Dallas Stars coach Jim Montgomery is so predictable. From junior-A to the NCAA and now the NHL, his teams always play their best hockey in the second half of the season.

Year by year, Montgomery grooms his teams in a methodical fashion.

He did it in three seasons with the junior-A Dubuque Fighting Saints, and for five years at the University of Denver, and now is doing it in his first season in the NHL.

Montgomery won two United States Hockey League championships with Dubuque to get him in position to replace George Gwozdecky at DU, and what he did with the Pioneers is nothing short of legendary: five NCAA Tournament appearances, including four trips to the Elite Eight, two to the Frozen Four and winning the 2017 national championship.

That put him in position to not only coach at hockey’s highest level but to become a head coach without any experience behind an NHL bench. Montgomery, 49, told me he would never leave DU to become an NHL assistant, because he considered Denver the best college job in the country, and because he knew he would carry his head coaching success into the NHL.

He was right. Since returning from all-star break, the Stars were 17-10-2 and had ranked second in the Western Conference in points (36, trailing only St. Louis) entering Saturday’s game at Vancouver. Dallas took a seven-game winning streak on the road into Vancouver and was 8-1 in its last nine games outside Texas.

The Stars were in the position to clinch a playoff spot with a win against the Canucks. Dallas missed the playoffs the last two years while under the direction of Lindy Ruff and Ken Hitchcock, respectively.

Montgomery, who built the DU team that played for the West Regional championship on Saturday, credits his players for buying into a new structure in January when the Stars were out of the playoff picture. He asked them to ditch the run-and-gun and play tighter defense, offering more support to goaltenders Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin — perhaps the NHL’s best tandem.

Montgomery coached a similar way in his first two years at DU, when the talent wasn’t as good as it became. In his last three years with the Pioneers, it was a north-style attack all the way because he had the horses.

All NCAA and NHL coaches are highly intelligent and create an identity based on what they have. But the highly affable Montgomery simply gets more out of what he has. When Montgomery was hired by DU in 2013, I interviewed former NHL stars Paul Kariya and John LeClair for an introductory story on Montgomery, who played with Kariya at the University of Maine and with LeClair for the Philadelphia Flyers.

They both said Montgomery was destined for greatness at DU and beyond.

“His hockey IQ is the best I’ve ever seen, and he’s obviously taken that into coaching,” Kariya told me at the time. “I have no doubt that Denver is very lucky to have him and he’s going to do a great job there.”

Montgomery’s gifts go far beyond the game.

“He has a warm personality and people can relate to him really quickly. And he’s smart,” LeClair said. “When you have a good personality and are smart like that, it’s easy to make friends, easy to get people to trust you, and I think he’s had so much success because people really buy into what he’s doing.”

I wrote about Montgomery in September when Dallas played a preseason game in Denver. He told me he was already more confident as an NHL coach than an NHL player, because he never knew where he stood as a player.

Montgomery already knew he was going to lead the Stars into the playoffs.

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