From micro to macro, how and why Glen Gulutzan has evolved as an NHL head coach

I caught up with the Dallas Stars new head coach on Tuesday.

In Glen Gulutzan’s first go-around as the Dallas Stars head coach he was a micromanager.

He was self-described overly-involved and it’s one of the reasons that Stars general manager Jim Nill opted to fire Gulutzan as one of his first acts back in 2013.

And while Gulutzan makes no excuses about it, I think it’s important to acknowledge some of that context. Gulutzan was a minor-league coach when he took over the Dallas bench, he’d never coached above the AHL, and minor-league coaches, by the nature of the position, have to be micromanagers.

In fact, the first time Gulutzan had never worked on a staff with a goalie coach before he got his first head job in the NHL.

In the 12 seasons since he left Dallas, including two as the head coach of the Calgary Flames, Gulutzan has realized that an NHL coach has to be more focused on the macro than the micro.

“With coaching now, it’s about managing a team of specialists more so than managing every single thing,” Gulutzan said. “You have your big four — power play, penalty kill, goaltending, and 5-on-5 — and three of them are the responsibility of one of the assistants. So as a head coach now it’s more about managing all the tools, the analytics, the big tactical decisions, and keeping the big picture in mind as much as possible.”

“Analytics,” gets thrown around often, it’s a term that I think can either be positive or negative depending on your view of the world. It’s also one that some coaches use as a blanket phrase to shut down nosey reporters, while others at least give a bit of an explanation.

Gulutzan, thankfully, is more of the latter.

“Players in the past 10 years are used to hearing more and more about analytics, their agents, for most of them, have already told them the negative stuff anyway,” Gulutzan said. “So if you use it to make a point, like ‘we are 32nd in the league on the forecheck,’ players actually see the data as a teaching point.”

Gulutzan said those teaching points also need to be delivered at the right time.

“It doesn’t do anything right after a single game in my view, that’s not the time and it’s not enough,” Gulutzan said. “You need to have the larger sample size, the space that allows you to look at all areas of the ice, and be able focus on how you can improve over time.”

For Gulutzan it’s another “connector,” which he views as a vital piece of building both a successful staff and team that works well its coaches. It’s one of the reasons he’s excited about both the hires of Neil Graham and David Pelletier on his staff.

Graham, the former Texas Stars coach who also interviewed for the Dallas head job, is well-known for how he manages and connected with players already in the organization. Pelletier, a former Olympic figure skater who worked with the Oilers, is one of the best connectors Gulutzan has ever worked with.

Gulutzan said he became a better connector himself during his time in Edmonton.

“There was a player that I worked with in Edmonton for six or seven seasons, showed them hundreds and hundreds of clips, and it was during the playoffs one time and he was struggling and we just took a walk, and talked about the walk,” Gulutzan said. “After that player left (Edmonton), in one of our last talks before the player asked me if I remembered that walk, because they said it was the best thing I did for them as a coach. That’s the type of thing, I believe as a coach, you need to focus on more now than anything with Xs and Os.”

Being a better connector and human manager, Gulutzan believes, will also help with the tactical front.

Gulutzan has said he wants to build a team that fits his players, not force a team that fits his ideals. While the roster isn’t finalized yet, what does that actually mean?

“Well I see a very mobile D and we aren’t changing that, which right now is where I’d give you the line about how we’ll have D that join the rush and pressure the play, which is all, ‘blah, blah, blah,’ everyone knows that,” Gulutzan said. “But the thing I see is a tweak in the defensive zone, allowing (assistant coach Alain Nasreddine) to really work that the way he sees fit, and making some tweaks with our forwards where our defense has more support both defensively and moving the puck.”

Gulutzan he envisions a Stars team playing a bit tougher on the puck, which has been harped on over and over in his other interviews, but most notably, to me, said he sees a Stars team that has the ability to arrive at the right time with their skates to actually activate that physicality.

Gulutzan also envisions Miro Heiskanen setting the tone for the Stars.

“I go back to my time in Edmonton and between our analytical breakdown and how we felt as coaches there are four truly elite defenseman that control the game in the NHL,” Gulutzan said. “And he’s one of them in that group, he’s the ultimate piece on a defense that, if you’re smart, I think you can build a really elite group around him.”

We also talked about some other key things with the Stars including:

• Gulutzan looks at the rough guideline for Jake Oettinger’s starts to be around 50 regular season games, especially with an Olympic year. Gulutzan said that will be handled on a day-to-day basis, but data has shown before the goalies that play too far past the 50-game mark in the regular season tend to falter later in the playoffs.

• Gulutzan is interested in working with the Stars new sports science department, and noted that the travel in Dallas is really harder than any other team in the league — it’s an island on the NHL landscape. So his plans for practice and intensity will likely be reflective of that with a goal of having Dallas being a better recovery team this season.

• As far as personal setup goes, Gulutzan is planning on staying in an AirBNB during training camp near the Stars facilities in Frisco, that way he can take time to pick out a proper place to live with his wife, likely closer to Dallas.