BAYFIELD, Ontario — Three months after the fact, Pete DeBoer still has no reservations about pulling Jake Oettinger early in Game 5 of the Western Conference Final between their Dallas Stars and the Edmonton Oilers.
His one regret, however, is how he handled the postgame narrative on that fateful night of May 29, one that put the dour spotlight on the Stars goalie after the 6-3 loss that eliminated Dallas in the third round for a third consecutive season.
“Listen, we were all to blame for coming up short again, and it starts with me,” DeBoer candidly said in an exclusive sitdown with NHL.com, his first public comments since being fired by the Stars on June 6. “It was on me, it was on all the coaches, it was on all the players, it was on the organization as a whole. We all created the disappointment. We were all to blame, not just one guy.
“When all the questions at the postgame press conference were about Jake, I should have redirected the topic to reflect that this wasn’t just about him, this was about all of us. We — and I stress the word ‘we’ — did not get the job done. We were on a run in which we’d lost six of our past seven games against Edmonton in the third round dating back to 2024. In one of my answers, I said he’d lost six of seven to them. But it wasn’t just him. It was all of us. That’s not on just one guy. I should have made that clearer.”
Oettinger agrees, and said as much when informed of DeBoer’s comments while meeting with NHL.com at the NHL/NHLPA North American Players’ Media Tour in Henderson, Nevada on Tuesday.
“I mean, I think I feel like he hit the nail on the head,” Oettinger said. “I agree with what his reflection was.
“I’m glad he said what he said.”
And with that, Oettinger politely walked away, down the hallway at America First Center, another in a series of interviews in the books, off to prepare for a new season, a new chapter in his career.
Just like DeBoer is.
* * * *
It is a windy September afternoon in this picturesque town bordering Lake Huron, and Mother Nature is flashing her teeth. From DeBoer’s back deck you can see and hear the angry waves crashing into the normally pristine shoreline.
Indeed, on this day, the deep blue waters are turbulent.
In the same way DeBoer’s past seven months have been.
“You certainly could call it that,” the 58-year-old says. “It’s been some kind of roller coaster ride.”
Normally this time of year he’d be preparing to attend training camp. For much of his adult life that’s what he’s done. As such, he calls not doing it this time around “weird.”
Given his impressive track record, it’s understandable why he feels that way.
In three seasons with Dallas, DeBoer was 149-68-29 and had the best points percentage in the NHL (.665). The Stars were 29-27 in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, trailing only the Oilers (34) and Florida Panthers (41) in wins during that time. He is 662-447-152 in 1,261 regular-season games with the Panthers, New Jersey Devils, San Jose Sharks, Vegas Golden Knights and Stars, and 97-82 in the playoffs.
Moreover, DeBoer’s teams made the third round of the playoffs six of the past seven seasons. He’s guided two teams (Devils, 2012; Sharks, 2016) to the Stanley Cup Final. He ranks fourth among active coaches and 17th all-time in regular-season coaching wins; and fifth in all-time postseason wins.
The one blemish on his resume: No Stanley Cup. To that end, no coach has more playoff victories without winning the title.
That’s not to say he’s not highly decorated. Anything but.
He’s a two-time coach of the year recipient in the Ontario Hockey League and led Kitchener to the Memorial Cup in 2003. And in February, he was an assistant on coach Jon Cooper’s staff with Canada for the 4 Nations Face-Off, a tournament they ended up winning.
“It was such a high, one of the great moments of my career,” DeBoer said. “And then we got Mikko Rantanen in a trade in Dallas shortly afterward. There was so much momentum. And then, we lost our final eight regular-season games and it was gone.
“Roller coaster,” he repeated.
The Western Conference First Round brought a meeting with the high-flying Colorado Avalanche, a daunting task considering the Stars were without star defenseman Miro Heiskanen and leading scorer Jason Robertson.
Heiskanen had knee surgery Feb. 4 and missed the final 32 games of the regular season and the first 10 games of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Robertson, a 35-goal scorer, suffered a lower-body injury in the final regular-season game and would miss the entire series.
No matter. The Stars eliminated the Avalanche with a 4-2 victory in the deciding game, upping DeBoer’s record in Game 7s to 9-0 and solidifying his nickname as the coaching fraternity’s Mr. Game 7.
Next up were the Winnipeg Jets, who’d won the Presidents Trophy for most points (116) in the regular season. Dallas eliminated the Jets in six games and advanced to meet the Oilers for a second consecutive time in the Western Conference Final, buoyed by the presence of Heiskanen and Robertson back in the lineup.
It didn’t go as planned.
After winning the opener 6-3, the Stars lost the next three games by a cumulative score of 13-2, setting up a must-win Game 5 at American Airlines Center. And after Oettinger was beaten twice in the first 7:09 of play — albeit on shots he had little chance to stop — DeBoer called a timeout and delivered a tongue-lashing to his team.
Then, with Oettinger starting to return to the net, the coach waved to the goalie to come back and replaced him with Casey DeSmith. Oettinger would later describe his pulling as “embarrassing.”
“I know the stories immediately came out that I’m hard on goalies,” DeBoer says now. “But the fact is, I only pulled Jake once in 57 games in the regular season. That’s a fact.
“The first 30 seconds of that timeout was me blasting our team and, if I could have, I would have blasted myself and our coaches too. I mean, you’re mad and disappointed in that moment, at everything, at the team, at the start, at the goalie, at yourself, at everybody. Why are we in this spot? You know, we have this opportunity and we’re in this spot. So, it’s a scattergun of anger, of bitterness.
“And it was made out to be about Jake Oettinger. But that wasn’t the case. I love Jake Oettinger, and Jake and I met after the season ended. He knows how much respect I have for him as a goalie and even more as a person and a family man. And you know, I’ve said repeatedly throughout our playoff run, we would have never even gotten that far without Jake.
“Still, I felt our group had got to the same spot three years in a row and we needed a shock to the system at that point. And there was nothing off limits at that point to try and shock us back.”
It didn’t work. The Oilers eliminated the Stars 6-3, leading to DeBoer’s emotional postgame comments. Upon further review, he wishes he could take them back. He can’t. It doesn’t work that way.
“I felt our group had been to this point for a third year in a row and you could tell that in the group, there was a defeatism to them. You could feel it. I could feel it on the bench. And so, at that point, you use every tool you have in your box in order to try and shock them out of that.
“When you’ve been a coach long enough in high-pressure situations, you know you’ll get scrutinized one way or the other. And in the moment, when you are doing something like pulling the goalie, you can’t worry about that. So when people might say, ‘Hey, Pete DeBoer, if you could do it over again, would you?’ Yeah, but when people ask you that, you don’t know what the outcome is. You just know there could be repercussions if it doesn’t work out.”
It didn’t. And there were. Indeed, a week later, he was fired by general manager Jim Nill, a possibility DeBoer knew might become reality.
“Look, if we’d made the first round my first year, the second round my second and then the third round in the third, you could say we were making progress,” he said. “But getting to the third round three straight years, we weren’t able to get over the hump. I get it.”
Nill decided the dressing room needed a different voice. At the same time, his respect for DeBoer’s abilities behind the bench hasn’t waned.
“Pete did a great job for us in three years.,” Nill told NHL.com. “The results speak for themselves.”
* * * *
So, what now for Pete DeBoer?
It didn’t take long for him to get the answer.
Less than an hour after his dismissal, he received a call from St. Louis Blues general manager Doug Armstrong, the man who oversees the Canadian Olympic team. He wanted to reassure DeBoer that his role as an assistant with Canada was safe and, for that matter, his responsibilities would increase in the months leading up to the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.
“Jon Cooper called me too,” DeBoer said. “It was really meaningful to me. Both told me: ‘You know what, this doesn’t affect anything that we’re doing. Regardless of what happens here, we’re going to make sure we keep you busy. And this actually might be a big benefit for Team Canada, and that you’re going to have the time to concentrate on Olympic things maybe we don’t have because we’re dealing with our NHL teams every day.”’
To that end, DeBoer is scheduled to take a trip to Italy in the coming weeks to check out the state of the Olympic hockey facilities. After that, he’ll be bouncing around various NHL cities scouting potential candidates leading to the final roster announcement in January.
“Pete is an outstanding coach and when one door closed in Dallas, the Olympic door opened wider,” Armstrong told NHL.com Friday. “With Pete’s resume he will be on everyone’s short list when an NHL job becomes available. Until then we will fully immerse him in our preparations for the 2026 Olympics.”
It’s an opportunity DeBoer is fully embracing, especially after going through the elation of the 4 Nations experience.
“I remember going into the dressing room when we first got together and, even after coaching in the NHL all these years, pinching myself looking around the room at all the collection of talent in there,” DeBoer said. “And during that Saturday game in Montreal against the U.S., the crowd, the atmosphere, the fights, it gave me chills. And the same thing happened when we won.
“And now, to represent my country at the Olympics, it’s such a thrill.”
Go into DeBoer’s recreation room above his garage and you’ll find a bubble hockey game and various memorable photos from his career. One of his favorites — the official championship photo from 4 Nations.
“It always brings a smile,” he said.