Last summer – between the temporary shutdown of the National Hockey League and the Dallas Stars’ fairy tale run to the Stanley Cup Finals – Stars CEO Jim Lites quietly handed the reigns of the hockey team to Brad Alberts, his 51-year-old protégé. You couldn’t imagine a more challenging time to take over the leadership of a professional sports team. Alberts started with the Stars in an entry-level position selling tickets, and as CEO, he had a fabulous product on the ice. But there were no seats to sell. The timing of the Stars’ first run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 20 years meant that the team missed out on millions of dollars of potential revenue.
It wasn’t the first time the new CEO had faced adversity with the Stars. Alberts’ history with the team goes all the way back to their earliest days in Dallas. When Alberts started as a ticket salesman, the team had recently moved to Texas from Minnesota, and Alberts had to convince a football-obsessed city to take a chance on the first hockey franchise in the southwest. Alberts left a few years after the Stars’ won their first Stanley Cup in 1999 but returned to team to help current owner Tom Gaglardi lead it out of bankruptcy.
COVID, however, presented Alberts and the Stars with an entirely new kind of problem. In the current issue of D CEO, I write about Alberts, his history with the team, and his first year as CEO of the Stars. What I discovered is that Alberts used the past year to quietly make new inroads in the world of youth and international amateur hockey, continuing the team’s nearly 30-year quest to make Dallas a true hockey town. You can read it here.
