Pausing to ponder: Stars’ season ahead filled with both challenges and potential

83 days. That’s all that separates us from the return of Dallas Stars regular season hockey.

It’s practically just around the corner, right?

With the release of the NHL’s 2025-26 regular-season schedule on Wednesday, it seems as though we’ve officially passed the last substantial checkpoint of the standard NHL offseason. The draft has come and gone, development camps have been hosted, the free agency frenzy is all but wrapped up and teams are starting to settle in and shift their focus to what the season ahead could look like.

For a handful of teams, expectations are as high as they’re ever going to get right now. That’s because the offseason provides a blank canvas for every franchise. Last season can seem like a distant memory and the season ahead seems to hold unlimited hope. But the arrival of autumn usually provides a quick reality check for those clubs.

There are also the handful of pleasant surprises whose expectations start small but slowly grow with newfound success.

Finally, there’s the group where success is the standard. That’s where the blue bloods like Florida, Edmonton, Carolina, Vegas and Dallas reside. The expectations start high, stay high and end somehow even higher. Anything less than hoisting the Cup feels like a missed opportunity. But the closer you get, the more the expectations grow for the following season.

When the puck drops in Winnipeg on October 9, another new era of Dallas Stars hockey will officially commence. Newly-hired head coach Glen Gulutzan will open his second stint behind the Dallas bench as the team attempts to take the next step on the trail to a championship.

And there seems to be a lot riding on that next step.

After becoming the first team in over 30 years to advance to three straight conference finals and not win the Cup, General Manager Jim Nill made the decision to fire Head Coach Pete DeBoer. The veteran head coach had led Dallas to the best regular-season record (149-68-29) in the NHL and won six playoff series in his three years at the helm, so the decision clearly came with some shock. So did the re-hiring of Gulutzan, who Nill let go of in the summer of 2013 after he was hired as GM.

Gulutzan’s introductory press conference on July 2 was lighthearted but exuded an underlying confidence. The coach talked of his journey since leaving Dallas (a “reconnaissance mission through Western Canada,” as he playfully referred to it) and how the scars of past failures and shortcomings have helped him check the boxes, become a better coach, and learn to live in the moment.

“As an assistant, head, assistant, American League, wherever I started, I like to be where my boots are,” Gulutzan said. “I kind of want to live in the now. If you’re chasing all the time, I sometimes thought, you always catch your mind wandering, that, ‘Oh geez, if I got this job or that job.’ But I really actually loved my job. I loved my job in Edmonton, I loved my job in Calgary, I loved it in Vancouver, here and in Austin. It didn’t really change. I just like to be where my boots are.”

That’s a pretty healthy mindset for a coach taking over a team with gargantuan expectations. Don’t look too far ahead to where this train could or should go but instead keep the focus on the process. Only one team can hoist the Cup at the end of the day, and it’s incredibly hard to do so. That’s what makes the “Cup or bust” mentality so harsh, even for a perennial challenger like the Stars.

Well, it’s easy for me to sit up here and say yes, but I’ve got too much respect for the game,” Nill said in regards to adopting such a mentality. “It is so hard to win in pro sports. I’ve got a lot of respect for the game. I’ve done a lot of winning in my career and I’ve done a lot of losing in my career. That’s our goal, is to win the Stanley Cup, and we’re going to do the best we can to accomplish it.”

And that seems to be largely achievable with the current roster at hand by implicating a handful of minor tweaks. Playing with more physicality, collaborating with his assistant coaches to form a new plan of attack and shifting “one degree” in a number of elements within the team game.

“We’re going to ask for a little more hand-to-hand combat from everybody, starting from the top to the bottom,” Gulutzan said. “It’s a one-degree league, it’s not a ten-degree league. We just need to up the ante a little bit and put our energy there.”

And with a little under three months to go before these new hopes and philosophies are put into motion on the ice, it offers an opportunity to ponder the potential.

As you look across the league, there are few teams with a more intriguing storyline to follow than the Stars. Instead of hitting the “retry” button and running it back again after three straight years of coming close, Dallas is shaking it up. A team brimming with talent and building on a recent history of strong success is trying to take the next step with a new head coach. But they’ve played 543 games (including playoffs) since the start of the 2019-20 season, more than any other team in the NHL. Will fatigue be a concern? Will there be extensive growing pains with a new style and strategy?

To top it all off, they’re battling in arguably the toughest division in the NHL. Winnipeg is the reigning Presidents’ Trophy winner. Colorado still has some of the NHL’s top talent on its roster. St. Louis was the best team in the league following the 4 Nations break last season. Minnesota is still a threat, while Utah and Nashville should be better than they were last year. It’s a challenging mountain, to say the least.

And that’s part of what makes this offseason so unique as we await puck drop. It’s a fruitful time to contemplate. It’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the high tide in the offseason and make some wild assumptions.

But the deeper you dig, the more room there is for cerebration. How will the forward lines shake up? Which forward will step up into the top six? Will newly-acquired defenseman Vladislav Kolyachonok challenge for a starting spot on the blue line? Does the Dallas offense and power play see a spike in efficiency under new assistant coach Neil Graham? How will they open the season with 10 of the first 13 games being against 2025 playoff teams?

All good questions, all answered in due time.

But as we enter the dog days of summer and the NHL news cycle quiets down, feel free to take a moment to ponder all of the unknown in the season ahead. The Dallas Stars have a lot to figure out but also have a lot of positivity to build on as they continue their pursuit of going the distance.

That feels like a pretty good place to be with 83 days until puck drop.

This story was not subject to the approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club.

Josh Clark is a writer for DallasStars.com. Follow him on X @Josh_Clark02.