[liamenator]

It seems that Ken King's first major hockey decision was so wildly successful, in hiring D. Sutter--from whom he likely did learn a lot about hockey ops--that his perception of his own hockey acumen is out of step with the reality that he's a newspaper man with a shrewd eye for business and community relations.

And actually, his vision on paper of how this iteration of Flames hockey ops would function doesn't look bad--lots of voices in the room, consensus, creative hires, unconventional approaches, etc.--as a clean break from Sutter's tightly controlled oligarchy. The problem is they haven't made the right hires, and it just doesn't seem to be functioning in an optimal way.

I mean, if you look at the core of our hockey ops team: King, Feaster, Weisbrod, Conroy, Holditch you see 3 non-hockey guys (Feaster, King, Holditch), 1 guy with no previous experience who's been learning on the fly (Conroy), and 1 guy whose biggest successes--though he's got a reputation as a sage around here--came in the scouting ranks & Basketball ops (Weisbrod). There's a lot of potential there, but I think we're starting to see that not much of that potential has been realized by these guys, either as a team or individuals, over the last 2 years.

And given that he's inserted himself into this hockey ops mix to such a degree--which can't really be argued anymore, at this point--I don't think we can reasonably expect King to be able to make the kind of sober evaluation and analysis required to decide whether this arrangement is working properly or not. Because this is his model, his team, his work, there's simply too much at stake for King for us to reasonably expect he'll be able to pull the plug when necessary.

So... he's gotta go.