But first, a quick refresher: Gulutzan was the head coach in Dallas from 2011-2013 for two underwhelming seasons. During this period, the Stars were fighting money troubles, temporarily being run by the league and possessing a roster that had only a single player who scored more than 30 goals in either of those two seasons.
Gulutzan was a first-time NHL head coach who had been promoted from the minor leagues after serving in the same role for the Texas Stars for the previous two seasons. He didn’t get a fair shake, and one of the first moves Jim Nill made when he became the general manager was to relieve Gulutzan of his duties. Since then, the coach has served as an assistant in Vancouver, two less-than-stellar seasons as the head coach in Calgary and the past seven seasons as an assistant in Edmonton.
But make no mistake, there are a lot of positives with this hire.
Gulutzan spent the past seven seasons working with the best player in the world in the Oilers’ Connor McDavid and another one of the elites in Leon Draisatl. He’s learned how to handle veteran star players as well as the eight-minute-a-night guys who received the frustrating healthy scratch. He didn’t handle those drastic differences that well the first time in Dallas and said as much in his introductory press conference.
On top of all that, he’s overseen the Oilers’ power play, which in the past seven years converted at a whopping 26.8% rate, the best in the NHL over that time. He’s now been to back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals and knows the pain of losing in each of those. He’s been around different systems, different coaches and has 12 more seasons of NHL seasoning. The first time he was here, he had exactly zero NHL coaching experience and just two seasons as a coach in the AHL, and having spent the previous six seasons to that as a head coach in the ECHL, which is the level below the AHL in the minor league system of professional hockey. Gulutzan’s resume now is the polar opposite of his resume in 2011, to put it mildly.
He said some great things in his recent press conference when he was reintroduced as the head coach. He acknowledged he wasn’t ready the first time around, saying, “Jim [Nill] was right. Experience matters. You don’t realize it at the time when you’re a young guy, you just don’t. But, when you start working with veteran guys and stay in the league, that’s when I realize that’s what I needed.”
And he’s had 12 years of that work in various locations to grow that experience to be ready for this opportunity to walk into a situation where the expectation is clear and reasonable: winning a Stanley Cup.
Later in the press conference, he added: “I’ve put in the work, I got kicked around, I got the scars on me.” He referred to scars multiple times that day, seemingly to allow all of us to realize how much he’s gone through in his coaching career to get back to this point. That’s a positive in my mind.
Growing Beyond the Past
I also liked what he had to say about the type of system he plans to run.“I’ve played every system, I’ve worked for five different coaches,” Gulutzan said. “Every system has won a Cup. We’re going to put together a system, collaboratively, with that group that’s best for us. That’s probably one of the things that’s changed with me, I only had one way to play, there’s not just one way to play.”
I love that. It shows growth, the ability to listen to assistants and players, and the understanding that adjustments will need to be made not only throughout the season but, more important, throughout the duration of a playoff series.
But, throughout his almost 30-minute press conference, as much as I enjoyed hearing him share his story of gathering experience and talk about his ability to look back and discuss his time here before and how much he’s learned, something else caused me to applaud while listening.
“One thing I’d like to do here too, right from the start of 82 [regular season games], we just gotta up our physicality a little bit, one degree, through 82 games,” he said. “You can’t just turn that switch on in Game 83, you have to build it in. We’re gonna build that in. There has to be a little element of physicality.”
YES! Thank you! If Gulutzan gets this team to achieve that, then this will be a brilliant hire.
Stars of the Past
This is a team loaded with goal-scoring opportunities and depth, but in each of the past three seasons, as the playoffs have progressed, they’ve found themselves being controlled by other teams and lacking the type of physicality it takes to get through the West and into the Finals and, eventually, hoist the Cup. In the Western Conference Finals against Edmonton this past season, for example, the Stars were outhit in five games, 230-155.Now, hits aren’t the end-all of physicality, but it does show a drastic difference in the way Edmonton would use its physicality against the Stars. During the regular season, Edmonton had 1,241 hits as a team. Dallas had 1,245. Yet, in the playoffs, Edmonton found a way to up their physicality and impose their will against the Stars. And, while hits are an imperfect stat that certainly do not tell the whole story on how a team can play physically, Gulutzan was on that Edmonton staff and now has the opportunity to help the Stars make that adjustment in the playoffs next season.
Adjusting the forecheck and backcheck will also be crucial, and knowing when to do that on the fly during games in which it’s not working the way it needs to will be a big test in Gully’s second run through Dallas.
Gulutzan was hired to win a Stanley Cup here. While Nill seems hesitant to say the team is in Stanley Cup or bust mode, the fan base certainly expects that after three straight trips to the Western Conference Finals. The voice in the room needed to be changed, and Gulutzan is known as more of a player’s coach who will deliver the message differently than Pete Deboer did. But the goal remains the same: skate the Cup.
The coach has certainly developed his “scars,” and he’s quite deserving of a second opportunity to show that he is the right man to make that happen now. The roster is loaded and ready, and come next season, regardless of who is coaching, all of us will be chanting, “We want the Cup!”
