Stars Stuff: The Jim Nill discourse, Dallas continues to ascend, and a look ahead

This season has only just begun.

“Until we have the 20 best players in the league all on one team, there’s always somewhere we can upgrade.”

That was Eric Tulsky this weekend in an interview with Pierre LeBrun. What a quote. The hockey world is still reeling from Carolina and Colorado’s blockbuster trade. At some point, we’ll return to the Untouchable tiers. However, nothing has really changed for me. The tiers are in the spirit of Tulsky’s quote: who can be upgraded at their respective positions at a similar cost for a superior, however subtle, impact? Yes, Jamie Benn, Matt Duchene, and Tyler Seguin are too low on that list given what they’ve done this season. But their ages automatically hurt their value, warranted or not, and the case doesn’t get closed until the end of the postseason. Just saying.

I get the feeling from Stars fans, that no matter how good they look right now, nothing will satisfy that Cup thirst until Jim Nill does something bold, like Tulsky and Chris McFarland. When I mentioned Leah Hextall said Nill was only looking at UFAs, some fans sounded almost disappointed. One fan even referred to a lack of “nads.” Now, I don’t believe ‘nads’ is what a person needs in order to make prudent decisions. A central nervous system, and one of those hole-in-the-wall Eastern European bakeries at breakfast time is all you need, IMO. But it’s a fun word to say and write, and so I wanted to dwell on that for a second.

My response is that Nill has his own way of doing things. The same personality and attitude that informs his purpose in only going after UFAs ahead of the deadline is the same personality and attitude that informs Nill’s ability to draft and develop (which he’s done better than any of his peers—objectively), sign, trade, and manage a roster with two Conference Finals appearances in its rearview. You can’t really criticize one without the other.

That doesn’t mean Nill is beyond criticism. Ilya Lyubushkin and Matt Dumba in the offseason. Thomas Harley and Ty Dellandrea at the draft. Lindy Ruff and Ken Hitchcock picked to lead¹. His tenure is highly complicated. For a deeper dive, I recommend reading my piece on him at D Magazine in 2022 for reference. Or this oddly-popular article here. The point being that you don’t get to pick and choose the decisions that matter more when framed against how Dallas got here in the first place.

This is not me, ‘nadlessly’ hedging my bets. “Let’s wait to judge until after the season.” Premature judgment gets a bad rap in a world where Toronto fans were told to ‘trust us’ after the David Clarkson contract. But the difference here is that these last several seasons feel like the genuine culmination of Nill’s work. It’s not just about the back-to-back Conference Finals. It’s about the process that led them to it: a revitalized aging core, and the emergence of a new one with a coaching staff willing to respect the development of its young players. This is a team comfortably second in the Central without two pieces in its top six and over nine million to work with ahead of the trade deadline. Nill is nothing if not adaptable. We’ll see how he adapts to the deadline.

Welcome!

Eight new subscribers showed up over the weekend. For a ragtag operation like this, that’s a lot. This is the part where I tell you how much cooler it is to be a paid subscriber because I still dream that maybe one day I can be my own boss and just write about hockey for a living. But since I don’t live in that world, it probably means you don’t live in the one where eight dollars a month is tenable.

Which is cool. Read at your own pace. Here’s a list of every paywalled article I’ve written. If you think it’s worth it, awesome. If not, I’m still glad you’re here.

Tomorrow’s gonna be pretty fun: a sober play-by-play of Dallas vs. Vegas with stats and film room analysis. I figured the best game of the year deserved its own time capsule.

Dallas’ shot quality

As a team dependent on shot quality differential, the Stars aren’t quite elite, and we got a 60-minute reminder of that on Saturday versus St. Louis. We’ve talked about it before and their odd splits: very good generating shot quality as a team, but very average at suppressing shot quality as a team.

Data and visual courtesy of Evolving-Hockey.

At 53.22 percent in expected goal share, Dallas is in the lower end of the top 10. Given how out-of-sorts their forward lines have been, I consider this pretty impressive. If there’s an argument for Nill to make a move ahead of the deadline, it’s this one: it would be nice for the Stars forward lines to develop long-term chemistry. They haven’t had a chance between the slow starts and the injuries.

Dallas’ luck

You might be wondering why the Stars didn’t lose all of their early games with such a poor shot quality differential. Enter “PDO”: The infamous luck stat, which combines save percentage with shooting percentage. As you can see, Dallas got really “lucky” when they weren’t controlling the shot quality battle, and now that they’ve started winning the shot quality battle, their luck has run out. And yet they’re 6-4 in their last ten.

Garret Hohl wrote a great refresher on regression and what it actually means. For my own part, I wish we could ditch words like regression and luck altogether. It’s not that they’re unimportant. On the contrary; I think understanding them at the level of the ‘chart hugger’ is essential to good analysis. But luck implies that teams are rolling dice. Maybe they are. But a word like circumstantial might pull a little more weight for the purpose of sports. I like the word nondevelopment instead of regression because it doesn’t have that automatic negative connotation that regression does.

I mention this exercise in semantics because Dallas is due for one or the other: either a sudden explosion in goal-scoring, a sudden implosion of netminding, or both. That’s not really important, nor is it an interesting observation. What’s interesting to me is that Dallas has had a stretch of 20 games now where they haven’t experienced incidental success or developed anything new in their game (for better or worse), and still they’ve ascended the rankings. To me, that’s a big deal. It’s a signal that the Stars don’t need the hockey gods in order to pick up big wins.

That’s not to call this team perfect by any stretch. Despite trending up, the power play has a Lord of the Rings level journey to go until being respectable. And there are plenty of little things, like the blueline, that need shoring up. The Stars do not, and will not ever have that elite talent who can steal games. They can’t bring a Connor Hellebuyck or a Cale Makar into the postseason like Winnipeg and Colorado. But in lieu of that, they have depth. Because of that, it’s imperative that they lean into that identity; that no position, whether in the bottom six among forwards, or the bottom pair among the defenders, is wasted.

The postseason is where the real work is done. As a general rule, it’s harder for teams with more players of varying qualities of good to beat teams with only a few players with specific qualities of great.

Dallas will need to the best example of the exception they can be.

1. Ignoring that Hitch was an ownership hire.