FRISCO – Former Stars general manager Doug Armstrong said he believes his firing sent a message to the Stars' players that the bar is set very high for the franchise.

"This market doesn't want to rebuild," he said. "They don't want to hear it. Right now, the mandate to the players – and it is to the players – is you better win the division and you better play in three more rounds of the playoffs. And that's the beauty of Mr. Hicks. There's no question to what he wants."

Armstrong said ending his 17-year career with the Stars was difficult, but he was moving forward with a good attitude.

"I owe it to my kids to get up and dust myself off and get back to work and find a job or go to school," he said during a meeting with the media Friday that served as his exit interview after he was fired Tuesday by Stars owner Tom Hicks.

"I'm using this as a learning tool for my kids to show them that life doesn't always go the way you want it to go. I'm not going to feel sorry for myself. I'm moving ahead."

Armstrong, 43, started with the Stars organization when the team was still in Minnesota. He served as team services director, moved into the front office doing contracts for former GM Bob Gainey and then became GM when Gainey stepped down in 2002. Armstrong said he had never before been fired from a job, but said he would keep a positive attitude.

Armstrong is under contract to the Stars until the end of the 2010-11 season, so he shouldn't have any financial worries. If he does find a job in the NHL, he will work out an agreement with the Stars to terminate his contract. Armstrong said he has already been contacted by teams seeking a scout, television stations looking for studio analysts and even an agent's office. He said he is going to take the week off, spend time with his family and contemplate his future after that.

Asked whether he had regrets on specific trades, such as the Ladisav Nagy and Mattias Norstrom deals, or on how he handled situations like removing Mike Modano as captain, Armstrong said he had a few. But, he added, in analyzing his career over the past three days he believes he was always doing what he thought was best for the organization at the time.

"I think you've got to take risks, and we took a risk with Nagy," he said. "I asked the support staff and the scouts. I talked to the key players who he was going to play with. We don't do this in a vacuum. If I did that, we wouldn't need to compile a staff of scouts."

Armstrong said he is proud of the fact that in his tenure the Stars posted regular-season records that rank second, third and fifth in franchise history. However, he he has to temper that with three first-round playoff exits and one in the second round.

"I'll never skirt the fact that we failed in the playoffs. We failed," Armstrong said. "But people were predicting us to win series, win rounds, advance to the finals, win the [Stanley] Cup, and that means we were good. We didn't get that job done, but there was a lot of good work here."

He said the two playoff losses that hurt most were back-to-back first round exits against the Colorado Avalanche in 2004 and 2006.

"The middle two really hurt, because we had good enough teams to compete harder and get more than we got," Armstrong said. "I didn't feel anybody emptied the tank in the [two] Colorado series, and that irritates me to no end. It's cheating ourselves, and I hate cheating ourselves."

Armstrong was hesitant to give advice to new co-GMs Les Jackson and Brett Hull through the media, but said he would be open to talking to them at anytime.

"My only advice to them would be to give yourself a clear definition of who is going to do what, because the chain of command is very important," he said. "I'm fully confident that Les and Brett are going to be united and have a singular focus, [but] if you have too many cooks in the kitchen, you have a recipe for disaster."

Armstrong said he was trying to make a trade for a key player before his firing, but the current market is difficult to deal in.

"It's very difficult, and the difficulty is that everyone is looking," he said. "For every time I made a call to ask for a scoring winger, they said, 'Are you ready to part with one of your [key] guys yet?' Everybody is still looking to improve. Parity is here, and it's not going to go away, and it's not what we're used to."