The Stars announced Friday they’ve fired head coach Pete DeBoer. He had one year left on his contract worth roughly $4MM, Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News relayed yesterday. With no other head coaching vacancies after the Bruins filled theirs yesterday, they’ll be paying him to sit unless he lands a job with another club thanks to an in-season coaching change in 2025-26.
“After careful consideration, we believe that a new voice is needed in our locker room to push us closer to our goal of winning the Stanley Cup,” general manager Jim Nill said in a team release. “We’d like to thank Pete for everything that he has helped our organization achieve over the past three seasons and wish him nothing but the best moving forward.”
If DeBoer sits at home for the entirety of next season, it’ll be the first NHL campaign without him leading a team’s bench since he first entered the league as head coach of the Panthers in 2008. He’s been a fixture for nearly two decades, and for good reason. DeBoer-coached teams have made the playoffs nine out of the last 10 seasons, and he’s advanced to the third round in six straight postseason appearances.
Those clubs, including Dallas for the last three years, have lost every one of those six Conference Finals/Semi-Finals, though. That’s the impetus behind today’s coaching change as the Stars look to get over the hump, although they were likely pushed in this direction by the specific circumstances of how their season ended in Game 5 of the Western Conference Final against the Oilers.
DeBoer pulled star goaltender Jake Oettinger from the game after two defensive breakdowns led to a pair of early Edmonton goals, and continued to justify his decision postgame despite his offense going completely dark for most of the series. Dallas scored 11 times in the five-game loss, but six of those goals came in a Game 1 blowout. They averaged just 1.25 goals per game as they lost four straight to end their season.
His decision to remove Oettinger from the game reportedly caused a high degree of frustration within the organization. If the relationship between DeBoer and Oettinger was fractured beyond repair, moving on from the former was the slam-dunk decision. Oettinger, who will presumably finish top-10 in year-end All-Star voting for the third year in a row, signed an eight-year, $66MM extension last October that doesn’t kick in until next season.
Goaltending drama aside, moving on from DeBoer is arguably the most seismic coaching move of the offseason, along with the Penguins’ dismissal of Mike Sullivan. The Stars had a 149-68-29 (.665) record in his three seasons as head coach, the best record in the league since his hiring. While Dallas didn’t convert on any of its WCF appearances, their streak of three straight third-round showings tied the franchise record set from 1998 to 2000.
With his Stars tenure now behind him, DeBoer is up to 17th on the NHL coach all-time wins list with 662. The 56-year-old has an all-time regular-season record of 662-447-152 (.525) across stops in Florida, New Jersey, San Jose, Vegas, and Dallas and has advanced to the third round in eight of his 17 years as an NHL head coach.
It’s unclear what DeBoer’s firing means for the Stars’ assistant coaches, particularly Misha Donskov and Steve Spott. The two have worked closely with DeBoer over the last several years and followed him from Nevada to Texas. He had not previously overlapped with the Stars’ third assistant, Alain Nasreddine.
Image courtesy of Jerome Miron-Imagn Images.
Not surprising. Three straight loses in the conference finals will do it.
He got what he wanted, get a free $4 million and away from the hell that is Dallas
Traffic there alone would make one hope to get fired.
What? Have you been to Dallas?
He is correct
Mr. Conference Finals himself
Yep, 8 times in the past 15 seasons, with two trips to the final round. Plenty of coaches envy that record.
I agree Wilf. It’s easy to make fun of the coaches that always fall just short, but at the same time they provide a lot of value and aren’t bad coaches. If the Stars do get over the hump he will deserve some of the credit.
Things really took a turn for the worst in this matter. It was reported that players throughout the playoffs weren’t happy with Pete DeBoar & his tactics. Apparently, GM Jim Nill listened & has taken action. That’s going to be a wanted position for sure for any coach.
To add to my comment, Jay Woodcraft feels like he would be a good fit with Dallas IMO.
Lol, you sound like me! Agreed, Woodcroft would be a perfect fit.
everyone will chalk it up to the conference finals record but let’s be honest. this is about his treatment of Jake. outing him publicly like that, then admitting he hasn’t spoken with him since, you lose the respect of your locker room like that.
kudos though to Dallas for likely having made this call a few days ago and waiting out the NHL coaching carousel to try and avoid him getting picked up by a team like Seattle, Boston, Pitt, Chicago, etc.
I was with you up until the timing part. If anything they want him hired somewhere else to save some money. It doesnt really hurt them at all if he lands another gig.
Also if he stayed in the west and his new team and Dallas meet in the conference finals it’s a guaranteed trip to the finals for Dallas.
They’d be off the hook for his salary though. Waiting only hurts themselves. I don’t think they care much about him coaching against them.
Why would they care if he got picked up by someone? He’s still going to collect 4 million from Dallas.
If you had said they wanted to see if a guy they like didn’t get hired by one of those teams and thus made the move it would make more sense. My guess is they might like Love from the Capitals.
because if he can bring a team to the playoffs and beat Dallas (which based on the losses on the roster they are sure to have you’d expect a step back), it looks bad.
let’s not talk like the Dallas Stars need to penny pinch.
Depends on if he goes to a team that would play Dallas in the first 2 rounds
maybe but they were eliminated more than a week ago. seems strange to wait till every team fills it’s vacancy to announce this? that punishes them by not being able to interview those candidates. they waited to do this to ensure he didn’t have another job lined up in days.
as for who replaces him, I wouldn’t count out Neil Graham. he’s been with the Texas Stars for 5+ years and is widely praised.
I wonder who gets the Stars job
Torts is still out there. 👍
One thing is for sure… love him or hate him, he never would have pulled that post game crap on one of his players.
I heard Pete DeBoer is available now. Oh wait…
No, for Torts it was pre game crap, witness Sean Couturier, Joel Farabee, and most especially Cam York from this past season.
I’m betting woodcroft, but could be love if they like him.
Are you talking about comments or benchings?
Don’t be shocked if Nasreddine not only sticks around but becomes a serious candidate for the job.
Wow, I totally didn’t see this coming.
But seriously, I guess this means they’re not trading Oettinger anytime soon.
Torts to Dallas?
Noooooooooo to Torts. Gord Gallant, Peter Laviolette, Luke Richardson, Derek Lalonde, Mike Yeo, David Quinn, Joe Sacco are on the list of usual suspects. The latter three are assistants but no team would stop them from moving to a head coach position.
I’ll add the name Brad Shaw as a possibility. After Tortorella got the boot and deservedly so Shaw came in to finish up the season and it was a different Flyers team on the ice. He’s a quiet teacher/leader and maybe that’s what the team needs now.
Shaw is an assistant with the Devils now
The only person who ever had a worse press conference than Pete DeBoer’s was R. Bud Dwyer.
What a pull…
Remember watching that live
That reference goes off with a bang!
Betting not too many under age 50 and from outside Pgh will get it, but it certainly made me LOL!
Me too.
It not the coach it the player they quit
As the old saying goes, “Coaches get entirely too much credit and entirely too much blame.”
With that being said, you don’t throw the guy that got you there under the bus like that. Even if he would have went after Rantanen, you just don’t do that. It’s a discussion that happens behind closed doors and that’s it.
the player quit? the one who got pulled?
maybe sit this one out.
Completely agree with the latter part. The fact that he framed it as “He (Jake) had lost the last 6 of 7 against EDM” was shocking to me. Last time I checked teams lose games – not goalies or pitchers or quarterbacks.
Bye Felicia.
Hopefully Turk Gallant gets a call. Or even how about giving Gardiner MacDougall a chance at the big leagues.
Also does that mean Rod the Bod get canned too.
I give DeBoer a lot of credit for Dallas’ success. Gonna go out on the limb again like I did two years ago and re-opine I just don’t see that team winning the cup. Granlund was like McDavid out there and Blackwell was like Draisaitl. Oettinger… like, well, maybe Joe Woll? I digress. Anyway, I think the window’s closing on that roster if not closed already. Only thing I’d really have liked to see differently is getting Wyatt Johnston a little more ice, and Marchment a little less. And maybe DeBoer wasn’t that great either, I dunno. They barely got as far as they did. Without Rantanen’s basically unparalleled heroics they would’ve been bounced at a point that made sense. So, yeah, now that I think about it DeBoer maybe could’ve done more, since they’ve been in the post season so many times and never really obviously improved. Jim Nill might be overrated too though. Anyway, I enjoyed watching Dallas lose in the same way that I enjoy watching Vegas lose. Thank goodness Skinner has been on his game cause I was gonna have to feel that way about the Oilers again too for not stocking the cupboard, plus how cool would it be for a local goalie to win with his hometown team? Pretty cool, I think.
Had to be done. Some will say “but he got them to 3 conference finals!”, but look at the talent he had. To use a baseball example, if a manager lost 3 years in a row with the Yankees roster in the playoffs without getting to the World Series, he’d be gone to. It’s not like DeBoer was coaching a team on a rebuild.
I get a bit tired of everyone praising deboer for his W/L record and postseason appearances. He is probably the luckiest man ever to exist in the hockey world with the vast majority of his jobs. He continually inherits loaded rosters and fails to make it to the mountain top. At least he finally showed his true colors and crapped the bed in a big way this time. Let someone like buffalo or Chicago end up with this clown in the next couple years and see what a “winning” coach he really is.
It looks like Pete engineered his own firing. He knew they would have no choice if he said what he did.
Signed and sealed when he threw Oettinger under the bus for the exact same problem he himself had– and look at that, still has.
Kinda rich coming from a guy who already had a reputation of not being able to get over the hump before he went to Dallas.
Gotta move on from that coach carousel with the same 40-50 names on it. For every Paul Maurice, there’s six of these guys.