Gulutzan ready to jump from Oilers PP magician to head coach of Dallas Stars

National Post

11-07-2025

The best power-play coach in hockey is now running the bench of the playoff rival Dallas Stars, but Glen Gulutzan won't soon forget his glorious time with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Co. after his seven years as an Edmonton Oilers ' assistant working with five different head coaches.
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'No thank-you,' laughed Gulutzan, whose lethal power play in Edmonton crested at 32.4 per cent one season, an NHL modern-day record, but will let Neil Graham, Stars' AHL affiliate head coach, run it for Gulutzan, who has enough on his plate in his third stab at being an NHL head man after earlier times with Dallas and Calgary.
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'Never even crossed my mind. I've known Neil going back to when he was starting out in Idaho in the ECHL and I was in Calgary. We first met for an hour or so over a coffee one day there,' he said.
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Gulutzan will have Graham, who interviewed for the Dallas head job as well, work with Miro Heiskanen, Roope Hintz, Jason Robertson and others in Dallas while Gully now watches 97, 29, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Zach Hyman and Evan Bouchard work with whomever Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch brings in to replace him.
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Gulutzan, who also looked after the Oilers forwards as assistant coach, had the time of his life coaching the Oilers oiwer play, though.
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Some critics would say, that McDavid and Draisaitl really ran things, of course. Gulutzan doesn't discount their input, for one second. But he would be the guy weaking things when teams figured out the PP, and 97 and 29 were all ears, and respected his smarts totally, because when Gulutzan came to the Oilers in 2018, they were last in the league on the PP.
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'I don't disagree. It's not totally wrong,' he said of the people who downplay his influence on the power play. 'We went through an evolution. We changed the structure and we kept working until it involved into a juggernaut and we had the best players in the world in the right spots. You let them play together for two to three years and bang, we set the league record.'
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When he first came to the Oilers, the power-play machination was different.
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'We wanted to make sure the D-man was the facilitator and his job was to get it into Connor, Leon and Nuge's hands, in the right spots,' said Gulutzan who first had Oscar Klefbom on the point with 29, 97 and Nugent-Hopkins and Alex Chiasson and James Neal switching off at net-front.
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Bouchard is the passer for sure today, but he's also got the Bouch Bomb.
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'He's a great facilitator but you've also seen his shot. That was another great weapon to Edmonton's arsenal,' said Gulutzan.
'The greatest source of pride for me was working with those athletes for that amount of time. There's some ideas that all of us brought. That's a treasure for me,' said Gulutzan, who always listened to what 97 and 29 and Nugent-Hopkins had to say, but in the playoffs it became a chess match and Gulutzan was up for the challenge.