Jim Nill signs a 2-year extension as GM of the Dallas Stars: A meandering response.

Nill is a good GM. But is he a great one?

I never quite understood who or what Jim Nill was as a GM. He’s as much a confident display of facial hair as he is an awkward contradiction of puck philosophies. Who is he? Is he the man behind the Tyler Seguin trade, or the one behind the Martin Hanzal signing?* Is he the GM that let his coach play Michael Raffl play more EV minutes than Roope Hintz in the 2022 playoffs versus Calgary, or the guy who wouldn’t slot Raffl into his current top 16? Is he the man who stubbornly refused to give up Julius Honka for goaltending help (Cam Talbot) or the guy who suddenly decided a first rounder was worth giving up for a player kind of like Honka in some ways? Was he behind the offensive revolution he helped kickstart in 2014, or the mastermind behind trying to stop the offensive revolution in 2020?

I don’t know how I feel about Jim. Which is funny, because I know exactly how I feel about other GMs.

I know I wouldn’t trust Chuck Fletcher with a potato gun. Not after watching him in Philly, giving up three draft picks, and $5 million per year for extremely online and totally replaceable Tony DeAngelo. Or after watching him so afraid to lose one of his defensemen in Minnesota that he let Alex Tuch and Erik Haula go for free. Or that time he traded Nick Leddy for Cam Barker. Or when he signed noted Poor Analytics/Awful Defender Rasmus Ristolainen to a massive deal.

I know exactly how I feel about Pierre Dorion. For his massive contract given to Matt Murray. For giving up Mark Stone for Erik Brannstrom (this is why you trade your beloved prospects sometimes, people: Brannstrom was good, and still is…but he’s no Stone), a second round pick, and a bag of pucks. For drafting Tyler Boucher over Cole Sillinger, Brennan Othman, Matthew Coronato, Isak Rosen, Fabian Lysell, and one…very special Wyatt Johnston. (This pick was unanimously seen as a reach. Cam Robinson had him at #49 while Scott Wheeler had him at #43.)

Jim Benning. Peter Chiarelli. Dave Nonis. Dale Tallon, and his effort to make moves just to spite the “computer boys” in his own front office. While we’re listing a who’s who of Dunderhead Mifflin, why does no one ever mention Paul Fenton? A GM so out of his depth that he was fired after one year?

Sidebar: the drafting of Filip Johansson by Fenton during his one year with the Wild is still, IMO, one of THE worst first round picks of the last 20 years. It was so bad not even the national telecast knew how to spin it.

I know exactly how I feel about Kyle Dubas; a GM I respect as a person. I love his progressive mindset to player development. I love that he understands the actual point of analytics — at least conceptually. And I love that he’s always aggressive at the trade tables, even if he made a few too many. But I also know that he came up the hockey ranks like everyone else: because he was born into it. (Don’t let The Athletic’s fawning over his every move leave you confused.) And he made the same mistakes his peers always make, confusing loyalty for mindfulness. He got crunched in Toronto by gambling on a homogenized core, and a higher cap. It’s hard to truly blame him for the cap not going up (due to COVID), but you can definitely blame him for thinking four scoring forwards is what constitutes a diverse core.

I’m not gonna talk about Nill’s tenure. A) I’ve already talked about it and B) Sean Shapiro already did more justice to the topic than I ever could.

The Stars, Jim Nill, and building a better sports performance department in Dallas

I mention all the other GMs because if you listen to their stories, it becomes clear that GMs often get sandwiched between wanting to make their teams better, and taking direct orders from inept ownership. Or an absurd concept of culture. That’s not to say that GMs are passive figureheads and don’t deserve criticism for doing abjectly stupid things. They absolutely do. But it is to say that whatever collision of ideas and rank Nill has had to manage — and we know he’s had to manage a few; the Ken Hitchcock hiring being the most infamous — he’s made the entire odyssey look effortless.

The thing is: even bad GMs see plenty of success success. One of my pet peeves in hockey is reading insiders and talking heads gas up C+ teams for barely squeaking into the playoffs and saying “anybody can win!” but then turn around after whoever wins the Cup and call it the “model” of success, whether it’s Vegas or Colorado. As if it were preordained. We know better, of course. Genuine, thoughtful analysis is as likely to look as foolish as the lazy kind because outcomes can be so random in hockey. The trick is to respect that randomness. Not ignore it.

I say that to emphasize that even the best teams are captained by GMs who only dare to be great when their team already is, and often only get there by not being great. It wasn’t that long ago that Kelly McCrimmon and George McPhee in Vegas were seen as cliched embodiments of the strip itself; rolling the dice one too many times, and scaring off future Knights in their reptilian pursuit of a legacy. It was fun while it lasted, but does anyone envy the cap hell the Lightning are in? The Islanders have seen a lot of success but can anyone tell me what the hell Lou Lamoriello is doing? Then there’s Nill.

Friend of the Stars discord channel, and all-around good analytics guy Greg Amundsen has written about the concept of roster regeneration over roster rebuilding. Nill feels like one of rare GMs who truly understands this concept. I sometimes wonder if seeing his initial core of Benn, Seguin, and Klingberg never quite hit their stride isn’t what prompted him to be more active at the draft (that’s a hot one, so don’t run with that, but I do wonder and it’s something I alluded to after the 2022 NHL Draft.) It makes intuitive sense: an unspoken confidence in the present leading to a more active role in the future. Whatever the case, Nill never made a show of it. Rather than sell out to win, or bottom out to lose, the Stars are now in a very different competitive window than most teams: it’s a sustainable window rather than a fleeting window of either success or failure.

Benn/Seguin/Klingberg gave way to Robertson/Hintz/Heiskanen. And now you have players like Stankoven/Bourque/Bichsel ready to support the emerging core. It’s hard to imagine Dallas being anything other than a stone cold contender for many many years to come.

Granted, that’s the charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that all the draft hits and free agency wins mean nothing if it doesn’t result in a Stanley Cup. That’s fair, and potentially correct. What do you build for if not to build a winner? The 2023-2024 roster is, for my money, the best we’ve ever seen in the Nill era, and maybe one of the franchise’s best ever. But is it enough?

For all of his faults, Nill has nothing if not earned those two extra years to find out.

*Or did that have Hitch’s fingerprints? Of all the signings…ever…this one felt the most like the owner giving a coach carte blanche. With Seguin, Spezza, and Faksa down the middle…why sign an older, bigger, more injury-prone Faksa? Yea Nill loves his veterans but not THAT much. Or am I off base?