The Five Biggest Questions about the Future of These Dallas Stars

Shall we play a game? No, let's just talk about Stars stuff instead.

If you’ve ever played 20 Questions, you know that it’s a very annoying game. You start with almost impossibly broad questions to cut giant swaths of possibilities away (e.g., Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?¹), unless you’re a kid, in which case you exasperate your parents by beginning with “is it my shoes?” or somesuch foolishness. Kids are so bad at games, man. I win almost every time.

But today, we are not going to play any games. Instead, we’re going to breeze² through five questions that keep rattling around my mind when it comes to the recent rumblings about Dallas, and what has to happen for everything to shake out (or not shake out).

We’ve already pored over exit interviews, digging into the words of the players and coaches when they spoke about the season that ended too soon. Now, let’s talk about all the supposed fallout or potential fallout or possibly zero fallout³ since then.

1. Who (Else) You Gonna Call?

Here’s what Gaglardi told Tim Cowlishaw the other day with regard to Canadian media members calling him to ask if Pete DeBoer was getting fired:

“Are you kidding me? He’s a top three, top five coach in the league. You think I want to be going into the coaching market right now, do you see who’s getting hired? Pete’s a seasoned coach. I’m just one voice in the discussion but I don’t see [firing] Pete being on anyone’s agenda.’’

-Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi on 5/30/25, in The Dallas Morning News

Cowlishaw followed that up with two more tweets today:

And secondly, Cowlishaw confirmed that Gaglardi and Nill had indeeddiscussed the DeBoer situation on Tuesday.

It is now Wednesday, and Jim Nill won’t be speaking to the media until next week at the earliest, given the Calder Cup Playoffs that are still ongoing for the Texas Stars. But my question about all this is: Does/did DeBoer’s job security really come down to whether or not Gaglardi would have to foot the bill of DeBoer’s $4 million salary in his final year or not? If another team hired him after Dallas fired him, then Dallas would be off the hook for that final year, but that list of suitors quickly shrank once the first domino fell. Was that really the determining factor, rather than whether or not DeBoer is the right fit for the team?

I mean, even a tenth of $4 million would change my life, so I can understand someone being reticent to throw that amount of money in the garbage, so to speak. But still, the idea that this could “save” DeBoer was surprising to me, if it’s true (and Cowlishaw’s recent conversations with Gaglardi suggest he’s not making it up).

Anyway, I think Gaglardi’s first comment on all of this was still the most salient one: what coach would even be a lateral move from DeBoer for a Dallas team looking to win a Stanley Cup next season, let alone an improvement? I mean, when I look at a list like this, I think, “Ehh, maybe Gerard Gallant, I guess?” and then I look at a lot of other names and shudder.

Gaglardi’s prerogative is to decide where millions and millions of dollars are going to be deployed in order to best help his hockey team win. Jim Nill’s prerogative is to be the steward of hockey operations, looking closely at what is the healthiest thing for the team and its chances of winning, then showing his boss why the money ought to be spent there.

Those conversations yesterday between the two must have been fascinating ones indeed, but I can’t imagine they would leave DeBoer twisting in the wind for another week or more if they’d decided to move on from him. And even if you think it’s time to do so, you wonder if the Stars might be better-served to wait until next season and see how the team starts. If they get off to a great beginning in the fall, all the pressure cools off. And if they don’t, there will always be plenty of coaches available in the Kris Knoblauch/Craig Berube mold of teams that turn a mid-year coaching change into a deep playoff run.

Okay, we have four more of these to answer. Let’s get briefer, if we can. (We won’t.)

2. What to Do with Neil Graham?

If you watched the Texas Stars play Game 4 of the Western Conference Final last night, you saw a heartbreaking, double-overtime loss.

If you watched head coach Neil Graham’s postgame press conference, you also heard an interesting quote when Graham was asked if he’d considered pulling goaltender Remi Poirer after he surrendered the third goal of the game. Poirier would go on to surrender a fourth goal later in the second period, and the Stars would pull Poirier and put Magnus Hellberg in the net to start the third period. Hellberg would perform admirably, keeping the Stars in the game long enough for Justin Hryckowian to tie the game in the final seconds of the third period, as well as keeping Texas alive for overtime, including a penalty kill. Hellberg was outstanding, but he only got one goal of support through 2+ periods, and the Stars are now trailing 3-1 in the series.

Anyway, here’s what Graham said when asked about whether he’d thought about pulling Poirier earlier.

“No, not in a tie game,” Graham said. “You know, maybe if that goes straight in, but it went off our defenseman, our strong-side defenseman’s stick, deflects of him and in. In a tie game, I think that’s a little bit of a panic decision. Frankly, once the fourth one went in, I took some time to think about the decision, make a calculated choice. We did it before in playoffs, and we have trust in both [goalies] like I said, so it wasn’t really that tough of a call.”

[emphasis mine]

Now, I don’t think Graham was sub-tweeting DeBoer or anything like that. But I do wonder if Graham wanted to be especially clear about the logic and process behind his decision to change goaltenders, given the drama from recent events three hours up I-35.