FanHouse Joe Nieuwendyk

It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We continue our division-by-division preview of the potential wheeling and dealing with the Pacific Division.

San Jose saw its Presidents' Trophy campaign come to a surprising end in the first round of the NHL playoffs, Los Angeles is still the perfect spot for Dany Heatley, and is there any hope for success on the ice in Phoenix?

The success of coaches in professional sports is difficult to predict. Bill Belichick was an abject failure in Cleveland, but is now considered one of the top coaches in all of sports. Flip Saunders did pretty well for himself in Minnesota, but could not bring a championship to Detroit. In the NHL, Claude Julien and Paul Maurice are two examples of coaches who got the proverbial walking papers and found great success at later jobs.

Since coaches are essentially hired to be fired, veteran NHL coach Marc Crawford has been fired. He's actually about to begin his fourth stop in the league, as the Dallas Stars hired him Thursday to replace the fired Dave Tippett.

When Joe Nieuwendyk was named the new Dallas Stars general manager nearly two weeks ago, speculation was he would probably retain coach Dave Tippett. After all, he knew Tippett and had worked with him in the past. In terms of performance, the Stars' injury-riddled season -- one year after a run to the Western Conference finals -- seemed to be a good reason to keep the coach around.

Instead, it appears Nieuwendyk wants his own guy. TSN is reporting that the Stars have fired Tippett after six years on the job.

The idea of co-general managers is not one we're likely to see often in pro sports. These days, even major league sports executives can be so ego-driven that it's impossible to share any kind of credit or properly delegate authority between two people.

The Dallas Stars tried co-general managers for close to two seasons, but have decided to make a change. The team named former player Joe Nieuwendyk (pictured left of Mike Modano at a Stars reunion in 2007) its new general manager at a news conference Monday.

Former player Joe Nieuwendyk, now the special assistant to Toronto GM Brian Burke, was given a bulk of the credit for the Leafs landing the highly-coveted Tyler Bozak. All signs point to Nieuwendyk having a bright future as a GM after his training stint in Toronto is over. "(Nieuwendyk) came to watch me in Denver," Bozak said. "He was a huge influence, he was great to talk to and he helped me a lot with (the decision to join the Leafs)." Still, Burke wants to improve his NHL roster so college players like Bozak don't see job opportunities with the big club. "I hope this is the last year we're a destination for the college player," Burke said. [The Star]