Thoughts on Glen Gulutzan and the Dallas Stars after the First Two-Thirds of the Season

Comparison might be the thief of joy, but sports kinda necessitate it

Brief note: As you’ve heard already, Gavin Spittle and I are heading down to Cedar Park later today to watch the Texas Stars play on Friday. The AHL club is on its own five-game winning streak, which has propelled Texas up to 4th in the Central Division, just behind Johan Hedberg’s old Manitoba Moose, whom Texas will be facing twice this weekend.

This piece by Christian Chambers over at 100 Degree Hockey gives a good picture of how that’s happened, if you’re looking to check back in. The Texas defense corps went through a lot of what the NHL club did early in the season, having to play a lot of players higher in the lineup than they’d ideally be placed due to injuries and other factors. But with Luke Krys and Vladislav Kolyachonok back in the fold, and with the acquisition of AHL veteran Jeremie Poirier a few days ago, suddenly Toby Petersen’s squad is looking a whole lot steadier than they were after an 0-5-1 start to the year, and the best part of their season is likely still to come.

But we’ll have plenty of time to discuss the AHL club during and after this weekend. Today, I had a few lingering thoughts about these Dallas Stars and Glen Gulutzan as the team heads into the Olympic Break on its own six-game heater, so let’s get into it.

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Glen Gulutzan was always going to be judged by the Dallas Stars’ 2026 playoff performance. A team with this much elite talent simply doesn’t miss the playoffs, and that was apparent both early in the season, when the Stars were winning ugly, and for nearly a month after the Christmas break, when they were also managing to lose ugly.

Still, there have been new dashboard lights lighting up in the first half of the year. Some of those things have, rightly, made you wonder just what this team was going to look like when they inevitably geared up for Round 1 of the postseason.

The even-strength offense has gone from having eight players averaging 2 or more points per 60 minutes last season to just three meeting that threshold this year. Oh, and the player leading those three (and the entire team) in 5v5 scoring per minute this year is the oldest player on the roster: Jamie Benn.

And as much as the team’s defensive metrics have tightened up considerably from where they were last year, the plunge in offensive creation in terms of shot volume and puck possession at least balanced that improvement out, and sometimes overshadowed it entirely. A team that had made the conference finals three years in a row was looking, routinely, like a team weathering a barrage night after night before trying to steal the game on the power play.

Sometimes it worked well enough to grab the win. Very often, in fact. But Glen Gulutzan himself said the Stars’ .750 points percentage two months into the year was overly generous, considering how they were really playing. So when that bill came due in January, it was easy to make a case for how the real Stars had finally shown up, how the heavy schedule and thinned forward group was too worn down, too imbalanced to hang with the likes of Colorado, Vegas or Minnesota, let alone Tampa Bay or Florida.

A truly ugly loss in Anaheim in mid-January marked the nadir of the Stars’ self-doubt. Answers were in short supply, and even brief reprieves in Washington and Los Angeles were quickly snuffed out by stumbles in subsequent games. They just couldn’t get going, and there were no reinforcements on the horizon.

Then a funny thing happened: In a tight game in Utah to finish their road trip, they started playing a bit better hockey. And from there, they started playing a lot better.

It took a couple games for the results to match the process, as it always seems to do in the NHL. Dallas lost to the Mammoth in a tight, 2-1 game before returning home, and they then got beaten 4-1 by Tampa Bay, who arrived in Dallas playing the best hockey of their season, with an 11-0-1 hot streak.

But do you remember what Gulutzan said after that Tampa Bay loss, which was the team’s third straight, and the latest loss in a 2-6-4 spiral over a dozen games?

“We’re at that stage right now where we’re squeezing,” Gulutzan said. “The responsibility falls to me to get us into the right mindset, to get us to play our game for 60 minutes. There’s been spurts of it in some of the games over the last ten, but not enough.”

And again, when he was asked about potentially loading up Robertson with Johnston and Rantanen more often in an effort to juice the offense a bit more, Gulutzan said this: