Archive: How Stars' Jake Oettinger Rose Onto The Scene As A Workhorse NHL Goalie

Dallas Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger is regarded as one of the top netminders on the planet. And in this cover story from The Hockey News’ Oct. 14, 2022, edition (Volume 76, Issue 5), writer Carol Schram profiled Oettinger as he rose the ranks.

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Oettinger burst on the NHL scene in 2020, posting an 11-8-7 record, a 2.36 goals-against average and a .911 save percentage in 29 appearances. The Stars knew they had someone special on their hands, and that was why Oettinger played 48 games in his sophomore season. He also had fellow Stars goalie Ben Bishop as a guide to playing in hockey’s best league.

“I think he sees a lot of himself in me and wants to help me in any way he can,” Oettinger told Schram. “He’s a guy I look up to a lot. I want to have a career like he had. A huge mentor for me, and I’m sure I’ll be chatting him up and asking him questions for my entire career. I couldn’t be luckier than to have a guy like Ben Bishop to call my friend.”

Now 25 years old, Oettinger’s durability makes him stand out from his colleagues – and what makes him so important to Dallas’ Stanley Cup playoff hopes.

“That’s all part of being a No. 1 guy,” Stars goalie coach Jeff Reese said. “You might be good enough, but are you durable enough? Are you in the net? Are you available whenever we need you?

Here's the full story:

NOT SO LONE STAR

Vol. 76, No. 5, Oct. 14, 2022

By Carol Schram

When a young professional athlete earns his first big payday, it’s understandable if he splurges on a flashy new ride, a gleaming high-end watch or some designer threads.

Jake Oettinger is not that guy.

Coming out of his entry-level contract and fresh off a star turn that got his Dallas Stars within one goal of a first-round playoff upset of the Calgary Flames, Oettinger signed a three-year, $12-million agreement with the Stars on Sept. 1.

The deal included an immediate $1-million signing bonus, but the 23-year-old didn’t rush out to celebrate his windfall. “We’ll see what I end up doing,” he said. “It’ll probably be something, like, golf-related.”

That would fit. When Oettinger is home in Minnesota during the off-season, he and his father, Chris, hit the links two or three times a week. This past summer, the pair joined up with Oettinger’s childhood friend and Pittsburgh Penguins center Ryan Poehling and Poehling’s dad for the opportunity to test themselves at California’s legendary Pebble Beach.

The downtime was well-earned following Oettinger’s playoff tour de force. He was the talk of the hockey world during the first round, posting a .954 save percentage and 1.81 goals-against average and logging 10.1 goals saved above expected, third among netminders over the entire post-season. Seeded seventh in the Western Conference, Dallas got to 15:09 of overtime in Game 7 against the second-seeded Flames before Johnny Gaudreau corralled a rebound near the goal line and fired a bad-angle shot past Oettinger, advancing Calgary to the second round and ending the Stars’ season.

Without Oettinger, it wouldn’t have been a series. Dallas was outshot 287-195, and the deciding matchup at the Scotiabank Saddledome was the most lopsided game of the bunch. With the score tied 2-2 after 60 minutes, the Flames held a 52-23 edge on the shot clock. Gaudreau’s game-winner was Oettinger’s 67th test of the night, while Dallas sent just 28 pucks at Flames goalie Jacob Markstrom.

Rather than let himself feel intimidated by NHL playoff hockey, Oettinger embraced it. “I was just trying to enjoy the moment and have fun and not put too much pressure on myself,” he said. “Just soak it in. ‘You’re a No. 1 goalie in the NHL right now, in the playoffs. It doesn’t get much better than this.’ I wanted to put my best foot forward and show my teammates and the world what I have in the tank. Try to leave it all out there and let the chips fall where they may.”

Jeff Reese played 174 NHL games for five teams between 1988 and 1999. Now, he’s in his eighth season as the Stars’ goaltending coach. For him, Oettinger’s playoff performance was something special to watch. “A lot of guys would be overwhelmed in that situation,” Reese said. “He just truly enjoyed it. That’s a hard quality to teach.”

The sold-out arenas in Dallas and Calgary crackled with an energy that had been glaringly absent when Oettinger logged his first two career NHL games two years earlier – a pair of relief appearances in the Edmonton bubble during the Stars’ run to the 2020 Stanley Cup final. In 36:40 of action across Game 2 of the 2020 Western Conference final against the Vegas Golden Knights and Game 3 of the final against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Oettinger stopped all eight shots he faced. “I feel like we kind of got screwed over a little, not being able to play the Stanley Cup final in front of our home fans,” Oettinger said. “That’s what makes it fun, either being loved by your home crowd or being the villain against the away crowd. That’s the best part of hockey.”

Bubble life was a challenge on many levels. But Oettinger was in his first full pro campaign and had played 38 games with the AHL’s Texas Stars that season. When the COVID pause shut down his rookie season in March 2020, he had a 15-16-4 record with a .917 SP and 2.57 GAA.

The two months in Edmonton weren’t easy for him. But his first taste of NHL life was an immersive 24/7 crash course, which offered up the chance to soak in everything he could from the veteran teammates he spent all his time with day after day.

With the benefit of hindsight, Oettinger now looks back on bubble life as a positive experience. “When I was in there, I was counting down the days and thinking about home a lot,” he said. “But looking back on it now, I’m like, ‘Dang, I would kill to go back for one more day. We definitely made the most of it and had a lot of fun, and I got really close with a lot of guys in there.”

He may not have realized it at the time, but at 21, he was at the perfect point in his development curve where the Stars’ veteran incumbents, Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin, were open to offering him tips and advice. That dynamic is not necessarily in play in all goalie platoons, especially when there’s a competition for minutes. “They were at the stage of their careers that they were willing to pass information on to help him,” Reese said. “And they really like him, too. You can’t put a price on that, when guys start trying to help you.”

Oettinger formed an especially tight bond with Bishop, the three-time Vezina Trophy finalist who played what turned out to be the final three games of his NHL career in Edmonton. Last December, Bishop announced his playing days were over due to a debilitating knee injury.

At 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds, Oettinger doesn’t give up much, size-wise, to the 6-foot-7, 210-pound ‘Big Ben.’ Both are Midwesterners: while Bishop was born in Denver, he grew up in the St. Louis area. And though they’re 12 years apart, both came up through Hockey East in the NCAA. Bishop played for three years at Maine, while Oettinger tended the twine for three seasons at Boston University.

“I think he sees a lot of himself in me and wants to help me in any way he can,” Oettinger said. “He’s a guy I look up to a lot. I want to have a career like he had. A huge mentor for me, and I’m sure I’ll be chatting him up and asking him questions for my entire career. I couldn’t be luckier than to have a guy like Ben Bishop to call my friend.”

Born in Lakeview, Minn., Oettinger played high-school hockey before making the tough decision to leave home at 15 to join USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program. Oettinger says talks with his father were instrumental in him deciding to go the way of the NTDP. “He said, ‘Do you want to play in the NHL, or what do you want to do with your hockey career?’” Oettinger said. “I wanted to play in the NHL, and he said ‘Well, this is the best chance to help you get there.’ Pretty easy decision.”

In 2014, when Oettinger moved east to Ann Arbor, Mich., he expected he’d soon be back in the State of Hockey for college. Oettinger grew up envisioning himself wearing the maroon and gold of his beloved Minnesota Golden Gophers. He came by that fandom honestly – via his mother, a University of Minnesota alum and Gophers season-ticket holder. “I went to, like, 100 games growing up,” Oettinger said. “I was there pretty much every weekend, so that was kind of where I wanted to go.”

To Oettinger’s disappointment, the Gophers didn’t come calling. So, with a little prodding from close friend and NTDP defenseman Chad Krys – who was already committed to BU – Oettinger decided to follow suit and commit to the Terriers after his first season with the NTDP. “He definitely did a good job of recruiting me,” Oettinger laughed. “I love BU so much. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.”

Initially, Hockey East was foreign territory. Oettinger said he didn’t know anything about BU (or the city itself), nor had he ever paid much attention to its hockey program growing up. But a campus visit gave him the chance to meet the Terriers’’ coaching staff, headed at the time by now-San Jose Sharks coach David Quinn. That visit – and the BU brass – impressed upon Oettinger everything Boston had to offer. The teenage stopper was so pleased with his visit that committing to BU was a “no-brainer.”

At that time, the NTDP was also sending a steady stream of future NHL talent to Quinn’s program. Jack Eichel made the jump in the fall of 2014. Charlie McAvoy and Jordan Greenway followed one year later. Clayton Keller and Kieffer Bellows joined Oettinger and Krys as freshmen in 2016, and Brady Tkachuk came on board for a year in 2017. “It’s pretty funny that we all were just broke college kids trying to get by at one point,” Oettinger chuckled.

College life agreed with him immediately, and Oettinger moved into the starter’s role at BU as a draft-eligible freshman. He posted a 21-11-3 record in 35 appearances in his first year in Beantown, with a .927 SP and a 2.11 GAA.

NHL scouts took notice, and the Stars used the 26th overall pick to make Oettinger the first goalie selected in the 2017 draft.

Six months later, Oettinger suited up for his second world juniors. In 2017, he won a gold medal but didn’t see any game action, behind Tyler Parsons and Joseph Woll on the U.S. depth chart. In the 2018 tournament, Oettinger saw ice in three games. He backstopped the Americans to a 9-3 win over the Czechs in the bronze-medal game, but a matchup with the rival Canadians may have been even more special. He was between the pipes for Team USA’s 4-3 shootout win over Canada – played in front of a record-setting 44,592 fans on Dec. 29, 2017, as a thick snowfall covered the temporary outdoor rink at New Era Field in Buffalo.

“Canada-USA, it doesn’t get much bigger than that at the world juniors,” he said. “To get to say I got to play in the first outdoor game at the world juniors, and I came out with the ‘W’ is pretty cool. The pictures and stuff like that, sometimes I forget I played in that game. When I look back and see, I think, ‘Wow, that was unbelievable.’ ”

In March 2018, BU triumphed in the Hockey East tournament, and Oettinger was named MVP. He finished his college career with a record of 58-40-11 in 109 games, with a 2.34 GAA and .923 SP.

He also skated away with a degree in communications. “Coach Quinn always preached for the guys that were maybe thinking about pro early, ‘Stay in the summer and hang out as much as you can. You’ll be thanking yourself later,’ ” Oettinger said. “I definitely took his advice. I can’t be more thankful for the opportunity that BU gives all its players to take classes over the summer for free and to honor your scholarship when you leave.

“Pretty much every summer, I would stay out there and take summer classes and work out and stuff, so I was lucky to get ahead. It’s pretty cool to say I’ve got a Plan B, and also that I’m a graduate.”

But now that he’s an undisputed NHL No. 1, Oettinger shouldn’t need to rely on that fallback plan anytime soon. But as recently as a year ago, there were obstacles in the way of that objective.

Four months after the Stars fell to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2020 Stanley Cup final in Edmonton, and with Bishop still injured, Oettinger shared the net with Khudobin in 2020-21, his official rookie season. In his first 29 regular-season NHL games, Oettinger went 11-8-7 with a .911 SP and 2.36 GAA. But the Stars lost 14 of their 20 overtime and shootout games in the abbreviated 56-game schedule. They finished the season in fifth place in the one-off DiscoverCentral Division, four points behind the Nashville Predators and out of the playoffs.

When he returned to Dallas in the fall of 2021, Oettinger found himself fourth on the club’s goaltending depth chart – still waiver-exempt and now behind Khudobin, a rehabilitating Bishop and the newly arrived Braden Holtby, brought in on a one-year contract as an unrestricted free agent.

Oettinger began the season back in the AHL and put up a 4-5-1 record with Texas. In mid-November, he was recalled to Dallas on an emergency basis after Holtby sustained a lower-body injury. And after winning five of his first six starts, there was no looking back.

Oettinger finished the regular season with an NHL record of 30-15-1, a .914 SP and 2.53 GAA in 48 appearances. He also gained another valuable professional mentor in Holtby.

“ ‘Holts’ wasn’t healthy all year, but he did so much for ‘Oett,’ ” Reese said. “He’s played over 500 games. He’s won a Stanley Cup. He’s won a Vezina. He’s done it all. And he’s the first one on the ice, it’s incredible. Although Jake worked hard, he saw how hard (Holtby) worked, and still worked. That was invaluable.”

Dallas was the last team to qualify for the 2022 playoffs, just days before the end of the regular season. Oettinger had been playing high-pressure games for months before facing the Flames. He was already battle-tested.

“All the things that he worked on, it really came together,” Reese said. “Now, it’s just a matter of continuing to get better and not being satisfied where he’s at, and not being satisfied he’s got a contract. But he’s not like that. He understands that he’s not done. He wants to get better.

“He looks at a guy like Andrei Vasilevskiy, that’s the mountaintop right there. That’s where he wants to get. He understands there’s a lot more work to do, a lot more hockey to play. And he was disappointed we didn’t win the series. He wanted to keep going.”

Like Tampa Bay’s two-time Stanley Cup winner, Oettinger is a workhorse. He likes to play big minutes and rarely misses time due to injury.

“My goalie coach in college told me that one of the best abilities you can have as a goalie is availability,” he said. “Obviously, you can’t prevent every single injury, and it’s definitely part of the sport, unfortunately. Luckily, I’ve been pretty good so far, and, knock on wood, I can keep that going.”

Added Reese: “That’s all part of being a No. 1 guy. You might be good enough, but are you durable enough? Are you in the net? Are you available whenever we need you?

“I’ve seen him take some pretty good shots and just push through it. That’s something else you can’t teach, right? He just wants to compete and play so badly. He’ll hang in there. He’ll play through some pain as well. He’s a coach’s dream, he really is. He’s very confident, very motivated, works hard and he’s not afraid of the moment.”

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