The Dallas Stars fired head coach Peter DeBoer on Friday, less than a week after the team was eliminated in the Western Conference Final for the third year in a row. It is a complicated move because it was one that probably needed to happen. But it’s also going to be extremely difficult for them to find an upgrade behind the bench.
It wasn’t so much the fact that the Stars have been unable to get over the hump and win a Stanley Cup under DeBoer that did him in. It was also the fact that he seems to have a short shelf life with teams and has a tendency to make some really damaging decisions that end up doing irreversible damage.
In this case, it was benching the team’s franchise goalie, Jake Oettinger, in Game 5 of their series against the Edmonton Oilers, and then throwing him under the bus following the game.
“I didn’t blame it all on Jake. But the reality is, if you go back to last year’s playoffs, he’s lost six of seven games to Edmonton,” DeBoer said after the Game 5 loss. “We gave up two goals on two shots in an elimination game. It was partly to spark our team and wake them up, and partly and knowing the status quo had not been working. It’s a pretty big sample size.”
General manager Jim Nill said on Friday that even though that comment was not the reason for firing DeBoer, it definitely was part of it.
Which is very understandable.
An NHL goalie is one of the most important parts of any team, and if that goalie feels the head coach has lost trust in him, it’s going to be awfully difficult to come back from that. It’s also going to be extremely difficult for that head coach to walk back into that locker room after throwing one of the most important members of the team under the bus and putting the blame on everybody but himself.
The problem for the Stars is that, for as self-destructive as DeBoer can be, he is still one heck of a coach with a track record of success in the NHL.
He has made the playoffs 10 times, advanced to at least the Conference Finals eight times with four different franchises (New Jersey, San Jose, Vegas and Dallas) and two Stanley Cup Finals (New Jersey and San Jose). His teams generally do well and go deep into the playoffs. That is not easy to find consistently.
But his run-in with Oettinger was not the first time he had burned a bridge with a franchise goalie, having previously benched Marc-Andre Fleury in Vegas for Robin Lehner, a move that also set the wheels in motion for him to be dismissed there.
Most of the prime head-coaching candidates during this hiring cycle have already been picked over, and going with an unproven coach for a veteran, Stanley Cup-contending team is always going to be a risk. But it might be one the Stars have to take.
DeBoer had to go because of his own doing. Even if there is no easy and obvious upgrade.
