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.