What We Know about Glen Gulutzan, Neil Graham, Manny Malhotra, and the Ongoing Dallas Stars Coaching Search

Let's review some details and adjudicate some semantics

There haven’t been a whole lot of leaks about whom the Stars are interviewing to be their next head coach in recent weeks. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given some of the candidates involved, but there have been some developments, so it’s high time we rounded up what we do know, along with some of my tentative conclusions over the past few days.

As always, I’ll do my best to separate what we actually know from what we’re merely making logical deductions about.

All right, let’s start with the most recent news. Which is…

The Stars Reportedly Got Permission to Interview Glen Gulutzan

Glen Gulutzan getting an interview for his old job would not be a surprise, really. We’d already heard some weird sidestepping from Stan Bowman about Gulutzan and Dallas, so this is mostly just confirmation of what we already suspected. The two-time NHL head coach and 14-year NHL coaching veteran is a desirable candidate, and the Stars reportedly wanted to sit down and chat with him. Makes sense.

I’ve heard from a few Stars fans telling me how disappointed they’d be if Gulutzan were re-hired, so let me see if I can dispel some of the more unreasonable fears about the coach who spent two seasons in Dallas where the playoff-less streak reached five straight years. Because I think the coach Gulutzan has become might be a far cry from the one you remember—and he’s said as much himself, in fact.

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Gulutzan, in 2011, was a rookie NHL coach. In fact, he’d only spent two seasons as an AHL head coach right before that, having been in the ECHL previously.

Gulutzan’s hire in 2011 (for a bankrupt team struggling to meet the salary cap floor) was less than ideal—except in the sense that he, as a 39-year-old without any NHL experience, likely commanded a much smaller salary than a more veteran coach would have. And with the team in pretty dire financial straits at the time, that was no small concern.

Gulutzan came aboard in 2011 to coach a team that Brad Richards had just left in free agency, and things were tough. Brenden Morrow’s grueling physical game finally started to catch up with him, and James Neal and Matt Niskanen had been traded the prior season for Alex Goligoski. If you are having trouble placing this season, then one more name should do it: Sheldon Souray, who amassed just six goals—far short of the 23 he had scored for Edmonton just two years prior. (You might say that Studly Wonderbomb underwhelmed.)

Still, Gulutzan’s Stars made a decent push in his rookie year, when he had just turned 40 years old. Dallas actually finished the season with two more wins than the Kings, but Los Angeles grabbed the final playoff spot in the West by virtue of 15 overtime losses to Dallas’s five. Thus, the Kings’ 95 points were more than enough to beat Dallas’s 89 total in Gulutzan’s debut year, and the Stars went home after 82 games.

That season also ended with the Stars losing five straight games to fall out of the playoff race at the last minute. (Is finishing a season with a big losing streak bad? Remind me to research this sometime.) Gulutzan’s team couldn’t pull out of their tailspin, and they got outscored 6-18 in their final five games en route to missing the playoffs.

The next season was even odder, as it didn’t start until January on account of Gary Bettman’s Latest Lockout. Dallas was also now owned by Tom Gaglardi, and they added some very smart pieces in Joe Nieuwendyk’s swan song as the Stars’ GM. By adding short-term veterans like Derek Roy, Ray Whitney, and some guy named Jaromír Jágr¹, the Stars positioned themselves to either make a return to the playoffs with much more help than they’d recently had, or else to position themselves for an easy fire sale to stock their cupboards with draft picks and prospects. It was a 48-game sprint, and Gulutzan went from coaching a bankrupt team at the salary floor to a newly owned hybrid team with one of the greatest players of all time.

Oh, and Alex Chiasson scored six goals in his seven-game cameo that year, too.

And, once again, the Stars finished the 2012-13 season by losing five straight games. Except, that wasn’t the same sort of losing streak, as the team had already sold off all their major pieces after stumbling toward the trade deadline with a 16-16-3 record. Naturally, the Stars won five straight games right after the deadline, but it was only a mirage. Loui Eriksson and Jamie Benn had two of their more forgettable seasons, and big change was on the horizon for the organization: new uniforms, a new GM, a new superstar in Tyler Seguin, and of course, a new coach.

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I rehash all that to say: maybe don’t judge Gulutzan by the two weird Stars seasons you remember him coaching. Instead, look more closely at what he’s done since.

You might say that having Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl means automatic power play succes, but then, the Stars know plenty well enough that just having the talent isn’t always enough to guarantee the execution.

Take a listen to this, for instance.

Gulutzan isn’t giving away too many secrets there, but it’s clear he’s had a lot of coaching still to do while running the Oilers’ power play. And the results pretty clearly show that he knew how to do it, too.

in fact, if you skip ahead to 9:36 of that video, you’ll hear Gulutzan say something really fascinating when describing his “road hockey” approach:

…but where it all came from is, I almost should send an apology note to Brenden Morrow and Jamie Benn in Dallas, because I tried to “chess-piece” that power play in Dallas when I was first coaching, and it didn't work. So that term “road hockey” was a term that kind of evolved and came to me. We used to play it all the time in Hudson Bay. That's all we talked about, is “road hockey” when we grew up. I tried to be a little bit too much of a chess master when I first started in the league, and you know what, you live and you learn and you grow, and that's part of being a coach. So, that “road hockey” term kind of came from some of my failures.

-Glen Gulutzan, June 13, 2023

That, to me, shows a lot of humility on Gulutzan’s part. He can see that he made mistakes in the past, and he’s tried to learn from it in very specific ways. And boy, you could do a whole lot worse than the job he’s done in Edmonton.

Anyway, you’re absolutely free to have your own opinions about Gulutzan if he ends up being the pick, but I think his coaching career deserves a bit more context than fans sometimes are able to give their team’s former coach.

Oh, and part of my hunch that Gulutzan 2.0—if he turns out to be the hire—could go a lot better than last time has to do with something else. Or rather, someone else.

Neil Graham

Just a reminder: Pierre LeBrun’s reportedly framing Gulutzan and Graham as the final candidates is speculation, not reporting. There could well be other people in the mix we don’t know about, so just be careful not to infer beyond the information we have.

Graham is a well-respected head coach in the AHL who has drawn attention from NHL teams. But in all likelihood, most Cup contenders would be looking for a head coach who has just a little bit of NHL coaching experience to take the reins.

In my (very ill-informed) view, the best-case scenario for Dallas just might be to have Glen Gulutzan take over as the head coach with Neil Graham coming up to Dallas as an assistant coach, possibly running the power play in place of the departed Steve Spott.

That would allow Graham to get NHL experience while also giving Dallas a natural successor to Gulutzan down the road someday. And while you can’t ever guarantee a working relationship’s success before it happens, Gulutzan’s career and Graham’s have a lot of early similarities that could make them a pretty decent team. They have traveled some of the very same roads, after all.

That is just me trying to put pieces together, to be clear. It seems clear the Stars want to keep Graham in the organization, but sending him back for an eighth year in the AHL might well set him up to take an NHL job elsewhere in the near future with another organization.

Anyway, wheels within wheels. And there is one other AHL coach I am still wondering about, too.

Manny Malhotra Has a Strong Reputation

If you weren’t following the AHL this year, you probably don’t know that Manny Malhotra’s Abbotsford Canucks finished the regular season on a 16-1-1 tear before eventually winning the Calder Cup—dispatching Neil Graham’s Texas Stars in the process.

And Ben Kuzma wrote yesterday that he thinks Malhotra is on Jim Nill’s radar, too:

There is a reason why the Stars are still waiting to fill their coaching void. It’s Malhotra. He’s well beyond a curiosity.

Ben Kuzma, Vancouver Sun
June 24, 2025

Now, how much of that is just the fact that Dallas is the only NHL team without a head coach is tough to say. But I think it makes a ton of sense that Malhotra would merit an interview after leading his team to a championship.

Malhotra also spent the prior seven years as an assistant with the Vancouver Canucks and Toronto Maple Leafs, so he’s got plenty of experience on an NHL bench, too.

If you don’t love the Gulutzan idea, Malhotra could be another option to take over with Graham as an assistant—though I’m not sure what kind of message it sends to your AHL coach if you hire the head coach who just defeated him to be his boss in the NHL the next year.

Then again, if they’re both in the NHL, that probably sets anything else aside. A good coach is a good coach, and the Stars are the only team looking for a head coach right now. They have a few days to decide, still, presuming they want to get this done before free agency on July 1.

Would Alain Nasreddine and Misha Donskov Return to Be Assistant Coaches?

Misha Donskov is a unique sort of coach among the Stars’ group, much like Jeff Reese. Among many other things, he handles a lot of video sessions and pre-scouting meetings before games.

So, becuase of his more unique role, I’m going to assume he’s returning until we hear otherwise. You are free to do that, or not.

Alain Nasreddine is a more interesting question, especially if he indeed got an interview for the head coaching job in Dallas. Remember, Nasreddine stuck around in New Jersey after being passed over in favor of Lindy Ruff despite being the interim head coach the year prior, when John Hynes was fired, returning as an assistant the following season.

So, if that historical precedent is any inidcation, I think there’s a world in which Nasreddine could stay in Dallas for one more season as an assistant to audition for a head coach opening somewhere else next summer, as there aren’t any other head coach openings right now, and Nasreddine presumably still has a year remaining on his contract.

And remember, Nasreddine has done great work in Dallas with the defense and penalty kill, as the Stars have the 2nd-best PK in the NHL over the last three years.

But then again, if Nasreddine doesn’t get the job in Dallas, Bill Guerin could decide that Minnesota having the 30th-ranked penalty kill for two straight seasons means they try to poach yet another person from the Stars and convince Nasreddine to rejoin the coach he replaced in New Jersey once upon a team—John Hynes—in order to fix the PK up north with his old mentor.

It seems unlikely that Nasreddine would leave Dallas (or even be allowed to do so) for an equivalent position in another city, but this is just something that I wanted to throw out there, since it’s occurred to me once or twice. Minnesota loves them some former Dallas folks.

Okay, one last little bit of business before you head to bed tonight.

Did Jim Nill Mean What He Said about Planning to Bring Back the Assistant Coaches?

One other thing was bugging me today during my appearance on the DLLS Dallas Stars show today that was I wanted to dig back into, so I’m going to wrap up by doing that.

In case you missed it, Steve Spott gave an interview to two NESN reporters in Boston the other day. (And yes, it is Steve Spott, despite his camera lens looking like it had recently been removed from a witness protection program.)

Here’s what Spott said about the process of his exit from Dallas three minutes into this video (emphasis mine):

“It was really quick,” Spott said. “I had met with Jim Nill and our management in Dallas. They decided that they were gonna go in a different direction, which I understand. And then from there, it just became, what’s going to be next? Do you take the year off? Do you continue to try to work? I had an opportunity to speak with Don [Sweeney] and obviously Marco [Sturm], and I just felt that was the best fit professionally and personally for my family.”

It’s not a lot, and we don’t have a firm timeline. If I had to guess, Spott’s describing a meeting that took place in the days following June 6, when DeBoer was fired.

But at first blush, his comments could—and I say “could” intentionally here, because it’s not definitive—contradict what Jim Nill said when he was asked about the rest of the coaching staff a couple weeks ago, in the press conference where he announced DeBoer’s firing.

Here are those comments by Nill:

“We’re just starting that process now,” Nill said. “I have a vision. We’re going to be very wide, open-minded. The other coaches, everything’s fine with them. I plan on them being part of this. They’ve done a great job. They have a year left, and they did a good job also. Done a lot of winning.”

So the question is, was Nill being disgenuous when he said “everything’s fine with them” about the rest of the coaching staff?

I…don’t think so. At least, not any moreso than what’s kind of expected of NHL general managers in a press conference that isn’t about the assistant coaches. Technically, Nill was being honest at the time, as far as we know. Perhaps no decision about Spott had been reached by then, and the plan changed in the following days. The phrase “part of this” that Nill used could mean the whole evaluation process, not a definitive “Yes, everyone is returning” sort of statement.

Also, the last thing Nill probably wants to do in that conference is encourage speculation about specific assistant coaches before he has a chance to sit down with them and talk through things himself. He cares about doing right by people, and announcing the possible job status of various other coaches just two hours after he met with DeBoer to fire him would be pretty unprofessional, I think. Those people deserve to hear things from him. But that Friday press conference was not about anybody other than Pete DeBoer.

Nill doesn’t need me (or anyone) to defend his character, to be clear. Sometimes, you have to hide the truth in order to outfox the other teams trying to beat you every year, and a GM has to hold cards particularly close to the vest when they involve personnel decisions.

So, I do think it’s important to point out what was actually said and not said. All told, I think Nill was probably choosing to be guarded moreso than dishonest, and even if you think he misled folks, it seems pretty clear to me that all he’s doing there is trying to spare the assistant coaches any stray speculation about their jobs in the firestorm that always resulted from a head coach’s firing.

And I mean, if you’re Steve Spott listening to that presser, I don’t think you take anything Nill says in there as a guarantee of your job security when your longtime coaching compatriot just got fired.

Spott has done enough press conferences himself to know that, sometimes, you simply can’t lay out your entire plan when it’s just beginning. He’ll be just fine.

1. If you haven’t heard the old story about Jagr and Gulutzan and the 6-on-5 faceoff, it goes like this: Jagr had to remind Gulutzan during a timeout that the lineup Gulutzan had chosen was flawed: he hadn’t included a second center, just in case the first one (presumably Jamie Benn) got kicked out before the faceoff. This is the last time I’ll mention it, probably.