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As it turns out, throwing the superstar goaltender who only just signed an eight-year contract extension under the bus isn’t exactly the best way to improve your job security. Now-former Dallas Stars head coach Peter DeBoer learned that the hard way on Friday when the team announced it was parting ways DeBoer on Friday.
Stars goalie Jake Oettinger, who is widely considered one of the best in the NHL at his position, struggled in the team’s 4-1 Western Conference Finals loss to the Edmonton Oilers. He tallied a 3.20 goals-against-average and just a .853 save percentage in five games against Edmonton. But Dallas also scored just 11 goals in the series, six of which came in a Game 1 victory.
DeBoer pulled Oettinger for backup Casey DeSmith in the series-ending fifth game. Afterward, the coach placed blame for the series loss squarely at his goalie’s feet.
“I didn’t blame it all on Jake. But the reality is if you go back to last year’s playoffs, he’s lost six of seven games to Edmonton. And we give up two goals on two shots in an elimination game,” he said. “It was partly to spark our team and wake them up. It was partly knowing the status quo had not been working. That’s a pretty big sample size.”
Talk about “I’m not saying … I’m just saying.”
At that point, most fans believed it was the end of any working relationship between DeBoer and Oettinger. One of them was going to have to go. And when faced with the decision between a longtime head coach who has never one a Stanley Cup and a star goaltender with a fresh eight-year, $66 million contract, the choice was easy.
“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,” Stars General Manager Jim Nill said in a statement. “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.”
DeBoer will rebound, and probably pretty quickly. The 58-year-old has made eight conference finals and two Stanley Cup Finals appearances in his career. So he’s clearly a good coach. But he also badly misplayed his hand this time, and it cost him one of the league’s best jobs.