First Shift 🏒
Thirty-six games into his second go-round with the Stars, Glen Gulutzan seems to be fostering a learning environment.
After a two-year run as a rookie NHL head coach back in 2011-13 with Dallas, Gultzan spent three years as an assistant in Vancouver, two years as the head coach in Calgary, and seven years as an assistant in Edmonton. So the 54-year-old has a pretty good grip on processing information. That has come in handy on many different occasions this year.
Earlier in the season, the team needed to fix the penalty kill and did that. Then, there was a hiccup with the power play and the coaches and players bonded together to find a solution. On Friday, the lads in Victory Green were coming off a 5-3 win over San Jose that got a little too pacey for Gulutzan’s liking, so he met with players in the morning, went over video, and drew up a better gameplan to face a similarly young and speedy Anaheim Ducks team.
On Friday night, Dallas was near flawless in running up a 7-1 lead through two periods and then cruised to an 8-3 win in the end. It was a great case of “see a problem, fix a problem.”
“It’s nice when you get a result,” Gulutzan said of the process. “At the end of the day, it’s a constant thing. It’s a day-to-day every day.”
Gulutzan studied teaching in college and loves the learning process, and that has been helpful in bonding with his new players. After the video session Friday morning, he had a few brief chats to drop reminders with certain individuals, and that seemed to foster communication. And with a similar opponent on back-to-back nights, the Stars were a much different team.
“We clogged the middle of the ice, the neutral zone, and they fired some bad passes and we took advantage of it,” said defenseman Thomas Harley.
Dallas had played two “stingy” teams in Florida and Los Angeles and also assimilated information on those games, getting better on the second night. But in adjusting from that style of play to a more high-flying brand of hockey, everyone had to change gears, so to speak.
“We asked all of our lines today that we have to be better defensively, more conscious, and win a few more battles and not feed any transition,” Gulutzan said. “With San Jose, we didn’t want to make them excited, but we did, and Otter bailed us out. We said we can’t feed another team. That’s our own doing, so we have some correctable things.”
And they did just that. In the end, they controlled play. In the end, the defense fed the offense. In the end, it was another nice day inside the classroom.
“I enjoy it,” Gulutzan said. “You put out one fire and another comes up. I like the challenge of that. You don’t play the same way against every team. There are similarities. You had LA and Florida, stingy, man-on-man, heavy teams, to teams that can ignite off the line rushes, so you have to strategize a little differently.”
