Dallas Stars fire Pete DeBoer, where do they go from here?

Last Friday, Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi told local sports columnist Tim Cowlishaw that Canadian media types had been calling him regarding Peter DeBoer's job security. To that, he had the following to say: "They wanted to know if Pete was out, they said the rumor up there was that he was out. Are you kidding me? He’s a top three, top five coach in the league. You think I want to be going into the coaching market right now, do you see who’s getting hired? Pete’s a seasoned coach. I’m just one voice in the discussion but I don’t see Pete being on anyone’s agenda."

What a difference a week makes.

Gaglardi reportedly met with Stars GM Jim Nill in the past few days and of course the subject of the coaching situation came up. Apparently, whatever was discussed was consequential enough for Gaglardi to greenlight DeBoer's ouster. The team announced on Friday morning that he was relieved of his duties.

It's easy to see why Gaglardi was so confident about DeBoer's future a week ago. His teams have been to eight of the last 14 Conference Finals, including six of the last seven. He is a perfect 9-0 in various Game 7s across his coaching career. His teams perform well before the playoffs, too, to the point where only eight coaches in the history of the league with at least 1,000 games behind the bench have a better regular-season points percentage.

Why, to Gaglardi's point, would you fire a coach like that? Especially because a quarter of the teams league-wide have already done their own coaching searches and now the Stars are definitionally picking through the castoffs the Rangers, Bruins, Blackhawks, Ducks, Penguins, Kraken, Flyers, and Canucks didn't want.

Put another way, there are very few circumstances in which NHL teams should fire their coaches without being extremely confident they can upgrade at the position. Even fewer have the guts to follow through on the "should" part. But the Stars, apparently, found themselves in just such a situation.

Gaglardi is right: DeBoer is demonstrably a top-3-to-5 coach on the planet. Regular season? Postseason? It's hard to find coaches with more recent success.

But when you lose to the same team in two straight years, and win a total of five games across three straight Western Conference Finals, the nerves start to fray. When you pull your All-World goalie because you're down 2-0 on the first two shots you face in an elimination game, that starts to wear thin. When you effectively call your goalie a loser, that's probably going to be a problem.

One imagines, then, that Gaglardi made his comments to Cowlishaw without the full picture of how the players he employs felt about the whole Jake Oettinger situation. Undoubtedly, that was not handled in an ideal way and if there was disquiet in The Room about that, on top of the circumstances of how the Stars lost to the Oilers, then it's easy to see why this was a decision that kinda had to be made. DeBoer had one year left on his deal — reportedly at a pricy $4 million — and in this league it's apparently illegal for coaches to go through a lame-duck season where neither team nor coach is sure what comes next.

So, that means the Stars are on the hook for that salary unless DeBoer finds another job elsewhere — presumably, that'll happen within a day or two of another team firing their coach, whether that's in the next few days or in the first few months of the 2025-26 season. The team will also be on the hook for whatever the next coach's salary is, and that hire will come into the job knowing that everyone thinks they are worse at it than DeBoer would have been. That's an incredible amount of pressure, on Day 1, because it's not like taking a step back with this core, at this point in its competitive cycle, is going to be acceptable.

You don't trade for and sign Mikko Rantanen to that extension without thinking a Stanley Cup is legitimately on the table for you. You don't have players the caliber of Oettinger, Miro Heiskanen, Jason Robertson, Roope Hintz, Thomas Harley, and Wyatt Johnston all in their 20s at the same time without thinking you have an obligation to push everything all-in every season for the foreseeable future. But now, without DeBoer, you've introduced an element of chaos.

Maybe the chaos is good. Maybe the right coach (which might just mean “John Tortorella” I guess?) can come along to push all the right buttons DeBoer couldn't, and avoid pushing all the wrong ones he apparently did. But he has to get to the Western Conference Final again… as a baseline-acceptable job performance.

That's honestly one of the biggest risks an NHL team has made in the salary-cap era. One they probably had to take for a team that apparently tuned out or was pretty pissed at its coach. But what if this doesn't work, either?

Every GM who fires his coach is one step closer to being out of a job himself. But it's rare for a GM to fire a coach with this track record. Nill suddenly has more to prove than any general manager in the league, because his team isn't winding down its competitive window, like in New York, Boston, or Pittsburgh. And it's certainly not spinning it up, like in Anaheim, Chicago, or Philadelphia. Nill built a team that's as good as it's ever been in the cap era.

The fact that the team's owner couldn't envision being made a week ago tells you everything. This might not have been the wrong decision, but Nill better be 1000000000000 percent sure it's the right one.