Dallas Stars: Buying Into Jim Montgomery’s Culture Is Critical First Step
As their third coach in as many years, Jim Montgomery has the difficult task of convincing Dallas Stars players and fans to buy into his culture. With the growing number of college players on NHL rosters, Montgomery must find a way to bridge the gap between mentoring young adults and managing men, while still resonating with the team’s veterans.
Do you remember the first time you saw the Academy Award-winning film The Usual Suspects, and you spent the whole movie six inches away from the screen screaming, “OMG WHO IS THE VILLAIN AND WHY IS HE KILLING EVERYONE?”
Maybe you don’t. Perhaps you remember that time you were trying to figure out the identity of the villain in Identity while sitting six inches away from the screen screaming, “OMG WHO IS THE VILLAIN AND WHY IS HE KILLING EVERYONE?”
Or maybe you remember that first unfortunate viewing of the Julia Roberts film Eat Pray Love and wondered, “OMG WHAT DID I JUST WATCH AND HOW CAN I GET BACK TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE?”
If any of these ring a bell, congratulations! You’ve been subject to the cinematic version of the last two seasons for the Dallas Stars. A team seeking identity, while continually confusing fans with red herrings, surprise endings, and the nagging desire to—as Cher once sang—turn back time.
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Comebacks are difficult. They require something to fuel a return to prominence. For Cher, her numerous musical resurrections were driven by turning to a more pop-oriented sound. The Stars should strive to be like Cher.
But creating a Texas-sized comeback on par with Cher’s in the late 80s is no easy feat. The Stars have brought in a head coach with a whopping zero NHL coaching experience, have worrisome depth issues, no backup goaltender, and are stuck in a kind of emotional, hockey purgatory devoid of identity or winning culture.
To give the Stars—and vicariously their fans—an identity, new head coach Jim Montgomery will need to push his vision for the club. Sean Shapiro’s fantastic breakdown of Montgomery in The Athletic describes a man that has all the tools to create a winning culture in Dallas. But what exactly makes up a “winning culture” and where do the seeds of that culture begin?
Let’s Get Physical
Montgomery’s teams have a penchant for abrasiveness. Shapiro writes that fans should see shades of Stars teams from a bygone era.
As a fan, this has been my biggest complaint since the departure of Brenden Morrow during the 2012-13 season. There has been a lack of physical play, which rears its head at instances during the regular season and at all times during the postseason. In fact, 2017-18 was the first time the Stars were anywhere near the top 10 in the NHL in hits since the 2012-13 season, when they finished 11th—just one hit short of 10th place.
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While being physical is nice, it doesn’t automatically translate into wins. Six of the top 10 teams in hits didn’t make the playoffs this year, including the Stars. Where that physicality manifests is when the brutishness ratchets up a notch in the playoffs.
Do you want my opinion on why the President’s Trophy-winning Nashville Predators got bounced by the Winnipeg Jets in the 2nd round? (Say yes.) I’ll give you two reasons: physicality and Mark Scheifele.
I’d Like to Buy a Winning Culture, Pat
Montgomery’s approach sounds remarkably simple, but anybody who has played sports at a high-school level or above will tell you what looks simple on paper is rarely simple to execute and often complicated to learn. It requires enormous attention to detail, much of which is done outside the watchful eyes of media and fans.
This is where things will get interesting. How can a coach who has never managed an NHL squad convince a group of young men that these little things are important? It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds. Everyone has an ego. A professional athlete making millions of dollars each year has an even bigger one.
In my high school and college football career—the latter being quite brief—the best coach I ever played for never suited up for a down of football in his life. When he was hired out of a small school in Louisiana, our team wasn’t happy. We had to learn a new offense, which we felt was archaic, as well as new positions, which we thought were ridiculous.
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What happened next? We went from 3-7 to 9-1 in one year. At the end of the season, the coach asked each of us in a team meeting to raise our hand if we genuinely believed that we’d be this successful during summer two-a-days. Only one player raised his hand.
All of this is to say that it won’t be easy for Montgomery. Despite what you hear from management and players, there is undoubtedly some trepidation in the back of their minds. Will Montgomery’s success at Denver translate to the NHL? Can a coach who has been dealing with impressionable young men transition to managing full-grown adults? What can a college coach teach professional athletes that they don’t already know?
Montgomery does have the advantage of having played professional hockey for nearly a decade, so my comparison isn’t exact. This experience should aid him in getting players to buy into his philosophy.
Adam Wodon over at College Hockey News notes that this transition has been done before with varying levels of success. Dave Hakstol’s seemingly successful jump from the University of North Dakota to the Philadelphia Flyers has propped the door open for more coaches to make a move to the professional ranks.
What’s more intriguing is how much NCAA hockey has infiltrated the NHL ranks. In the above-linked article, Wodon writes:
Which brings us to the next point — not only is the NHL now north of 30 percent full of ex-NCAA players, but the teams’ general managers and assistant general managers are now almost 50 percent ex-NCAA guys. Famed BU alum Chris Drury, just to point to a more recent example, is an assistant GM with the Rangers.All of these things — players, coaches, managers — all go hand in hand. It’s hard to figure out the chicken and the egg, but it’s a cycle that builds upon itself. More and more managers, more and more comfortable signing NCAA players, hiring more and more coaches, leading to more and more exposure, leading to better and better players joining the NCAA ranks in the first place, which then fuels more going to the NHL, and so on.
The Dallas Stars 2017-18 roster consisted of, at times, seven players from the NCAA: Devin Shore (Maine), Tyler Pitlick (Minnesota State), Stephen Johns (Notre Dame), Greg Pateryn (Michigan), Jamie Oleksiak (Northeastern), Curtis McKenzie (Miami University), and Ben Bishop (Maine). Oleksiak is gone, and Pateryn is, in my opinion, likely to depart in free agency. That leaves five players from this season that played in the college ranks.
While these players likely have no hesitation about a college coach in the NHL, it’ll be the upper-tier players who will set the tone. If Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, John Klingberg, and Alexander Radulov buy into Montgomery’s culture, the rest of the team will have no choice but to follow. If they resist in any way, it has a chance to kamikaze the future for years.
The most notable local example of this isn’t from hockey, but from the football. The Dallas Cowboys hired Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer in 1994 to replace the popular Jimmy Johnson, the first coach to ever win a National Championship and Super Bowl.
Long story short, by the time he was fired after the 1997 season, Switzer wasn’t on speaking terms with quarterback Troy Aikman. The Cowboys culture quickly nose-dived until Bill Parcells came in years later and resurrected the franchise after the new millennium.
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So, is Jim Montgomery a Barry Switzer or a Jimmy Johnson? At this point, Stars fans will happily settle for anyone who can get the franchise back into the playoffs on a consistent basis. For Montgomery, I’d measure initial success as playoff appearances in two of his first three seasons. Once the culture is in place, the identity will follow.
Then, and only then, we can talk about a comeback tour.