Talking with Dallas Stars GM Jim Nill on the NHL Playoff Format, Olympic Hockey, Potential Roster Moves, and What's Holding Up the Trade Market

We talked with Nill this week about a few topics

After 44 games, the Dallas Stars are in a very good spot.

They’re still the second-best team in the NHL, despite having just snapped a six-game losing streak. They’ve scored the second-most goals in the NHL, and they’re also top-ten in goals allowed. They even boast the exact same road record (14-4-5) as the Colorado Avalanche, if you can believe it.

Still, there’s a lot of work still to be done. And as always, the person responsible for a lot of that work is Stars’ general manager Jim Nill. The Stars may not have as many draft picks to trade as they used to, but this is still a team very much in hot pursuit of a championship. You don’t trade for Mikko Rantanen if you’re not planning to win it all right here, right now.

The Stars’ path to playoff glory looks as tough as it ever has, with all three of the league’s top teams being in the Central Division. That led me to start off a conversation with Nill the other day by asking if he thought there was any chance of the league’s changing the playoff seeding format any time soon.

Sadly, no such momentum sounds imminent.

”I don’t know,” Nill said. “Do you ever go back to one versus eight? I’ve lived it my whole career. When I was a player, I lived it. We were in a division with Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg, all three really good teams. All had 100-plus points. It is what it is.”

For Nill, however, the job remains the same.

“You know, I think if you look over the history of the last probably 15 years, Pittsburgh, Washington, you know, Tampa Bay, Florida, and Toronto have lived it in their division,” Nill said. “You deal with it. It’s the way it’s set up. To be the best, you’ve got to beat the best. It is what it is.”

In an effort to do just that, the Stars went out and made a coaching change last summer. And while you can talk about Jake Oettinger or Pete DeBoer and Edmonton all you want, I wondered if one of the reasons Dallas made that change was more simple than that: The Stars’ defensive structure simply wasn’t that effective last year.

So I asked: Was there a plan to make changes to the defensive structure of the team even before hiring Glen Gulutzan? Some of Gulutzan’s tweaks to the Stars’ defensive-zone coverage have been well-documented, but it seemed at least feasible that Nill and the Stars might have had some ideas about solidifying the team’s defensive structure—with whatever new coach they ended up signing.

“You know, when unfortunately we had to make that change, and when I talked to the new coaching staff that’s coming in, you’re always working to get better,” Nill said. “And those are things that we discussed. They had some ideas, and they’ve implemented some of their ideas. I think some of it is internal growth with the team, too. So it’s kind of a combination.”