The Misunderstood Strength of Glen Gulutzan's Dallas Stars

Let's talk about defense, which I hear is important

Last year’s Dallas Stars team changed. In the prior three years under head coach Pete DeBoer, the Stars were a team that broke the puck out quickly, generating offensive chances at a top-10 clip in the league.

That wasn’t quite true every year over that stretch, however. In 2022-23, Dallas was just mid-pack in both 5v5 goals scored (as they were this year) and expected goals, but we do tend to romanticize the past when the present takes a dip, and it did that last season.

The 2025-26 Stars lost in the first round, and their offensive numbers slowed down a fair bit under Glen Gulutzan. At 5v5, the ‘25-26 Stars were last in the NHL in shot attempts shots on goal. Their actual goal-scoring was far better than that—16th in the league at 5v5 and absolutely lethal on the power play—but concern about those underlying numbers turned into the biggest of talking points in the playoffs, when the Stars were outscored 14-4 by Minnesota when both teams had five skaters on the ice.

Anyone who has gone through a bad breakup knows how the present pain tends to make more distant memories of other exes a little rosier in retrospect, and certainly, you could look at myriad metrics this season and compare them to the last couple of years with disdain. Considering that the Carolina Hurricanes were the best team in the East in xGF this year, it would be understandable to look at the Stars’ process by comparison and say that it just wasn’t Cup-worthy, this season. One team breezed through the first three rounds thanks to Logan Stankoven and a demonstrably repeatable process while the Stars struggled to generate any kind of 5v5 production against a Minnesota team that, for all their virtues, was right next to the humble Columbus Blue Jackets in terms of defensive aptitude.

All of this preamble is setting the table for the Well, Actually of this piece, but that doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it as such. The Stars genuinely do need to make some of the adjustments Gulutzan alluded to at his end-of-season presser in order to exert more offensive control over games. With that said, I don’t think their process is quite so flawed as raw expected goals measurements would seem to indicate. Here’s part of what I mean by that: