Into the weeds with Dallas Stars skating coach, Luke Chilcott

Jamie Benn. Jason Spezza. Skate technology. Skate philosophy. Regional differences. Development. It's all there in today's interview with Dallas' resident blade whisperer.

The NHL is not a development league.

Except, of course, when players need it to be. That’s where Dallas Stars skating development coach, Luke Chilcott, comes in.

I’ve always wanted to talk to Chilcott, for a lot of different reasons. If you’re unfamiliar with his story, here’s the abridged version. Chilcott was an Olympic-level British figure skater who decided to call it a career in his 20s when the surgery to fuse his back to fix a bulging disc was too much of a risk. This unlikely story about a British figure skater becoming the quiet success of hockey in the south unspooled into work with the ECHL’s Allen Americans, which turned into an interview with Stars Player Development Coordinators JJ McQueen and Rich Peverley.

That’s when Chilcott’s profile blew up. Everybody remembers the ugly part of the 2018-2019 season — the infamous Jim Lites rant that coincided with a then-career low for Jamie Benn just four years after winning the Art Ross Trophy. But few can recount the summer that followed, and how Benn decided he needed to develop; specifically, how he needed to develop his skating.

The story of Chilcott and Benn has been told by the writing titans in the Stars media space. If you haven’t already read Sean Shapiro and Matthew DeFranks recounting of Benn’s evolution, then you should correct that because that’s not what today is really about. Today is really about what I got out of Chilcott’s appearance on Dimitri Filipovic’s PDO Podcast.

My interest in talking to Chilcott was simple: I wanted to ask him about, well, everything. I wanted to ask him about how skating technology has evolved in the same way that stick technology has. About the development of Dallas’ “awkward” skaters like Jason Robertson, Wyatt Johnston (well, before it became an active strength), and Mavrik Bourque. About hockey’s great skating weirdo, Antonio Stranges. Given the stories of how Brayden Point and Mason Marchment leveraged development coaches to become more efficient on ice, I also wanted to grill him about how a development coach resolves the contradiction of working inside a sport that confesses it ‘doesn’t have time’ for development.

So that’s what I did. Thankfully, Luke was kind enough to be candid.