PEBBLE BEACH, Calif—Tom Gaglardi was in a lather. And distressed.
A round at the famed Pebble Beach golf course on his 48th birthday had been a struggle, and Gaglardi just couldn’t quite figure out what had happened to his length off the tee. As he settled into his seat in a restaurant at the opulent Inn at Spanish Bay, the combination of sun and surf creating a stunning vista behind him, he reached a conclusion.
“I’ve just gotta play more, I guess,” he shrugged as he tucked aggressively into a plate of sushi and butter fish, racing to get it down before an NHL board of governors meeting.
His golf game may not be working for him these days, but his hockey team sure is. Four years after assuming ownership of the bankrupt Dallas Stars, the Stars are the best team in the NHL this season with 21 wins in their first 28 games, not to mention the most entertaining. The club is run and coached by people he hired, and powered mostly by players acquired since he purchased the franchise for a very reasonable $240 million US.
“Now, I kind of feel like it’s mine,” he said. “I feel I’ve had a hand in sculpting this.”
He has found success in a town populated by flamboyant, outrageous sports owners like Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban not just by icing a hockey team that scores oodles of goals in an era in which scoring is being suffocated, but also by being the guy who would probably be playing hockey and definitely watching it even if he didn’t own an NHL franchise.
“I’m not a suit,” he said. “For me, the best way to watch a hockey game is in blue jeans with a suit. I don’t want to be any different than that.”
His ability to breathe new life in this organization has been a godsend to the NHL after it was left as the caretaker of the Stars following the spectacular crash of former owner Tom Hicks. Commissioner Gary Bettman had been able to find a quality businessman like Jeff Vinik to buy the Tampa Bay Lightning, but Dallas — a competitive market with lots of history in the sport — needed something a little different.
Back in 2003, the Stars had the highest ticket revenue in the NHL. But Hicks ran into a variety of financial problems, the Stars went downhill as a team and as an appealing entertainment package in Dallas, and by 2011 the club had the 28th highest attendance in the game and were losing upwards of $35 million per season.
“But it was easy to see it could be fixed,” said Gaglardi in an interview this week with Sportsnet.ca. “It’s not like I was buying a team that have never worked. They had lost their way.
“Look, if the team wasn’t where it was, I wouldn’t have been able to buy it. Tom Hicks wouldn’t have sold it. Who would sell the Dallas Stars? Look around the league. The best teams don’t come up for sale… unless something weird happens.”
Gaglardi has produced this very good hockey story — the Stars were back up to 15th in NHL attendance last year — after failing to fulfill his dream. He grew up a Markus Naslund fan and a fan of his hometown Vancouver Canucks. A 2003 attempt to purchase that team ended bitterly, and to this day he and Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini are not on speaking terms — even though they sometimes occupy the same boardroom.
“Vancouver was painful. That was tough. The way it happened,” he said, his eyes drifting away as he encountered the memory. “But you move on. I kept my eye on teams. I kept in touch with Gary.”
He then tried to buy the Atlanta Thrashers and actually reached a purchase agreement, with the plan being to shift the team to Hamilton.
“That was a deal that was done. We signed a deal,” he said. “Then the Atlanta owners went to Gary and asked for the right to move, and Gary said no. For a bunch of reasons. Valid reasons. And that was that.
“But I’m not very good at giving up.”
In 2007, he bought the major junior Kamloops Blazers of the Western Hockey League along with NHL players Shane Doan, Darryl Sydor, Jarome Iginla and Mark Recchi. That meant when Dallas went up for sale, he saw an asset that others may not have.
“I knew we had Jamie Benn,” he said. “He beat my junior team all the time. Did I know he might possibly end up being the best player in the world? I wouldn’t say that. But I knew we had something. He was a pro then. He wasn’t a mystery. He wasn’t a guy hiding in junior.
“I knew we had something to build on. If a team had Benn, things couldn’t be that bad.”
The deal to buy the Stars out of bankruptcy left more than a few creditors unhappy, but it put the club back on the road to success and brought Gaglardi into the NHL lodge on his third try.
“To get a big, vibrant market like Dallas… It was the break I was looking for,” he said. “My mother’s a Texan. She met my dad at college in Longview, Texas. He went to engineering school there. So half my family is in Texas. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. I’d go visit my grandparents every summer, every Christmas.
“When you buy a sports team, you buy the market, and I just love the market in Dallas. I got to go to a market that’s bigger than any market in Canada. I mean, the state of Texas economy is almost as big as Canada. That gives us a new base to grow our family business there,” he said.
“I wouldn’t trade it. I think it worked out for the best. Would I like to have owned the hometown team that I grew up cheering for? Yes. I would have liked to.”
Gaglardi’s family controls Northland Properties Corp, and he also runs the Sandman Hotel chain and Moxie’s restaurants. He now owns three hockey clubs — the Stars, the Blazers and the AHL Texas Stars — and flits between watching those clubs and keeping an eye on hotel projects in England, Scotland, Canada and Texas.
The Stars have soared because of a series of moves, some of which can be traced directly to Gaglardi. His first move was to bring back Jim Lites as president of the team.
“We had to get out selling again, one season ticket at a time,” said Gaglardi, a father of three hockey-playing sons. “It gets easier when the team starts winning. It’s like sailing with or without wind.”
Eighteen months after Lites was brought in, Jim Nill was wooed away from Detroit to become general manager. In turn, Nill hired head coach Lindy Ruff and stole chief amateur scout Joe McDonnell away from the Red Wings, and over the past two years the club has acquired high-profile centres Tyler Seguin and Jason Spezza, and drafted defenceman John Klingberg in the fifth round with a wonderful stroke of good scouting/good fortune.
“I’ve been fortunate to be able to attract good people, and keep them. Great people, actually. It’s culture, it’s leadership. I got it from my dad. So that’s one thing I think I’ve done well. I’ve hired well,” said Gaglardi.
He commutes between his Vancouver-area home and his Dallas house (he also owns homes in Whistler, Calgary and Kamloops) by commercial airline, eschewing the privacy of his own jet.
He lives between the two worlds, that of rich tycoon — he owns sports teams, multiple homes and drives a Bentley — and regular hockey-loving, hardcore fan, apparently the ideal mix to be the person who rescued NHL hockey in Big D.
Gaglardi is a rarity among NHL owners in that he’ll actually attend pro scouting meetings, not to interject his opinions but because he loves to hear chatter over the quality of players on the Lake Erie Monsters or the Bakersfield Condors.
“I enjoy that part of the game,” he said. “Hobby wouldn’t be an inaccurate word for this. Everybody has to have something. Can’t just be work and family. I was fortunate enough to build up my hockey teams. I love being involved. I have great people running these teams and I like working with them. It’s really fun.
“But, it’s like, you go to work, and then you’ve got a game that night. It’s a release. it’s fun to win and lose. It gives you a reason to live, I guess.”
