Re: Around The League: 2013 - 2014 Season
I've never heard of a team hiring a GM to be a mentor. Weird.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-p...tml?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
LOS ANGELES – What you expect to hear in introductory press conferences for NHL general managers: Talk of long-term success, five-year plans and other schemes intended to make that general manager indispensible until the job is done.
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What you don’t expect to hear: An expiration date.
“I would suspect my term here is two or three years,” said Jim Rutherford, the former Carolina Hurricanes president and general manager that was hired by the Pittsburgh Penguins to replace Ray Shero on Friday.
[...]
What you expect to hear in introductory press conferences for NHL general managers: That he’s going to build a strong front office that advises him on key moves.
What you don’t expect to hear: That he’s essentially training his replacements. “What I will do is give them big roles and a lot to say and a lot of input in our final decisions,” said Rutherford.
Were the alternative not hiring a television star, this move by the Penguins might have come off as the most crazy-pants managerial decision we’ve seen in recent memory, in the sense that it bucks several conventions of how teams appoint general managers.
Jim Rutherford is somehow both a caretaker and a fixer. He was hired to figure out what ails the current incarnation of the Penguins, from the coach to the personnel. He was hired so that Jason Botterill (most likely), Bill Guerin or Tom Fitzgerald will eventually replace him, potentially in two years.
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