KAMLOOPS — It will be the Dallas Stars versus the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup final beginning tomorrow in Edmonton.
Tampa Bay’s last time in the final was in 2015 in a six game loss to Chicago.
Dallas last went to the big dance 20 years ago in 2000 — losing to the New Jersey Devils.
The year before the Stars won the Stanley Cup.
For the current owner of the Stars, who has a close connection to Kamloops, it’s like a dream come true — and will only get better if the Stars can hoist the Stanley Cup sometime in the next two weeks.
Tom Gaglardi has owned the Dallas Stars since 2011.
It’s taken nine years of some peaks, some valleys, to be this close to reaching the peak of the Mt. Everest of hockey.
To get this close, this time, says Gaglardi, meant sneaking in under the radar.
“Oh no question. Everything I’ve ever seen, you know, we weren’t supposed to beat Calgary.” say Gaglardi. “I just laughed it off. It’s fine. We’ll wear the underdog hat and I think it looks good on us.”
Dallas took out Calgary in six, Colorado in seven, and then dispatched Western Conference top seed Vegas in five.
“We’re a deep team, we play four lines that can play, and then we’ve got a really good mix of skill and brawn.” says Gaglardi. “We’re a big, heavy team. Our identity is defence first —- we know who we are. We lead the playoffs in points from the back end. It’s been a huge part of our offence. We’re built for this, we’re built for the playoffs. It’s exactly what our strategy is.”
Dallas has one Stanley Cup to its credit —- in 1999, a six game series win over Buffalo, with Ken Hitchcock as the coach of the Stars and Bob Gainey the general manager.
Gaglardi sees a lot of comparisons between the ’99 team and the team of 2020 —– he says this team is very much a Bob Gainey type of club.
Ken Hitchcock was also brought back for one season behind the bench in 2017-18.
” Our identity is really consistant to what Ken Hitchcock preaches. I have to give Ken a lot of credit. We brought Ken in to really change the identity of the Stars. We were not a great defensive team with tremendous structure. It was really a step we knew we needed to take, if we wanted to be a playoff success. The identity that we now employ really has the roots in that year Ken Hitchcock coached our team.”
On the matchup against Tampa Bay in the Stanley Cup final, which gets underway Saturday, Gaglardi is close to the vest cautious —- noting Dallas in the Western Conference, doesn’t see much of Tampa Bay in the East.
“The owners I converse with in the East say they’re the best team in the East.” says Gaglardi. Having said that Colorado and Vegas were pretty big challenges too.”
This may be the one chance for this group of Dallas players to reach that elusive peak —- with nine players on the roster 33 or older.
