocked shot that resulted in a McDavid breakaway goal and the Evander Kane goal off Esa Lindell’s “unfortunate,” which is a fair assessment. “It felt like we were on the wrong side of a bunch of those this year in the playoffs, so those are hard to explain.”

  • The first goal the Stars allowed this playoff run was the bicycle kick goal by Artturi Lehkonen. The last goal they allowed (with a goaltender in the net) went in off Esa Lindell’s skate. If you wanted to theorize that someone put some kind of ancient curse on this team, that is where I would start the theorizing.

• “I’m praying Jamie Benn’s back. One of the best leaders I’ve been around. I can’t do enough service to tell you how he led, even though personally, his own game wasn’t in a great place. He wasn’t playing a lot. He was in a totally different role than he’s been playing in his career. It never affected his leadership. And that’s the ultimate test of leadership. It’s not when things are going your way, and you’re playing on the time, and you’re contributing. I think it’s easy to lead in those situations. I think the true test of character is when things aren’t going your way, but you can still find that inner strength in order to lead and message the right things.”

  • Whatever your opinion of Jamie Benn, one thing you have to admire is that he has gone from getting cursed out by his owner six years ago to having his head coach pray for his return, even while that same coach acknowledges that Benn’s contributions on the ice weren’t where they needed to be. Some things matter more than goal-scoring. But then, when nobody is scoring, everything matters more than usual.

  • I see a parallel in how Joe Pavelski was (eventually) moved down the lineup in his final season and how Benn was moved down the lineup and off the power play in this campaign, but never out of the lineup altogether. Scratching players like that is a big, big deal, and I think DeBoer would probably say that the small gain you might get from replacing an underperforming Benn with a player like Mavrik Bourque or Oskar Bäck would more than be outweighed by the demoralizing effect it could have on the team as a whole the next time you needed them to galvanize. At least, that’s my guess.

Jake Oettinger

• Oettinger is pretty clear about how he felt in the moment of Game 5 when he got pulled: he wasn’t expecting to get pulled, and it was embarrassing and disheartening. But he still thinks it’s ultimately his job to make one more save, and so he owns that.

  • He’ll say that every time, I think, but the truth of the matter here is that Oettinger faced two Grade-A chances and gave up two goals. That’s not all his fault by any stretch. Then again, giving up a goal to Mattias Janmark in an elimination game feels like some kind of dark cosmic prank. Not everything comic is a relief.

• “It sucks. It’s embarrassing.¹ Any time you get pulled…doesn’t matter if it’s playoffs or the regular season, you just wanna go right off the ice and crawl under your bed and not talk to anyone.”

  • Oettinger was a good sport when answering this question about how tough it was to sit next to Ray Ferraro as the analyst talked about the decision to pull Oettinger two feet away from him. Real strength, I think, tends to manifest itself as deep-rooted joy more than stoicism.

• It is noteworthy here that Oettinger doesn’t criticize Pete DeBoer at all, but it is also noteworthy that he doesn’t go out of his way to praise his coach, either. Oettinger is focused on his game, and what he can control, and he doesn’t see a need to defend his coach in this moment. And I’m sure DeBoer would say that it’s not Oettinger to do so, either.

  • In that vein, I don’t agree with reading a ton into Oettinger’s glove bumps or lack of them in the tunnel, given how tough of a moment that must have been for him (as he said). But given that this was not unlike Tampa Bay pulling Blake Snell five years ago, the debate will probably rage on for a while yet.

• Did the upper respiratory illness greatly affect Oettinger? “I don’t think very much. Just for the first couple games of the Conference Final. I’d rather be sick than what some of these guys are going through, so no excuse this year.”

  • The Stars went 1-2 in the first three games of the Edmonton series. They scored six goals and won Game 1, then lost the next two games 3-0 and 6-1. Hard to blame Oettinger much when he got 0.5 goals of support per game, even if he was hacking up a lung.

  • As for what other ailments the team was dealing with, we’ll see what Nill has to say on that front. We already know about Hintz and Lundkvist, at least.
    

    Dallas Stars Media Day Interviews: Roope Hintz's Foot, Nils Lundkvist's Past & Future, and Jamie Benn's First Contract Negotiation in Eight Years

• Oettinger again: “This was as healthy as I’ve ever felt. I feel great. I feel like I could play 40 more games. I think [Jeff Reese] and our strength staff, I think they did a great job of telling me when to take my foot off the gas, and when we have time to work, and can put some good work in. I think as I get older now, that’s what it’s all about.”

  • Obviously athletes are not going to say, “oh dear me, was I ever so pooped after playing all those games!” So you have to take Oettinger’s estimation of his freshness with a grain of salt here. Coaches are always going to have to be the ones to rest a player before the player wants to. But I do think that Oettinger would be honest if he had felt ragged, so the truth is probably that the workload didn’t make it easier on him, but that he was handling it pretty well, all things considered. It seems clear from what we saw that Oettinger wasn’t giving up soft goals all over the place, and it really was a case of the entire team being outplayed. But changing a goalie is a lot simpler button to press than trying to get ten different players to find another level.

• Oettinger is pretty dismissive (in a positive way) of the fallout from being pulled. He talks about being the best he can be regardless of what coaching decisions are made, and then he made a crack about how one of the media could be coaching, and it wouldn’t matter to him for the purposes of the job he had to do.

  • While I’ll ignore the personal affront implied by his comments that my coaching wouldn’t immediately make the team better, I think Oettinger really does have this sort of mentality. He doesn’t let things get to him as much as possible, and that sort of level-headedness will continue to serve him well in life, as it already has. He’s a leader in that locker room for a lot of reasons, and his unflappability is certainly one of them.

• “You know, for me, I think I played some of the best hockey of my life in the first two rounds. I feel like I’ve done that the last three playoff runs. But then, that just shows you that goaltending in the playoffs, like, you play the best hockey of your career for two rounds, and then you don’t have a great round, and you suck again.”

  • Goaltending seems emotionally draining. This concludes my analysis.

• Oettinger is clear that he didn’t feel fatigued, but that staying sharp is a more complex (and I would even say nebulous) prospect. He also goes on to say that he thinks he’s only half the goalie he is capable of being someday, in case you didn’t think he was still pushing himself.

  • If Oettinger gets twice as good as he is now, then he will be stopping 1.8 of ever 1 puck he faced. The math says that is a good thing, but we’ll have to double-check those numbers down at the lab later on.

• “I don’t know why I decided to play goalie, but here we are.”

  • This is a good-natured reflection of the chaos of the playoffs and the weird nature of being a goalie. Or, it’s a profound expression of self-reflection. You choose. (It is not that.)

• “Yeah, I think every year of my life’s been a disappointment.”

  • This quote (a bit out of context, in fairness) made me chuckle in the moment. It’s a response to someone asking if this disappointment will motivate Oettinger, and he responded by pointing out that he’s had ample disappointment to draw upon, both in his NCAA career and in his NHL career. Or, it’s a profound expression of self-reflection. You choose. (It is probably not that.)

  • Matt Duchene made a similar point later on in the day, too, pointing out that if he ever wins the Stanley Cup, he could see the first day back in the gym as an especially hard one, without that first Stanley Cup to strive for after winning it.

• “It’s why I hate like, stats or analytics. I mean, I don’t hate it, but like, teams are so different.” Oettinger points out how 30 shots of one kind could be less difficult than half as many of another kind, depending on what type of shots they are. Then Oettinger stops himself and says, “I don’t know why I started rambling about that.”

  • Players want information that will help them win more, but I think they hear so many people less-informed than they are talk about their games (like we do in the media), that they tend to become naturally skeptical of anyone pointing to such information over time, or maybe right off the bat. In my view, it’s the job of good data science/analytics/research to present conclusions in concise, digestible forms that are backed up by thorough research that can account for the variables players will point to. I’ve experienced this myself at times this year, when I’ve asked a player or coach a question and tried to cite data, only for them to point out that they didn’t see it that way, or that their internal numbers say otherwise. In some ways, I’ve become much more reliant on what we’ll call analytics in terms of starting points for a story, but I’ve become more hesitant at using them as the conclusion—unless the numbers are so overwhelming that the conclusion is irreftuable.²

• Oettinger finishes by raving about Casey DeSmith for a bit, and I would say that from what I saw this year, every word of that is true. Scott Wedgewood was beloved, but Casey DeSmith played excellent hockey this year, and Oettinger clearly feels grateful to have DeSmith as a goalie partner.

  • Perhaps that means DeSmith actually gets a playoff start next year, rather than just being a metaphorical fire sprinkler. In fact, I think a team as deep as Dallas might have benefited from more rotational scratches even outside of the goal crease, but I suppose that’s a conversation for another day.

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Overall, I think what we know right now is this: Oettinger is never going to be happy about being pulled. And being pulled when the game is still within reach in what turns out to be the final game of your season is a miserable feeling indeed.

Then again, DeBoer can’t spare feelings when it comes to trying to jolt the team back into some semblance of competitiveness. He had hit a lot of buttons, and the Stars were nearly out of time.

Where do we go from here? Well, I think once Jim Nill speaks to the media, we’ll know if the status quo is going to continue over the summer. But Tom Gagalrdi was clear in his interview with Tim Cowlishaw the other day that he doesn’t see a lot of better coaches out in the market, so I think it’s likely to be the case that both Oettinger and DeBoer have a nice summer, and we get to pick up where we left off in training camp, come September.

That’s the more likely path at this point, unless some deeply concerning things get voiced in exit interviews that compel the team to take a different route. But I just don’t think you can confidently project a ton of upheaval for the Stars when it comes to their goalie and their coach, for now. It was a tough ending to the season for everybody. It’s probably best, at least for now, for coaches and players to take a breath and get some vacations started.

(Then again, nobody saw the Mikko Rantanen trade coming.)

1. On a slightly smaller scale, I can relate to this feeling. My baseball coach pinch-hit for me in a crucial moment in Little League when I was 11, and he had one of the few girls playing baseball that year (most opted for softball) pinch-hit for me in the sixth inning. She would strike out, and we lost. I actually didn’t get teased much for it (thankfully), but boy, when your team is losing and your coach looks at you and says, “Someone else has to be a better option.” That is the nadir as a player, right there.

2. This comes up with regard to Cody Ceci all the time. I tried hard to take the numbers, his approach to routine plays, and his decision-making in tough moments into account after he was acquired by Dallas, because I don’t think it’s fair to just point to a chart that says he should be terrible and say he needed to be benched. Obviously the coaches see those same numbers, and they’re drawing different conclusions. And the results were often corresponding more with the coaches’ conclusions than with my own presumptions, so that gave me pause about how to properly tell the story of what Cody Ceci was for this team. Because first and foremost, he was a large piece of spackle for a team that lost two top-four defensemen in January, and the team held together well enough to get home-ice advantage over Colorado, and beat them as a result. You can call that a fluke, and say the Edmonton series was the truth of the matter, when Ceci got pretty well exposed by his former team. But I think the real answer is that when talking about Ceci, you have to really understand the positive things he brings (in perception of his teammates and coaches) before you trot out the negatives. Because even if I ultimately think the negatives are so overwhelming as to outweigh his positives, you can’t really have a productive conversation if your starting point is entirely cynical. This is a terrible footnote.