The Dallas Stars meet an uphill climb as they try to answer for last season’s debacle.
Heading into the 2018-19 season having missed the playoffs eight of the last 10 years, the Dallas Stars are open to a lot of questions. What happens in the coming storm of honest-to-goodness hockey (less than three months to puck drop) could determine quite a lot about their future and the direction this team finds itself in, not only for ‘19, but for seasons beyond.
For the moment, the Stars are already faced with a few hot issues and the campaign hasn’t even begun yet. While we could be caught in a fully blown meltdown if things go awry during the year, it helps to remain optimistic. Let’s not get too high or too low.
In that vein, we want answers to what happened last season and we expect those will come about sooner rather than later. Here now are five burning questions we’ll be faced with in the coming months.
5. How does Jim Montgomery fare in Year One?
On paper, the hiring of college coaching sensation Jim Montgomery seems easy enough to calculate. He’s destroyed it behind the bench everywhere he’s gone, winning National Championships and leading multiple clubs to postseason success. The resume speaks for itself.
So of course the returns should be immediate, positive and impactful, right? It’s certainly what we’d like to believe, especially for a club that’s failed to secure an identity the last few seasons and has failed to enjoy anything beyond a first or second round exit in the previous decade.
Well, we simply won’t know until the lights shine their brightest and we’re staring into the months of December or January. By that time we should have a pretty firm grasp on where this whole thing is headed, at least in Year One.
The addition of Montgomery though might be the most difficult to actually quantify, whether Dallas is sailing or floundering by the new year or the trade deadline. It isn’t likely he’ll be booted back to the college ranks if the Stars can’t make the postseason.
There’s plenty of talented youth simmering along various points of the roster, at both NHL and AHL levels, and the growth of those players appears to be the most apt reason for bringing the new Jim to Dallas in the first place.
We should remember also that a learning curve is sure to strike somewhere. Montgomery is going to have ups and he’ll have his downs, but as a first year NHL coach, it would be remiss to label any downs (or highs for that matter) as indicative of his ability to win at the greatest level. It’s going to take some time to really know what we have.
But don’t fret, we’re still going to have some of the answers to this hiring almost immediately. The main one is how much can Montgomery squeeze out of some of these draft picks? Again we noted his talent for coaching up youth. How will that translate to players like Devin Shore, Brett Ritchie and Valeri Nichuschkin? Or defensemen John Klingberg or Miro Heiskanen? Hell, Tyler Seguin is still a young lad, how does Montgomery transform his game?