{"id":33900,"date":"2025-07-03T00:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T00:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/33900\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T00:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T00:10:08","slug":"stars-glen-gulutzan-would-benefit-from-picking-up-where-dallas-last-head-coach-left-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/33900\/","title":{"rendered":"Stars\u2019 Glen Gulutzan would benefit from picking up where Dallas\u2019 last head coach left off"},"content":{"rendered":"

For all the talk at Wednesday\u2019s presser about the scars he\u2019s accumulated since the last time he worked here,<\/a> Glen Gulutzan doesn\u2019t show it. Same chiseled features; same great hair. Even at 53, which is young only if you\u2019re on this side of the Medicare line, he still looks like he could stunt double for Robert Redford in The Natural.<\/p>\n

Either Gulutzan has taken his lumps well since Jim Nill fired him 12 years ago<\/a>, or he\u2019s got a first-rate plastic surgeon.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Nill insists the last dozen years have made all the difference in a coach tasked with taking the Stars where Pete DeBoer came so close the last three years.<\/a><\/p>\n

Or at least that\u2019s what you\u2019d think job No. 1 would be for the new\/old guy.<\/p>\n

Sports Roundup<\/p>\n

Get the latest D-FW sports news, analysis and opinion delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, Kevin Sherrington’s A La Carte.<\/p>\n

Stanley Cup or bust, Jim?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy for me to sit here and say yes,\u201d Nill said, \u201cbut I\u2019ve got too much respect for the game. It is so hard to win. … But that\u2019s our goal, is to win the Stanley Cup, and we\u2019re going to do the best we can to accomplish it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related:New Stars head coach Glen Gulutzan isn\u2019t shying away from past Dallas scars<\/a><\/p>\n

Thoughts, Glen?<\/p>\n

\u201cListen, in Edmonton last year, you guys can look it up, it was cup or bust,\u201d he said of his last stop. \u201cWe didn\u2019t get it, all right?<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, at the end of the day, I want to keep the focus on … the process here to win the cup, and then we\u2019ll see where it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is the right answer, if you\u2019re scoring at home. Only a fool or Jimmy Johnson<\/a> guarantees winning. Jimmy got his prediction right, and he still ended up getting fired.<\/p>\n

But, even if the general manager and coach hit on all the right points Wednesday, you\u2019d think the new\/old guy ought to at least pick up where DeBoer left off, and soon, or Gulutzan\u2019s latest tour of Dallas won\u2019t last much longer than the first. <\/p>\n

This is a team built to win now, with expectations to match. Gulutzan didn\u2019t duck them Wednesday. He conceded Dallas is one of seven or eight teams with a realistic shot at winning it all.<\/p>\n

Of course, you could have said the same going into last season, which is one of the reasons DeBoer no longer works here.<\/p>\n

Or is it?<\/p>\n

A sports culture primer: Any time a coach or manager gets fired, the replacement supposedly fills in the holes left by the predecessor. No one comes out and says so, necessarily, but, if you listen hard enough, you can hear it in the words used to describe the successor. In his introductory remarks Wednesday, Nill cited \u201cleadership\u201d and \u201ccharacter\u201d and \u201ccollaborate\u201d and \u201caccountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeBoer wasn\u2019t fired because he couldn\u2019t get his team over the hump or that he failed to demand more physicality of his players, though that\u2019s exactly what Gulutzan has in mind. DeBoer should have made sure his players kept opponents out of Jake Oettinger\u2019s grill instead of throwing his goalie under the bus<\/a>, but that\u2019s not why he got canned, either. Not entirely.<\/p>\n

Despite a sparkling r\u00e9sum\u00e9 Gulutzan could only dream of duplicating, DeBoer\u2019s out because he didn\u2019t take blame well and he\u2019s too old school.<\/p>\n

What worked for Scotty Bowman when he won three of his nine titles in Detroit, where Nill earned his chops in the front office before coming to Dallas, doesn\u2019t work anymore. Nill knows this. He didn\u2019t three-peat as GM of the year<\/a> because of a closed mind.<\/p>\n

Gulutzan knows that now, too, even if he didn\u2019t 12 years ago, which is why he said Nill was right to fire him.<\/p>\n

By the way: The new\/old guy showed a fine sense of humor about the \u201csurreal\u201d nature of his return at the presser, joking Nill had merely sent him on a Canadian recon mission in 2013.<\/p>\n

Over the course of that journey, Gulutzan worked with the likes of the Sedin twins (Henrik and Daniel) in Vancouver and Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in Edmonton \u2014 \u201csome of the best players that are ever going to play this game,\u201d he said \u2014 and learned a universal lesson as a result.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlayers are the most important part of this game, no question,\u201d he said Wednesday. \u201cIt\u2019s not us coaches. You\u2019ve got to know how to deal with them, you\u2019ve got to learn how to motivate them, you\u2019ve got to deal with star players, you\u2019ve got to deal with players getting seven or eight minutes a night. So you\u2019ve got to deal with all those situations. And the guy 12 years ago, he never dealt with them. This guy\u2019s dealt with them for the last 12, so that\u2019s probably the biggest difference.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve checked a lot of boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related:Where new head coach Glen Gulutzan says Stars need to improve next season<\/a><\/p>\n

Nill wouldn\u2019t say how many candidates he talked to before deciding on Gulutzan after a nearly monthlong search. Only that he did his due diligence. As noted in this space previously, a guy who\u2019d been fired from his only two head coaching positions after only two years at each stop hardly seems like an inspired choice.<\/a><\/p>\n

Just what Tom Gaglardi thinks about his GM\u2019s hire is hard to say. He didn\u2019t make the presser. A month ago he called DeBoer one of the league\u2019s top five coaches<\/a> right up to the moment Nill decided coaches aren\u2019t as important as players.<\/p>\n

Beginning this fall, we\u2019ll see if the Stars make their bosses\u2019 point. They don\u2019t have to win it all, but it wouldn\u2019t hurt Gulutzan\u2019s chances of sticking this time if they came close. Along the way, they might even pick up some tips from their new coach on hair product. Unfortunately, I\u2019ve lost my notes on the subject.<\/p>\n

Twitter\/X:<\/b> @KSherringtonDMN<\/a><\/p>\n

Find more Stars coverage from <\/b>The Dallas Morning News<\/b> here<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all the talk at Wednesday\u2019s presser about the scars he\u2019s accumulated since the last time he worked…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,11890,1596,1320,24883,293,4810,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-33900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-commentary","10":"tag-dallas","11":"tag-dallas-stars","12":"tag-glen-gulutzan","13":"tag-nhl","14":"tag-stars","15":"tag-texas","16":"tag-tx","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-united-states-of-america","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","21":"tag-us","22":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114786403813072453","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}