Now that the Stanley Cup has been awarded to the Golden Knights, the Dallas Stars can officially boast that they lost to the champions. Dallas probably wouldn’t phrase it that way, but given the Cup-or-bust monomania that pervades the NHL every spring, losing teams look for solace wherever they can. In Jim Nill’s case, given Dallas’ very limited amount of salary cap flexibility this offseason, solace and reassurance may be the best things he can provide.
Most of you are not Jim Nill, though. Most of you were simply rooting for this team alongside friends or families or loved ones, enjoying every playoff victory like a modestly successful scratch-off ticket. You submit yourselves to the emotions of each game and its competitors. You invest in their conflict and reap whatever the team has sown. Right now, there’s still some lingering heartache.
Of course, if you were/are Jim Nill, it probably behooves you to talk about how the Western Conference Final was effectively for all the marbles. You might say the Stars were two wins from beating Vegas, which is basically two wins from winning it all. Two overtime games could’ve bounced the Stars’ way, and who would’ve been laughing then, eh?
And you, Jim, you might even say it all happened despite Jake Oettinger (who was playing with a lingering injury for the last several months) performing well below expectations and Evgenii Dadonov’s knee injury taking him out of the series. It’s not as though the Stars caught lightning in a bottle like they did in 2020, after all. During the regular season, the Stars were a very good team: third in goals against, seventh in goals for, fifth in power-play conversion, and third in penalty-kill percentage. Not even a historically great Boston Bruins team managed to be top 10 in all four of those categories.
If the goal of last summer was to move on from two moribund Rick Bowness seasons, then the Stars had a truly successful regular season. With Pete DeBoer at the helm, they could’ve finished atop the whole Western Conference had they just stepped on two or three fewer rakes during 3-on-3 overtime, and that seems like an eminently reasonable thing to ask. Surely a team this good can’t be this hapless two years in a row when the benches get shortened, right? (Please don’t answer that.)
However, the sting of that series lingers for good reason. Vegas is an excellent team that deserves the Cup it just won, but it’s hard not to think that the Stars squandered a rare opportunity to do something really and truly special—and that they squandered it in one of the more embarrassing ways imaginable. Jamie Benn had already written his own comeback story, finding a way to finish his hefty contract in Dallas with real contributions and restored dignity, only to throw much of it away in Game 3 when he went after Mark Stone like someone reenacting a mistranslated version of Hop on Pop. A garbage play brought garbage raining onto the ice, and while Benn’s teammates made a series out of it when all was said and done, the blowout loss in Game 6 brought back ugly memories of 2016. For the first time, comparing Kari Lehtonen to Jake Oettinger didn’t feel completely absurd. A sobering thought, indeed.
While Nill didn’t rule out the possibility of a trade in his final interview of the season, he did stress that the Stars don’t have much wiggle room in their current salary cap crunch, which is a classy way to say the Stars may well have to run this group back and hope fewer things go wrong next time. Given the way it started, that seems … fine, I suppose? But given the way it ended, such an approach can ring hollow, if not downright timid.
After all, the Stars just lost to a Vegas organization that made a name for itself by taking risks, ripping off bandages, and leaving people on the side of the road along the way, both literally and figuratively. The Stars might well be contemplating a buyout of Ryan Suter right now, but Dallas fans know Nill rarely operates with that sort of ruthless efficiency when it comes to veteran players. That’s part of what has made Nill such an admired figure from those who know him well or only by reputation. There’s nothing wrong with being a good man.
Still, it’s hard not to think about how Vegas gave away fan-favorite Marc-Andre Fleury for nothing right after he won a Vezina Trophy, only to go on to win the Cup with a backup goalie a much worse team didn’t want. Vegas needed cap space to become a deeper team, and they did what had to be done to make it happen. I genuinely don’t know if that’s a good thing for the league, but it certainly seems to have been an effective approach for the team, if we’re judging by trophies. That’s not usually how Nill operates, though, even if Tom Gaglardi has not always shown the same compunctions about flouting decorum.
Maybe that’s for the best. Over the last decade, the Stars organization has cultivated a reputation for being a place where veteran players are usually treated with respect. Joe Pavelski left the captaincy behind in San Jose to come to Dallas and wound up liking it so much he chose to re-sign. Alex Radulov surprised everyone by coming here. Even Corey Perry was happy to land here after a bumpy end in Anaheim, despite having multiple other offers on the table. Same story with Suter two years later. You don’t get those names on the back of a team’s jersey if the brand on the front isn’t strong enough to bear them.
That brand is what general managers and owners have to consider when it comes to bigger moves. Fans love to speculate about how the next big prospects might all be as good as Wyatt Johnston, how management might unload all of their least favorite players, how there’s no need to sign depth players because no one is likely to get hurt next year.
But like all modern entertainment, hockey is equal parts economic and sentimental. “It’s a business” is the phrase used during salary negotiations, but that changes to “give everything you’ve got” when it comes to players feeling obligated to play through injury. Similarly, fans may want the team designed according to their dreams, but GMs tend to build it to withstand their fears.
While some bold, Vegas-like moves are possible this summer—who saw the Nils Lundkvist trade coming last year?—this has been a franchise that can’t resist the siren song of safe, known quantities the minute adversity strikes.
Jamie Oleksiak left for Seattle in 2021, so the Stars offered Suter four years and a no-movement clause right on the heels of Minnesota buying him out. Jani Hakanpää was always going to get top-four ice time this season despite rough results over the likes of Lundkvist or Thomas Harley. And there’s a reason that spring has long been known in these parts as “Joel Hanley Time.” When the Stars start to feel like they’re losing control, they pick up some comfort food, just like anyone else.
But change rarely happens when you’re comfortable. Vegas has consistently chosen positive disruption, and they’ve proven that path to be an effective one. The question for Dallas now is whether they are in need of that sort of change or whether there’s a more graceful approach to follow, akin to diminishing Benn’s role instead of trying to run him out of town. If anyone can find that middle way, it’s probably Nill.
If you look at the regular season, some moderate tinkering to the NHL roster with a great prospect pool to draw from is a perfectly reasonable foundation for another great season. But if the Stars weigh playoff results more heavily and make bigger adjustments to their approach, fans may be in for a more dramatic summer, replete with all the same uncertainty, excitement, and tension every game brings. You may not have any control over what happens, but you’ll still mourn or celebrate each transaction like you did. And maybe you will, if you just dream big enough.
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