Recruitment practices in the major sports leagues have recently been scrutinized. Especially in the NFL, true overqualified black candidates can’t seem to get jobs for white people who seemingly come out of nowhere, or are innovations or something the Lions you find a man who had spent the past decade hit a door with his head like Goldberg. But it is irrelevant to football.
Everything to do with racing in the NHL is a huge problem. Everyone knows that. The league has only one black assistant coach and one black assistant GM. But before the league can get to a point where it can force teams to hire more minorities, it may have to force teams to hire non-idiots first. And based on today’s evidence, they are miles away from there.
The Pittsburgh Penguins have been in the market for a new GM since Jim Rutherford stepped down at the dawn of this season. Today they didn’t do that alone find a bible to fill that position who has done next to nothing to earn it, but then they found the king of the bowels to oversee him.
First, they hired Ron Hextall as GM. Hextall’s previous stint as GM came up with the cross-state rivals Flyers, and there’s not much to it that someone would get up from their seat and yell, “I gotta have this guy!” His report is reasonable, maybe even okay. Travis Sanheim, Oskar Lindblom, Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Carter Hart and Nolan Patrick were added by Hextall. Neither of them is the finished article yet, and two of them are plagued by physical ailments, but still a lot of promise, but more promise than production.
But that didn’t matter to the Flyers, who never finished above third in the division in Hextall’s term. And some of his other decisions were mind-boggling. Brayden Schenn’s exchange for St. Louis for someone who claimed to be called Jori Lehtera and claimed to be a hockey player stands out.
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He managed to fire Craig Berube as a coach after one season, then watch Berube and Schenn win a cup with the Blues two years ago. That was in the service of hiring Dave Hakstol, whose best claim to the job his name sounded like Hextall’s.
You could argue that the base of this current Flyers team that currently leads the teams that are still in the East division has its fingerprints, so maybe we can let that go now. The Penguins will clearly need some hits in the draft, given the age of their key players and cap situation, and they may think Hextall’s record is enough to project that he’s the man for it. Arguable, but not a crime.
The real coup-de-stupid is that the Penguins are also hiring Brian Burke as president of Hockey Ops. While we should all rejoice that Burke and his confused and more confused Don Cherry of our TVs are acting, it’s puzzling how he got another job in the league. Burke is arguably the greatest harsh fraud out there, somehow camouflaged by the hockey media’s love for him for challenging a man to a once fight in a barn. If it’s a shed, or you just say “shed,” hockey writers will put it up.
Burke’s shine 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. All he added to that team was cashing in on assets he didn’t acquire or cashing in for Chris Pronger, who had requested from Edmonton. That is it. And that’s as good as it has ever been for the ducks since then.
Burke was able to take over that one feat, and his gruff nature, and persuade the Toronto Maple Leafs to hire him as GM, where his opening press conference gave Don Cherry the last erection he ever had (enjoy the rest of your day). And that’s it. He used “cruelty” in a sentence correctly. Hang a banner!
The Leafs didn’t come within a $ 50 cab ride from a playoff spot, and included giving up those two first rounders to Phil Kessel, trading for Dion Phaneuf’s dead ass, and drafting exactly two useful NHLers in four tries, Nazem Kadri and Morgan Rielly. Oh, and then he was essentially a five-year counselor for Calgary where they won exactly one playoff series. Damn Midas touch, this guy.
And just for the kick, Burke was a major voice in putting together the 2014 US Olympic team and the 2016 World Cup that won just cock. This guy traded pissed off all the time in a reputation he had next to nothing to earn.
There is a clear lack of innovation in the NHL, and that’s because teams just keep hiring the same 40 guys in GM or coaching. Everyone is a “good hockey player”, despite what they’ve done, or probably haven’t done.
As a reward for mediocrity, Hextall and Burke get to try to get Sidney Crosby another cup.
If you get one job in the NHL, you get 17.