After three seasons, the Dallas Stars relieved coach Pete DeBoer of his duties on June 6, 2025. … More
Pete DeBoer got the Dallas Stars to the Western Conference Final in all three of his seasons behind their bench. But it wasn’t enough.
On Friday, the team announced that it had terminated his employment, eight days after the Stars were eliminated by the Edmonton Oilers in five games.
“After careful consideration, we believe that a new voice is needed in our locker room to push us closer to our goal of winning the Stanley Cup,” said general manager Jim Nill in a statement released Friday. “We’d like to thank Pete for everything that he has helped our organization achieve over the past three seasons and wish him nothing but the best moving forward.”
Over his three seasons in Dallas, DeBoer guided the Stars to a regular-season record of 149-68-29 for a .665 points percentage. And this year’s playoff run came in spite of an injury that kept top defenseman Miro Heiskanen out of action until the middle of the second round while forward Jason Robertson missed all of Round 1 with a knee injury.
The Stars eked out a seven-game win against the Colorado Avalanche to advance out of the first round, then took down the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Winnipeg Jets in six games in Round 2 before falling to the Oilers for a second-straight year.
Despite his success, DeBoer’s tenure in Dallas will now be best remembered for his snap decision to pull starting goaltender Jake Oettinger after the Stars fell into an early 2-0 hole in their elimination game against Edmonton last week.
His defense of the decision after the game raised eyebrows across the hockey world.
“The reasoning’s always to try to spark your group, so that was the No. 1 reason,” he told the assembled media. “We had talked endlessly in this season about trying to play with the lead and obviously we were in a 2-0 hole right away. I didn’t take that lightly, and I didn’t blame it all on Jake, but the reality is that if you go back to last year’s playoffs, he’s lost six of seven games to Edmonton and we gave up two shots, two goals in an elimination game. It was partly to spark our team and wake them up, and partly knowing that status quo had not been working. And that’s a pretty big sample size.”
The Stars lost Game 5 by a 6-3 score. The next morning, team owner Tom Gaglardi backed his coach in a conversation with Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News.
“He’s a top-three, top-five coach in the league,” Gaglardi said. “You think I want to be going into the coaching market right now, do you see who’s getting hired? Pete’s a seasoned coach. I’m just one voice in the discussion, but I don’t see (firing) Pete being on anyone’s agenda.”
It appears the players were also important voices in the discussion. By the time their exit meetings were complete last weekend, word was trickling out that DeBoer’s position was far from secure.
At this point, it looks like DeBoer, 56, will have to wait awhile for his next opportunity. On Thursday, the Boston Bruins became the last team to fill their opening when they announced they’d hired Marco Sturm.
Six other NHL teams have also hired new head coaches since the end of the 2024-25 regular season:
- Dan Muse: Pittsburgh Penguins
- Lane Lambert: Seattle Kraken
- Rick Tocchet: Philadelphia Flyers
- Adam Foote: Vancouver Canucks
- Joel Quenneville: Anaheim Ducks
- Mike Sullivan: New York Rangers
The NHL is often labelled as a copycat league, and the same coaches often resurface on new teams. This list is a mix of established names and new faces.
Quenneville, 66, ranks fifth all-time in games coached and second in wins, behind only Scotty Bowman. He’s back in the NHL with Anaheim after resigning from the Florida Panthers in the fall of 2021 due to his part in the Chicago Blackhawks’ sexual misconduct incident in 2011, when he was that team’s coach.
Mike Sullivan, 57, is a two-time Stanley Cup winner as coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, now at the helm of the Rangers, and Tocchet, 61, is the reigning coach of the year who’s back in Philadelphia, where he was inducted into the Flyers Hall of Fame as a player in 2021.
Lambert, 60, earned his first head-coaching position with the New York Islanders in 2022. He was fired in January of 2024, after one-and-a-half seasons.
The other three names are all new as NHL head coaches:
Sturm, 46, is a native of Germany, and played 308 of his 938 NHL games with the Bruins between 2005 and 2010. He was behind the bench for Germany’s silver-medal win at the 2018 Olympics before coming back to North America as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Kings and then the head coach of their AHL affiliate, the Ontario Reign.
Muse, 42, spent the last five seasons as an NHL assistant coach, first with the Nashville Predators and then with the New York Rangers.
Foote, 53, was a two-time Stanley Cup champion as a rugged defenseman with the Colorado Avalanche and an Olympic gold medalist with Team Canada in 2002. He has been promoted, after Tocchet brought him into the Canucks organization as an assistant coach when he took over in January of 2022.
In addition to his run in Dallas, Pete DeBoer has also served as head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights, San Jose Sharks, New Jersey Devils and Florida Panthers. All told, he has been to the conference final six times and to the Stanley Cup Final twice — wth the Devils in 2012 and the Sharks in 2016. He has never been named a finalist for the Jack Adams Trophy as coach of the year, and he has never won a Cup.
