Every year, each NHL team’s general manager along with select broadcast and media members combine to select the three finalists for the Jim Gregory GM of the Year award. In theory, the voting is supposed to reflect the moves made by a particular GM that season that had done the most to improve their team. This season, Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill was named as a finalist, joining Don Sweeney (Boston Bruins) and Bill Zito (Florida Panthers) as the three top general managers in the league as voted by their peers.
At the NHL Draft on Wednesday, he was named the winner.
The win feels more of a recognition of Nill’s work over the past decade than a particular move he made this season. While he traded for Nils Lundkvist and signed Mason Marchment last offseason before adding Max Domi and Evgenii Dadonov at the trade deadline, the biggest impact Nill had on the roster this season was actually the draft he executed in 2017.
That was the year that the team drafted Miro Heiskanen, their stud defenseman. That was also the year of moving up to take Jake Oettinger, their franchise goaltender, late in the first round. And it was the year that they drafted Jason Robertson, a budding superstar forward and one of the most dynamic scorers in the league, in the second round.
That draft re-made the franchise. Then Nill pulled off probably the most elusive move a general manager can – an on-the-fly re-tool. So many teams talk about doing that, desiring to re-make their rosters without having to tear the whole thing down and going into a rebuild. But very few actually successfully do it, and Dallas did – transitioning the core of the team from the Jamie Benn – Tyler Seguin – John Klingberg era to one now headed up by the likes of Heiskanen, Oettinger, Robertson, and Roope Hintz.
This season, he also made a pivotal hiring in head coach Peter DeBoer. With the window of Stanley Cup contention seemingly wide open after a magical run in the bubble to the Final in 2020, and with key pieces like Benn, Seguin, and Joe Pavelski getting older, that window could have been completely thrown out of alignment with the wrong hire. With a proven track record of taking teams deep into the playoffs in his first season in a city, DeBoer came in and did just that, taking the Stars to the Western Conference Final.
Nill’s win as GM of the year this year seemed to reflect the body of his work over the last decade, likely putting him over the edge of two very deserving fellow finalists that made some bold moves of their own last summer.
Sweeney put together a team that ran away with historical-bests this year, even after most figured the Bruins would take a step back with Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci aging another year and under a new head coach in Jim Montgomery (you remember him, he got his first shot at NHL head coaching in Dallas). Zito completely changed the complexion of the team with his trade for Matthew Tkachuk, a move that was widely criticized last summer and led many to believe they’d take a step back. We all know what happened then – a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final as the last Wild Card to get in.
Nill has made good work over his decade in Dallas to develop the Stars into a consistent playoff team and add pieces internally through good drafting and, with a manageable salary cap position in the long-term outlook, it seems like there’s only one more logical trophy to add to the collection now. The one he probably wants to add to his case more than any other: the Stanley Cup.
Maybe he’ll take that shiny new GM of the Year title and make moves this season to put the team over the edge to do just that.