2025 Report Card: Forget the Oettinger drama. What was up with team defense under Pete DeBoer?

This year was a weird one. And not just because of DeBoer's TMZ moment.

One sentence summary

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to routinely betray your starting goaltender and lose your job.

Thematically appropriate highlight

The Oettinger drama is done. More than that, it doesn’t help us understand hockey under DeBoer this season. He screwed up, lost his temper, and while I don’t think it was grounds for dismissal, hockey is a player’s league now and the players didn’t take kindly to how he handled himself. Nonetheless, it’s thematically appropriate since for coaches — sometimes all it takes is one decision.

Grade: A (straight) C+

It’s weird how outcomes can change the perception of operations. Ever since Pete DeBoer’s arrival, and throughout his tenure, DeBoer was seen as the tactician the Stars needed. He was the perfect blend of previous coaches trying to break the offense wide open (ala Lindy Ruff) and those who still preached shutdown D (ala Ken Hitchcock). The results were there too. In the first two seasons under DeBoer, Dallas was top three in shot quality against at even strength. In terms of shot quality generated, Dallas was lacking at EV, but their power play allowed them to score more than most teams. Well-rounded and disciplined, DeBoer’s tenure earned the Stars a Western Conference Finals appearance every year he was head coach. Until…he wasn’t?

I’ve had trouble writing this one. Part of what I love so much about hockey is that it’s precisely because it’s so chaotic, unpredictable, and fast that it makes finding answers a lot harder. Who hasn’t ever wanted to get to play J.B. Fletcher for a day¹?

I don’t know when I noticed it, but it was definitely around the time that Miro Heiskanen went down. My assumption is that Dallas’ defense would be awful without him, and so it must have been very good with him — just like in previous seasons. Except that wasn’t the case. The Stars had average defensive numbers with Heiskanen on the ice.

Looking at DeBoer’s coaching impacts per Micah Blake McCurdy, we see a very different coach than the one we saw last season. Where before, Dallas had strong defensive shifts in both leading and trailing situations, this season was just chaos from gamestate to gamestate.

Here we see something not only atypical for DeBoer, but actively bad. In a tied gamestate (0), Dallas generated more offense than league average under DeBoer, but they also gave up a lot. However, in the final period of the game (which the blue line doing a moonwalk represents), shot quality disappeared, and so did Dallas’ ability to defend shot quality. The same was true when the Stars had a lead. If you’ve seen enough of these, you know this is somewhat unique. Most coaches tend towards dull. And yes, teams give up more when they’re leading. But rarely is the shift this dramatic.

What’s concerning about this is that this is not the pattern of good teams. In fact, when you look at the rest of the NHL, it’s explicitly clear: better teams play with the lead better. The Stars were the bizarre exception.

The top five teams were legit playoff contenders, with the exception of Ottawa — a team who, to their credit, is really only just now scratching the surface.

Seeing this on the heat maps really puts it all into perspective. The offense was there in score-close situations, but not overtly so. Also, their two-goal lead play was just horrendous. In an era where scoring is at an all-time high, this seems crucial.

This is well and good but the real question is why. Perhaps even: how. How and why did DeBoer’s Dallas team — largely unchanged from the time he took over and in many ways, arguably better — go from great to actively bad on the defensive side of things?

I’ve always had my own personal theories. But as much as I love theory, I’m not into posturing either (no matter how hard I try). I thought I’d be left to my own theories. And then Rick Tocchet of all people left me a clue thanks to Dimitri Filipovic and Thomas Drance being able to interview him on the PDOcast. I recommend listening to the episode in full. There’s a ton to chew on, as Tocchet is extremely forthcoming about his job, and the NHL at large. However, the real meat for Stars fans is when he starts talking about his time on the coaching staff at the 4 Nations with Pete DeBoer.

In this clip, Tocchet talks about what it’s like to coach elite players and having to answer to players having their own opinions about what works best. He highlights, in particular, Dallas’ approach to defensive zone coverage, where “the winger will crack down on the strongside.” Unfortunately I can’t roll tape on this one (thanks ESPN+), but thankfully Jack Han’s systems sheets spells it out for us.

Dallas’ systems shift in their defensive zone coverage is something we’ve talked about but not never really had the chance to dig into. For reference, here was Dallas’ defensive zone coverage the year prior.

So why the change?

My best guess is that, as we just saw above re: Dallas’ shot quality at even-strength, DeBoer wasn’t super happy with the Stars’ rush attack. While they were known as a good rush team the year before, they were only good at finishing on the rush. This year, they were great at generating chances — so much so they were the top rush team until Utah surpassed them at the end of the year. So DeBoer needed a trade-off: get better on the rush at the cost of getting worse on defense.

It’s certainly possible that the Stars could have their cake and eaten it too. But I suspect DeBoer figured he’d do something similar to Florida: leaning into the forwards for breakouts and possession and trying to give less work to a blueline that didn’t and still doesn’t have a real identity. There’s a lot more going on here, and some of this discussion I will table for another time². But for now, I’ll just leave Corey Sznajder’s review of the Dallas vs. Edmonton series here, as it’s well worth your time, and gets into more detail with some of Dallas’ tactical issues.

Prequel to the Sequel

Of course, we can be here all day theorycrafting when sometimes the simplest explanations can suffice: DeBoer’s dedication to the Esa Lindell-Cody Ceci pair. DeBoer wasn’t a coach of many mistakes, but he was a stubborn one. When it was clear that Joe Pavelski didn’t have enough left, he stuck with him, even to the detriment of the team. Same with Lindell and Ceci. One of the worst defense pairs in the analytics era doesn’t hurt a team’s odds in a vacuum only.

But then again we can play these games all day. DeBoer is still an excellent tactician. One of the best, in fact. I don’t even know that any of what I’ve just written is even the truth about what happened, and how it all went wrong.

What I’ve got, however — and the reason for the harsh grade — in the end is a coach who may have simply outsmarted himself. Burdened, in some ways, by the success of previous seasons and perhaps assuming that all that was needed was one or two tweaks away from getting the Stars into a Cup Final, instead had a paralysis by analysis effect. Perhaps that’s why it was so much easier to ‘blame’ Jake Oettinger. Outcomes can be out of your control. But a process should never be. DeBoer will coach again and be successful. But for one unfortunate year, it seemed like he lost control of the process.

1. Assuming she was innocent and not guilty of all the murders she suspiciously always had a nose for.

2. I’ll be writing about Micah Blake McCurdy’s latest model, which is revealing insofar as DeBoer either got hooked into or swam upstream against some of the modern trends.