Jim Lites and I will forever be linked.
In December of 2018, Lites, then the Stars president, asked me to come into his office to talk about “general midseason things.” I didn’t think much about it. If anything I thought it might be about a tip I was currently sniffing around on: hosting the 2020 Winter Classic at the Cotton Bowl.
What happened next became the stuff of Stars media legend. Lites spent roughly 30 minutes launching a verbal scud missile at his hockey team’s two best players, Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin. He told me that they were “not good enough.” That “the fans deserve more and the owner deserves more.” That “we are a stars-driven league, and our stars aren’t getting it done.”
But one line, in particular, endures five and a half years later and maybe always will.
“They are fucking horseshit,” Lites told me. “I don’t know how else to put it.” Then he demanded I write it.
I’m often asked about the horseshit rant. My editor here at D Magazine, Mike Piellucci, gets asked about it, too, when people learn he and I work together. For a lot of Stars fans, it’s what Jim Lites’ name will always be associated with.
That tirade, delivered by Lites but effectively from Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, was naturally left out of team-issued press releases last week when it was announced Lites and Brendan Morrow would be the newest members of the Stars Hall of Fame.
That’s a shame, because the rawness of that moment embodies this franchise and what it has achieved, largely with Lites leading the way in his nearly two-decade career as a team executive.
At their core, the Stars are a market disruption and have been since they moved from Minnesota to Dallas in 1993. From the beginning, a major team ethos was “hockey tradition be damned, what do we have to do to make hockey cool in the South?” That was Lites’ mandate when he left the tradition-heavy Detroit Red Wings in the early 1990s for his first post with the Stars. And it was a tall hill to climb.
In my book, 100 Things Stars Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, Lites recalled how he arrived in Dallas and was told the Stars had a list of 15,000 potential season ticket holders. But no one had asked for a deposit. So when Lites and the team’s sales staff tried to close deals and informed those fans that the tickets would cost a bit more than the $3 range they were initially assuming—“They thought it would be like high school football prices”—more than half of those 15,000 people told the Stars to shove off.
As a result, Dallas’ first television deal featured the team paying to get onto Home Sports Entertainment. Lites made hundreds of speeches trying to drum up support for a team no one in town really wanted or understood. At one point, Lites gave a speech at the Grapevine Rotary Club, located in the back of a hardware store. There were 14 people in the room, some of whom began falling asleep while waiting for a promised TV dinner. When he was done, Lites went back to his car, called his wife, and wondered, “Oh my God, what have we done to our kids and career?”
So Lites and the Stars had to make hockey cool. They had to find a way to disrupt the norm, to find any shred of relevance. To make a splash. This is where he did his best work. Lites made friends with Roger Staubach, then leveraged that connection to get the Stars in front of the wealthier audiences in North Texas. Under his leadership, the team broke the mold for game presentation. A team policy was put in place: no organ, the traditional soundtrack of hockey. An organ represented old, traditional hockey. If Dallas hockey was to be chaotic violence on ice, the sort of thing that would snatch the city’s attention, it needed the proper soundtrack: rock and roll.
The Stars were the first NHL team to show movie clips on the center-hung scoreboard to fire up the crowd. They had no permission to do so. They would go to Blockbuster, cut the clips from the rented VHS tape, show them to a mass audience, and hope the lawyers never caught wind. In one of the scarier moments of his career, Lites recalled sitting near former Disney CEO Michael Eisner when the Stars played a clip from a Disney property. “Jim, that’s a great idea,” Eisner told him. “Who at our studio gave you the right to play that?” Lites replied to Eisner he’d double-check and get back to him. He never did, and luckily for the Stars, Eisner never followed up.
Lites left and rejoined the Stars multiple times in his career, leaving for stints with the then Arizona Coyotes and New York Giants. When he returned in 2011, he became a central figure in saving the franchise from bankruptcy, then helped restore the team to solid financial footing after Gaglardi purchased it.
Next came one of Lites’ most important jobs: managing an owner who is both enthusiastic and hands-on. Case in point, the time Lites saved the Stars from botching the Jim Nill hire because Gaglardi had promised Brian Burke he’d interview him if he ever had a GM opening.
“We basically have it done, and Tom tells me about this promise and that he’s got to interview Brian Burke,” Lites told me for my book. “I told him, ‘Why would you do that? I’ve just given the job at your suggestion to Jim Nill. Don’t even think about interviewing Brian Burke because Brian Burke has no discretion. He’ll tell everyone he’s got the job.’”
Lites convinced Gaglardi not to call Burke, Nill was hired, and he’s still the Stars GM to this day, having won the NHL’s General Manager of the Year award in each of the past two seasons.
Lites has never cared what anyone else thinks about him, and that’s the chutzpah and confidence it took to make the Stars succeed. In many ways, the franchise was built in his image. For hockey to work in Dallas, the Stars had to avoid outside snickers and whispers. They had to live large and not be afraid of a bit of foul language. Make no mistake, the franchise wouldn’t have survived in Dallas without on-ice success first, which helps explain why Mike Modano is the greatest player in team history. But they also wouldn’t have made it by playing by everyone else’s rules. Led by Lites, they weren’t afraid to buck them all.
And that’s why Lites is still involved with the Stars today as the team’s chairman and alternate governor. His next challenge will be helping craft the future of the team’s upcoming free streaming service, a full-circle moment from his time paying to get the team on local television. However successful it becomes, Lites will always be remembered for “fucking horseshit.” But his real legacy ought to be as the person who wasn’t afraid to say or do anything to make the Stars succeed.
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