We Are Living in a Golden Age of Dallas Stars Media Coverage

It’s more fun to cover a team when they’re winning. This has always been true, but there is a caveat that I adapted from something Jeff Sullivan said way back when: it’s more rewarding to cover a team when they’re not winning and see them improve over time. Jumping on a bandwagon has its merits, but the rise to success is a more special one when you’ve started from the depths.

Telling stories is what it’s all about. Seeing the humble hero journey from the desert wastelands to the top of the world may be the most appealing narrative there is. It means weathering some tough times, as any Stars fan knows, but it also means developing a deeper appreciation for the good times, whether individual moments, special games, or entire seasons and playoff runs. The good parts are better when you know they could have ended otherwise.

Over ten years ago, I started writing for Defending Big D. Back then, the media landscape was different (except for the fact that the Cowboys dominated all mainstream coverage all year long). Mike Heika was still writing for the Dallas Morning News, and Sean Shapiro was still blogging on WordPress. Mark Stepneski was writing for the team with his Stars Inside Edge column, and Josh Clark (who now works as an editor for the team) had just joined Blackout Dallas.

It was also the last season for Ralph Strangis as the Stars’ play-by-play broadcaster. The next year, the fantastic Dave Strader arrived, but his heartbreaking cancer diagnosis and subsequent passing in October 2017 saw the Stars experiment with moving Daryl Reaugh to the other side of the booth alongside Craig Ludwig for the better part of two seasons. The reasoning at the time was probably that it made sense to keep familiar voices around, given the grief the fanbase had gone through over the last couple of years. Unfortunately, the Reaugh/Ludwig combo was first assembled during Stars’ worst season in a long while, including a historically bad penalty kill. Its second year wasn’t much better, with Ken Hitchcock’s return at the behest of ownership putting the broadcast in a tough spot. The team needed a touch of the discipline that Hitch could bring, but Ludwig was understandably more hesitant to criticize his former Cup-winning coach, and it’s fair to say the two friends and former NHLers were not set up for success when it came time to make a meal out of the dog’s breakfast that was those two rough seasons.

All told, it wasn’t a great listener experience, but I was probably too hard on it at the time. In fact, just listening to Reaugh and Ludwig talk about the learning experience of those years was genuinely enjoyable, as we got to experience Friday on the DLLS Stars podcast.

Ludwig and Reaugh were humble and candid in describing the difficulty of rising to the challenge of those seasons, and it made me wish that we’d had this sort of media coverage even then. I highly recommend checking it out, really I do. But to return to the topic at hand, change was on the horizon in a lot of ways for Stars media coverage.

During that 2016-18 period, Sean Shapiro started his subscription-based coverage on The Upset, with The Athletic arriving in Dallas in 2018 and bringing him aboard, and Mike Heika leaving the Dallas Morning News to join the Stars as a Senior Staff Writer in May of 2018. Matt DeFranks joined the News in the wake of Heika’s departure, and the following summer saw Mark Stepneski retire as well.

During that post-Hitch time, I got to a couple of practices and games, and I can tell you that media coverage was mostly the team employees like Stepneski (before his retirement) and Heika, with Sean and Matt and perhaps someone from Defending Big D (usually Taylor Baird, with an occasional appearance by myself after I moved here in the summer of 2019). And when the team traveled, it wouldn’t even have both Sean and Matt at every game, as travel budgets for hockey coverage in Dallas began to shrink over the following years. The coverage that fans had was as dedicated and knowledgable as ever, but the landscape was disproportionately barren given the success the team was about to have from 2019 to 2024. And after Sean departed The Athletic, Saad Yousuf moved from a jack-of-all-trades writer to the full-time Stars beat, before the Athletic then split Saad between Stars and Cowboys coverage. There were some recent playoff runs where Saad Yousuf was one of the only constant local voices covering the Stars, and it was tough to see him get moved over to the full-time Cowboys beat this past year.

But this season, it looks like it’s going to be very different. If I’m counting correctly, there will be more independent media coverage than there has been since the 2004 NHL lockout. And while I’ll always miss those 2010 days of Mark writing for Andrew’s Dallas Stars Page and Brandon Worley’s typo-ridden 2,000-word diatribes on DBD, there’s no denying that the overall quality of writing and discourse (with the exception of this website) has gone up immensely in the last ten years or so, even as the number of full-time voices has decreased.

But this year, Stars fans are getting more coverage from different sources than I can remember. I really think there might be more options than ever before (and not just print), so let’s take a look at the main options there will be for what promises to be a fascinating season. It also helps that the Stars look primed to be one of the best teams in the NHL again this year. It’s nice when coverage and team success coincide, eh?

A (probably incomplete) LIST OF PEOPLE COVERING THE STARS THIS YEAR

Mike Heika will continue to bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to his coverage as a team employee. If you’re not reading everything he writes, then you’re not doing your Stars fandom its due service. Obviously anything the team puts out is probably not going to lambaste every senior member of the organization or anything, but everything I’ve seen from Heika’s coverage since his hire by the team continues to reflect the quality you’d expect from him. The Podman Rush podcast with Daryl Reaugh is also quality listening, including everything from insight about the grind of road trips for players to how they dealt with Steve Ott’s fear of flying back in the day by alternative hydration.

Josh Clark works for the team as well now as an editor. I covered a couple of games alongside him back in 2019 and 2020 when he was using two laptops to keep his NHL.com and Blackout Dallas duties separate. Josh has done a ton of media stuff for both the team and Bally Sports back in the day, so I’d assume he’ll continue to write a couple of articles each month for the team like he’s done in the past. Josh is good people, and you should read his stuff.

Sean Shapiro isn’t local to Dallas, but he’s written multiple books about the Stars, and you’d be a fool not to read what he writes about the organization he knows better than any other independent writer in the industry. Just off the top of my head, you’ll be able to enjoy his coverage of the Stars at DLLS, his own (excellent) Substack, D Magazine, the Spits and Suds Podcast with Gavin Spittle, and any goalie-related thoughts about Jake Oettinger at EP Rinkside. (I’m sure I’m forgetting like four other side gigs he has, too.)

Lia Assimakopoulos will again be covering the Stars for the Dallas Morning News (in addition to her college football coverage). While newer to the beat she took over after Matt DeFranks left for St. Louis, Assimakopoulos showed last season that she is a reliable outlet for independent Stars coverage, and I’d expect her to become an even more noteworthy presence in the Stars media landscape in her second full season spending time on the beat.

Stephen Meserve at 100 Degree Hockey continues to be the first and best person to ask about Stars prospects in the AHL (and even ones who aren’t). If you haven’t read his book, then give me a call, and I will read a chapter of it aloud to you in order to convince you. This may violate a copyright, but I’d like to see a lawyer prove it in court.

Gavin Spittle has worked hard to make Spits & Suds a go-to podcast for Stars fans over the past year or two. He’s also very up front about the fact that not every episode is for everyone, as his goal is to bring the fullness of the hockey world to Stars fans, not just the same five guests ad infinitum. If you haven’t looked through the archives of his show in a while, now is a great time to do so. (Skip the ones with me, obviously. I’m trying to give good advice here.)

And new this year, the All City/DLLS group has launched major Stars coverage, with full-time beat reporter Sam Nestler returning to Dallas to sink his writing chops into the team without reservation. He’ll also be alongside daily podcast/Youtube hosts Owen Newkirk (who did a Reverse Heika and left the team to join the dark side) and Craig Ludwig. As I mentioned above, Ludwig really shines in this format, and it’s worth giving the show a shot if you for some reason haven’t yet decided to watch/listen to one of the only daily Dallas Stars programs out there. Owen is also in his element balancing out the more unhinged personalities of his colleagues, and you can see his CarCast chemistry with Sean Shapiro shining during the couple times a week when Sean joins the show. It’s exciting to see this big of an investment being poured into a new Stars outlet like this, especially given recent cutbacks elsewhere in the industry.

Taylor Newby at The Hockey News is also still writing about the team, as THN stepped up in the wake of SB Nation’s dissolution of its network to offer more local coverage by local writers. If you haven’t read Taylor’s work yet, you’ll have plenty of chances to do so again this year.

David Castillo joined DBD a year after I did, but he started a Stars Fans Discord a decade before I ever would’ve thought about it. He writes quite a bit on his own Substack, and he doesn’t hold back on his opinions. He also writes for D Magazine, if you’re into that kind of thing. I hear rumors that David might be finding his way to Dallas before long, so I suspect you’ll only be hearing from him more as the year goes on.

Joey Erickson has been faithfully producing the Locked On Stars podcast for a while now (which I believe Josh Clark used to do back in the day), and that means there are going to be days this season where as many as four or five different Dallas Stars podcasts are going to be released on the same day. Truly, we are the lucky ones. It’s timely, and Joey knows his stuff. Check it out.

Taylor Baird writes for NHL.com these days, and I’d be remiss if I failed to mention her as someone else who has been around the Stars for a good while. She’s also kept Defending Big D running, where old colleagues of mine like Ann, Kathleen, Tyler, Wes, and Mark have continued to both write and podcast for one of the longest-running Stars blogs on the internet. (They’re also looking for writers!)

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I’m sure I’m missing more folks here, but that’s kind of the point! There are a lot of access points for fans these days, and even the ten preceding blocks of text don’t cover all of it. Stars fans may well have it better this season than they have in a long while, so much so that I can’t remember everyone.

Of course, the one downside of Stars coverage this year is that I’ll still be writing, so you’ll have to work hard to dodge my stuff. I’ll continue to be on the odd Spits and Suds podcast, if they run out of better options; I’ll still be writing for the wonderful D Magazine (look for my piece later this week); and I’ll be writing here more regularly as the season approaches and my other responsibilities in life sort themselves out. Writing every day for just myself and y’all during the playoffs was a real rush, even with the accompanying sleep deprivation (note to self: find a way not to work two jobs someday). So I’ll still be around to make mistakes while trying to figure out what’s going on with bad guesses five minutes before a press release comes out. That’s the Robert Promise.

Thanks for reading my writing, as always. I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s still bringing me joy. I hope it brings a tiny bit to y’all too, but if not, at least you have more alternatives to it than ever before. That’s some consolation, I suppose.