The Persistent Patience of Pete DeBoer

A coach who has gotten the Stars to back-to-back 50-win seasons is waiting to see if the third year's the charm

Pete DeBoer is not Rick Bowness.

And by that, I mean that Pete DeBoer is not likely to express his frustration after a maddening loss like this:

The now-retired veteran coach of five decades isn’t usually remembered for having a short fuse, but if you recall that horrific Stars/Blues game from 2022, some frustration was pretty understandable. Miro Heiskanen had been dragged down without a penalty call behind the net during a late penalty kill right before the Stars got tagged with another minor to fuel a last-minute Blues comeback. AFter the Stars had worked hard for 58 minutes to put up a 1-0 lead, the Blues flipped the score in regulation with a 2-1 victory.

Last night was a little different. The Stars scored three power play goals after getting the first four such opportunities of the game, and they managed to build a 5-2 lead through 58:59 before Vancouver ripped off a three-spot in the final 60 seconds of regulation. The referees were far less to blame than the Stars themselves, who were not shorthanded on any of the final four goals of the game. (Though Matt Dumba probably had a legitimate beef on the game-winning goal.)

So in one sense, it wasn’t shocking to see a disappointed-but-not-furious Pete DeBoer after the game last night. He agreed with Jamie Benn’s “unaccepatable” assessment of the team’s performance, but he didn’t pile on too much.

After two periods of much better hockey than they’ve been playing for large stretches recently, Dallas had a 3-0 lead with 20 minutes to go. They promptly gave up two power play goals early in the third, yes; but they also managed to hold on and push back themselves in the (almost) end, as Mavrik Bourque and Mikael Granlund pushed their lead back to three goals with two good plays late.

Of course, you know what happened after that.

“There’s bad wins and there’s good losses, and I would consider last night a good loss. One, the learning perspective of the last minute, but also the 50 minutes prior to that. So we have to build on that.”

In other words, if you think this game is a worrisome referendum on the Stars’ ability to prepare their game for the playoffs, the team doesn’t see it that way. They’ve been on the positive end of some games like the wins in Calgary or Edmonton where the other side probably deserved the win based on their play for most of the game. But this time, it was Dallas who threw away a second point after some mistakes at the worst possible time.

“It’s what I told our group today,” DeBoer said on Wednesday. “We had a lot of wins over the last month where we didn’t have great detail to our game, and still found a way to win games. I wouldn’t call them great wins. Last night is a loss, but I really, from a coaching perspective, think it’s a good loss. I thought we had a lot of detail to our game. We did a lot of things we hadn’t done in a while. We had O-zone possession. We drew some penalties. We did a lot of things to build that lead that we built for the first time in a while.”

Now, before you blow a gasket as the term “good loss” for a game that set Stars fandom ablaze, I think it’s worth pulling back and looking at the whole season a bit. Because patience has been the name of the game when it comes to Pete DeBoer this year, even after losses that saw the fanbase lose their collective minds. For better or for worse, DeBoer has treated his team like the responsible older sibling that encourages the reckless antics of a younger one. By and large, he hasn’t been mad; just disappointed, and concerned.

DeBoer has saved his harshest criticism for two games where the Stars got three out of four points that they didn’t deserve. This is not a knee-jerk coach, but one who saves the pointed criticism not for abject failures like last night’s final few minutes, but for squandering an entire game—regardless of how it ends.

And that’s sort of what you want, right? You want a coach who leads the team with an eye towards process and, yes, “details.” If the team is the child in this scenario, then the coach sometimes needs to be the parent who says you haven’t cleaned your room if you just stuffed all your dirty laundry under the mattress. Process over results.

This is the same coaching staff who saw Jason Robertson get off to an incredibly slow start this year after foot surgery sabotaged his training routine, before exploding later on to take over the goal-scoring lead on the team.

This is the same coaching staff who saw Wyatt Johnston not scoring much early on, but whose patience now sees him scoring hat tricks like he’s filling up the gas tank.

They also saw Roope Hintz and Thomas Harley taking their time to get going before both went on a scoring rampage in the second half of the season to compensate for the absence of Miro Heiskanen. And compensate they have, to the tune of an insane .732 points percentage since Heiskanen left the lineup.

In other words, DeBoer’s patience with a lot of players early looks like it allowed them to given the Stars more patience when they needed it most. For now, at least.

It’s important to point out that DeBoer’s patience isn’t infinite, though. He didn’t hesitate to scratch a veteran free-agent signing after Matt Dumba struggled to execute the team’s gameplan early in the year, and DeBoer was pretty blunt about how that wasn’t acceptable. And while Dumba has gotten his game back into better shape lately, he still looks likely to be the first one out of the lineup when Miro Heiskanen returns—which may or may not be during the first round.

Nils Lundkvist crossed the threshold of DeBoer’s patience multiple times in prior seasons before finally earning more of it this year, while fighting through a shoulder injury before he had to be shut down for the season.

And Logan Stankoven himself even encountered a healthy scratch of his own after his goal-scoring woes finally started to show up in other parts of his game. A coach’s job is to be patient, but not oblivious.

If anything, a great coach needs to see trends before fans really start to notice them, to show less patience when they recognize the beginning of a troubling trend, but to show more patience when they can see a good process that just isn’t getting rewarded in the short term.

One great example you could look at is Mavrik Bourque, who scored the Stars’ fourth goal last night. The reigning AHL MVP started as slowly as anybody this year after a groin injury in training camp, and he’s taken a few healthy scratches this season. But he’s also being trusted on late penalty kills and in close games, and he’s scored some clutch goals for this team.

That doesn’t happen without his being allowed to build confidence after a slow first half, to continue to get chances to show his game at its best, which it’s finally starting to look.

Patience, by design, is not always going to make sense to fans, because the coaches should be able to see both farther and more closely than anyone else. They are human, and they miss things, but that’s the idea of being the one in charge: you might have to take risks both by acting when things seem fine and by waiting when things seem dire. Courage sometimes looks like standing still.

Still, DeBoer and the whole team have been adamant that you can’t wait and flip a switch in the playoffs, but the recent stretch indicates that the team also isn’t going to start going Full Connor McDavid Screaming Mode a week away from the playoffs when they’re sitting 3rd in the entire NHL. They Are Working On It, they have maintained.

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Dallas gets to face one of the only teams above them tomorrow, and that feels even more significant now in terms of confidence than it is for the vanishing hope of taking the top spot in the Division. After far too many games in the last month and change where Dallas grabbed points without playing a full 60 minutes, it would be nice to know that this team does have a level in them that can match up against one of the best teams in the league without leading to embarrassment.

If it’s any consolation, the coach is looking for that level as well, regardless of the final score.

“That’s the important thing tomorrow night. Whether we can win or lose, it’s what that looks like,” DeBoer said Wedensday. “If it’s a bad win where we have no detail to our game, and our goalie stands on his head, am I gonna be happy about that? You know, probably not.”

At the start of his post-practice media availability today, Pete DeBoer made it clear that the team wasn’t letting the result of last night’s game undermine their confidence. In fact, DeBoer even joked that being the first coach to blow a three-goal lead with a minute left could go next to his Game 7 record (which is 8-0).

That matched the mood on the ice at practice, which was hardworking but lighthearted during some defensive coverage drills and other activities, with Granlund and Roope Hintz even trading sticks at one point before practice officially kicked off—a look that elicited laughter from both players, given the height difference between the two forwards.

Aside: I asked Granlund later if he’s planning to go the Martin St. Louis route and trade up to a longer stick. Granlund smiled and said that he did feel like he could shoot a little harder with Hintz’s longer stick—physics of flex and all that—but he then said he’s stuck with the same stick (more or less) for 15 years now, so he’s not looking to switch it up at this point.)

Aside #2: Roope Hintz’s shot, ah, suffered quite a big from downgrading to the smaller stick, so I don’t think their swap will be a permanent feature outside of something like a Dude Perfect video.

But no matter how lighthearted a practice is, DeBoer said he does think you have to channel your emotions as a player in those crunch-time moments. It’s not all X’s and O’s.

“There’s definitely a desperation level required,” DeBoer said of those late-game situations. “Starting in the face-off circle, individual puck battles in order to get a puck out, the willingness to block a shot, all those things. It’s something our group has been pretty good at over our time here.”

And indeed, the Stars are still the fourth-best team in the NHL at holding third-period leads despite deciding to experiment with, uh, not doing that in each of their last three games. They’re 35-2-3 when entering the third period with a lead, which means that before the Pittsburgh game three conetests ago, the Stars were 35-1-1 when entering the third period with a lead. The only teams above them in that department? Winnipeg, Carolina, and Tampa Bay.

So, yeah. The Stars have been pretty good at defending third period leads, until very recently. Of course, they’ve also been pretty good at defending in general, until recently. But the Stars’ defense without Miro Heiskanen is a known flaw, though I don’t think it has to be their downfall for one playoff series.

“I really think it’s a one-off, but we’ll see,” DeBoer said of the Vancouver collapse. “Now you’ve gotta fight the mental part of it. The next time we’re in the situation, whether it’s tomorrow night [against Winnipeg], you’ve gotta fight the human nature factor of, ‘oh no.’ You’ve gotta attack the situation as opposed to just stand there and think about worst-case scenarios.”

And at practice today, DeBoer wrapped up by reiterating what he’s learned about the value of patience over his decades as a coach.

“When you’ve been coaching for…a long time now,” DeBoer said, “I think you learn not to overreact, to trust in a process, and to trust in the group. It’s not easy to have that patience sometimes, but you know, I think that patience has paid off more than not over the years.”

We’ll see if it pays off in the playoffs, when patience is at a premium. Teams can live and die with each game of a series, and going through that two, three, or (hopefully) four times is a gauntlet you can’t fully understand without going through it. Each victory is a flag planted in a your backyard forever, and each loss feels like a devastating blow to your pride. Riding that wave takes patience, persistence, perseverance, and some other special ingredient that all but one team won’t be able to find.

Here’s hoping the Stars don’t ask their fans to keep waiting for it much longer.