The Dallas Stars are a team bustling with potential. GM Jim Nill made huge splashes last summer in free agency, and the Stars were a playoff team from Christmas to mid-March until fizzling down the stretch. Dallas has missed the playoffs in eight of the past 10 seasons. And a veteran team that had to adjust to Ken Hitchcock's demanding system was dealt another twist this offseason when the surefire Hall of Famer decided to retire from coaching,
Enter Jim Montgomery. The 48-year-old has been tabbed as a rising star in hockey circles ever since leading the 2010 USHL expansion Dubuque Fighting Saints to a championship in their inaugural season (hey, sound familiar?). Montgomery has coached the University of Denver for the past five seasons -- including a national championship in 2017 -- and generated interest from NHL clubs. But nothing pulled him away from Denver -- until the Stars called.
What's more, Montgomery could represent a growing trend in the NHL; the league, which has never looked to the NCAA as a coaching pipeline, might be having a change of heart. When Philadelphia's Dave Hakstol was hired away from North Dakota in 2015, he was just the third coach to make the jump, and the first since 1982; now the New York Rangers have hired Boston University's David Quinn.
In a Q&A with ESPN, Montgomery talks about that trend, his biggest risks, video games and how he'll measure success in Year 1.
ESPN: What is your coaching style?
Montgomery: My coaching style is based off a team-first attitude. I want everyone to be selfless. The last part of it would be honest communication. I think the communication skills -- it's more important to listen than to talk. But when you do talk, whether you are delivering good news or bad news, as long as it's honest, you're always going to be able to work from there.
ESPN: What is the most daunting thing on your to-do list right now?
Montgomery: I don't know if it's daunting, but it's the most important: to make sure I have the right people with me. To create the right culture, and everyone talks about culture, you want to create the right energy in your group. It's really important that everybody's invested and that they're pulling the same way. You face so many challenges with the emotions of wins and losses throughout the year, that it's really important that you have people who are working together. It's hard enough to win, but you can't be pulling in different directions.
ESPN: Why haven't NHL teams historically looked to college hockey as a pipeline for coaching?
Montgomery: It's a 35-game schedule compared to 82. The majority of the best players, historically, didn't come out of college hockey. It speaks to the evolution of the game -- when I played, it was 19 percent, I think, of players from college hockey in the league. Now it's 33 percent. It's just kind of normal that those players that are [coming from the NCAA], who is developing them? It's the coaches. That's why I think you're going to start seeing European coaches in the NHL real soon, because you look at the success of countries like Sweden and Finland, what are they doing right? Who is developing the players? I think it's just the smartest leaders in any industry are always looking for what's working. If something is working, you need to investigate it, and that's usually when you find out that there's good people and talented people.
ESPN: Your first head-coaching gig was in 2010. How have you changed as a coach since then?
Montgomery: I'm vastly different. I'm still the same person, but I don't think I'm as emotional as a coach anymore. I really learned how important listening is, and cultivating relationships by understanding people better. That's where I've grown the most. You might have the greatest ideas in the world as a coach, but if you can't develop a relationship to get the guys to understand that your ideas are going to be good, if you don't create care, they're not going to care about the message. Once you create care in your relationships and once you develop trust, then those things -- when you want to change things -- people accept it easily. Because they believe and they care.
ESPN: When did you start coming to that realization?
Montgomery: I was lucky. My first year as a head coach, we won a championship, and everything went right. I'm watching everything that's going on with Vegas -- everything is going so well. Everything is magic this year. In my second year, we had a good team again, but [in terms of] the same energy and the same things going right, it wasn't there. We didn't have the same team-first attitude in the locker room. There were challenges that I didn't have in my first year. That's when I really understood that you needed to develop more as a person. That I needed to develop more as a person in creating relationships.
ESPN: What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?
Montgomery: Probably my biggest risk was leaving a good job as an assistant coach in college hockey that had -- there was a lot of security and a lot of safety in it -- to become a head coach of an expansion team in the USHL, which was a tough league to win in. That was probably the biggest risk professionally I've taken. But it's also the most rewarding risk. Because I found out the way I like to do things worked. I don't think I'd get great jobs, like the one I had with the University of Denver, or the one now with the Dallas Stars, if I hadn't taken that risk.
ESPN: I hear a lot of coaches talk about adapting to coach millennials, especially ones with shorter attention spans. I'm also hearing a lot of coaches griping about video games becoming a distraction. As someone who has been around college kids the last couple of years, is that something you're concerned about?
Montgomery: If I go back 30 years to NHL or American Hockey League locker rooms, or the same thing when I was in college, everybody is wired differently. When I was back in college, there were guys playing video games way too much and not getting proper amount of sleep, because that's where their interest lied. The same things happen now. There are certain guys that aren't music people, that don't wear the earphones in their head before the games, because they like to sit and talk with teammates; then there are guys isolated in their own zone. That has always existed to me. The fact that they've become a generation of more information and gadgets attached to them ... communication skills is the one thing that I've found has dissipated with that. People don't know how to connect with people as they used to. Everything is done through a gadget, a text message -- they show their personalities in text messages more than they do in person. That's the only thing that I find different.
ESPN: You've had interest from NHL teams before but stayed at Denver. I'm curious, what's one thing you wanted to know specifically from Jim Nill before taking this job?
Montgomery: I wanted to know his beliefs; I wanted to know his plan and how he was going to execute it. The amazing thing was that I never had to ask a specific question. Because that came out through him -- his confidence and how he was going to get the Dallas Stars to where he wanted to take them, which is to win a championship. That was the thing, like, right away I was like, this is an opportunity to work with someone that I perceive as really talented. What he said was exactly what I believe championship hockey is. But also his idea of how our relationship was going to work was exactly the type of working relationship I was looking for. It just felt right, right from the start when I met with him.
ESPN: What more do you want from Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin?
Montgomery: I don't know if that's fair for me to answer right now because I don't know them well enough. I haven't seen them play a great game; I haven't seen them play a subpar game. I haven't seen them interact with their teammates. So to say what I want more from them, I don't know if I could answer that intelligently right now. I know they're great players. I want to see how great of teammates they are. I want to see how they push other people and pull other teammates with them to where we need to go.
ESPN: How much game tape have you watched of the Stars?
Montgomery: Not enough yet. I have all summer to do that. My most important thing right now is getting to know not only the players but the people in the organization and how the organization works, how the players work, how the dressing room was, and then adding the right people to my staff in order to succeed. That's what I'm focused on right now. I know full well I'm going to have summer projects for myself and the rest of the staff, and that's when we're really going to dive into how we're going to play and how we're going to maximize the talent we have in our room.
ESPN: What is success for you in Year 1?
Montgomery: Success is going to be having the right energy and people believing in the process that we're going to instill. We're going to have a team identity, and success is going to be the players understanding and valuing that process like I do. If that happens, making the playoffs and everything else is going to come with it.
ESPN: What's it like to follow Ken Hitchcock? Daunting?
Montgomery: Yes, it can be, but I don't look at it that way. I look at it in a positive fashion. Man, they were coached by a great X's and O's coach, a guy that brought them structure. So, there are so many great habits already ingrained in them. OK, we already have a great platform, so, what can we do to add to it? That's what I think is the huge benefit of following a great coach, a legendary coach, like Ken Hitchcock.
ESPN: Do you have any fears about the job?
Montgomery: No. Not one.
ESPN: That seems like a good place to end it.
Montgomery: I hope my confidence comes through to you.