Glen Gulutzan And The Darkness - PART 1. Army Out, Hullie In, Avery, And The Collapse.

Gully's first chance behind the Dallas bench came during the franchises darkest days. I was there for every day of it. You haven't heard the whole story.

Glen Gulutzan, and his band of merry men..

To understand what was happening around Glen Gulutzan that first time around, you need to know how it was that he became the Stars head coach in the first place. And to understand that, you have to go back to how it was that Joe Nieuwendyk became the Dallas GM.

And I’m your man. After three years in the booth with the Minnesota North Stars, I hopped on the moving van in 1993 and caught a ride to Texas. I stayed in the booth with the team until 2015.

In short - I saw it and lived it all back then.

To tell the story properly, let’s go back to my first year with the team, the 1990-91 season in Minnesota. Within about a 60-day span, North Stars owner Norm Green, who had just purchased the distressed franchise, hired lots of new people, including Bob Clarke as his GM. Clarke hired Bob Gainey and, brought in a young buck named Doug Armstrong to handle team travel. I was hired with that group, along with a young PR intern named Dan Stuchal. Stukes still works for the team and is the Stars COO.

Those early days were quite challenging too, as Norm and the new staff tried to resuscitate a dead franchise. Opening night, 1990, we had about 4,000 people in the house. The previous ownership group, and hockey management, and business side ran it into the ground.

But Bob Gainey being Bob Gainey, this thing started to turn almost immediately. Not so much the product on the ice - not yet. But you knew this was a man of clear intent. An honest man, a real leader, a man of conviction and respect. With Bob Gainey, everyone felt a part of it. Doug Armstrong, a bright young executive, stayed on Gainey’s hip, and worked tirelessly to learn the craft. We didn’t know it then, but Army would be Bob’s heir apparent.

It would be Bob, and then Doug. Gainey officially got the GM title along with his head coaching position in 1992. That means, that we had real organization continuity for 16 years. Bob left in the 2001-02 season, and Army took over.

For the Gainey/Armstrong years in Dallas, and once Tom Hicks got in - we were always chasing it, always around it. We put up 45 and 50 win seasons for fun. We won the Cup in 1999. We went back to the final the next year. We spent to the cap. Army’s teams were loaded, but we had spotty playoff success. It’s not all on the goalie, but Marty Turco’s tenure in net yielded only three playoff series wins.

Everything was good. Business was good, even if we were not quite getting it done.

And then - and then the real story begins. It starts with Doug Armstrong getting pushed out, at least in part by the players, who didn’t like some of his gruff and abrasive tactics. The players forced the action.

Tom Hicks went along, and in an instant, we had, what every great and successful sports franchise has modeled for championship chases (tongue firmly in cheek here…) - CO-GMS. It was like, and not so humorously, when Michael and Jim were CO-Managers at Dunder Miflin. Except it sort of looked liked one guy was doing both “big picture” and “day-to-day”. You can guess which one jumped in to do the heavy lifting.

Brett Hull and Les Jackson replaced Doug Armstrong. The players got what they wanted, and road trips got way more looser, and the whole tone and tenor changed. Hullie got the beer and wine back on the charters.

It was the beginning of the end of what Bob, and then Doug had built. And it set the table for a franchise reset that put Joe Nieuwendyk in the GM chair, and Glen Gulutzan behind the Stars bench.

Only one problem. The owner was out of money, and things were about to get exponentially worse.