Hiring practices in major sports leagues have been under the microscope lately. Especially in the NFL, where overqualified black candidates I can’t get jobs in front of whites who apparently come out of nowhere, or are retreaded, or if you’re the lions you find a guy who spent the previous decade hitting his head on a door like Goldberg. But it is not relevant to football.
Anything related to race in the NHL is a big problem. Everybody knows it. The league has only one black assistant coach and one black assistant GM. But perhaps before the league reaches a point where it can force teams to hire more minorities, it may need to force teams to hire non-idiots first. And based on today’s evidence, they are miles from that.
The Pittsburgh Penguins have been looking for a new GM since Jim Rutherford stepped down at the dawn of this season. Today, not only do they find a giblet to fill that position who did practically nothing to deserve it, but then they found the king of the kids to supervise him.
First, they hired Ron Hextall as GM. Hextall’s previous stint as GM came with international rivals Flyers, and there’s not much about it that would make someone get up out of their seats and shout, “I have to be with this guy!” Your writing history is reasonable, maybe even OK. Travis Sanheim, Oskar Lindblom, Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Carter Hart and Nolan Patrick were added by Hextall. None is the finished article yet, and two of them have been attacked by physical illnesses, but still very promising, but more promising than production.
But none of that made a difference to the Flyers, who never finished above third in the division in Hextall’s term. And some of his other decisions were disconcerting. Noteworthy is the exchange of Brayden Schenn for St. Louis by someone who claimed to be called Jori Lehtera and claimed to be a hockey player.
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He managed to fire Craig Berube after a season as a coach and then watch Berube and Schenn win a Cup with the Blues two years ago. That was to hire Dave Hakstol, whose best claim for the job was his name sounded like Hextall’s.
It could be argued that the base of this current team of Flyers who are leading all the teams that are still in the Eastern division has their fingerprints everywhere, so maybe we can put that aside for now. The Penguins are clearly going to need some hitting in the draft, given the age of their key players and the situation of the team, and maybe they think Hextall’s track record is enough to project that he’s the guy for it. Arguable, but not a crime.
The real stupid thing is that the Penguins are also hiring Brian Burke as president of hockey operations. Although we should all be happy that the change will make Burke and his troubled and more confused Don Cherry act out of our TVs, but how he got another job in the league is mysterious. Burke may be the biggest buck out there, somehow camouflaged by the hockey media’s love for him, because he challenged a guy to a fight once in a barn. If it involves a barn, or if you simply say “barn”, hockey writers will love it.
Burke’s brilliance comes from being GM of the Anaheim Ducks when they won their only Stanley Cup, almost entirely with players who were there when Burke arrived. The only thing he added to this team was to profit from assets he did not acquire or recruit for Chris Pronger, who asked to leave Edmonton. That’s it. And that’s the best for Ducks ever since.
Burke was able to take that feat, and his rude nature, and convince the Toronto Maple Leafs to hire him as a GM, where his opening press conference gave Don Cherry his last erection (enjoy the rest of the day). And that’s it. He used “truculence” in a sentence correctly. Hang a banner!
The Leafs did not make it to a $ 50 cab ride from a playoff spot and included giving up the first two rounds for Phil Kessel, switching to Dion Phaneuf’s dead ass and summoning exactly two useful NHLers in four attempts, Nazem Kadri and Morgan Rielly. Oh, and then he was essentially a Calgary advisor for five years, where they won exactly one series of playoffs. Fucking Midas touch, that guy.
And just for fun, Burke was an important voice in building the 2014 US Olympic team and the 2016 World Cup, which won exactly one stick. This guy has been negotiating to look upset all the time for a reputation that has done almost nothing to win.
There is a distinct lack of innovation in the NHL, and this is because the teams continue to hire the same 40 guys in both the GM and coaching spheres. Everyone is a “good hockey guy”, despite what they did, or more likely they didn’t.
As a reward for mediocrity, Hextall and Burke try to give Sidney Crosby another cup.
In the NHL, if you get a job, you win 17.