Quote:
Originally Posted by PeteMoss
Phoenix had league ownership - basically could only spend the bare minimum to keep the franchise going and made the playoffs in the extremely tough Western Conference in 3 out of the last 5 years and just missed out in the past two (probably would have made it this year if not for Smith's injury). That is pretty impressive given the restraints they had.
As for the whole 'puppet' thing - Its going to be a group effort just like every franchise in the world. Feaster would have discussed his moves with Burke (or King before that), Weisbrod, etc, Sutter would have discussed with King. The entire point of having this structure is to have franchise stability in the event the GM doesn't work out.
Burke isn't going to sit there and tell Treliving who to draft in the 4th round, but he's also not going to sit in his office all day twiddling his thumbs and looking at spreadsheets of business operations.
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Yeah, the comments about "being a puppet" are getting really annoying.
I'm not sure why it's so hard for people understand that hockey management is changing. Burke/Linden/Shanahan's roles are to be the puppet masters. They're the boss. It's not "meddling", it's their job.
The GM is there to do the President's leg-work. It's collaboration, but ultimately the GM's boss is the President of Hockey Ops. Burke's job is to insulate the GM from answering directly to the business side.
This is Brian Burke's hockey team, and Burke has chosen Treliving to built it for him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
I wanted a young guy as well, but I wanted a young guy from a winning organization. There's the rub for me. Phoenix has been a middling team that plays a style of hockey everyone on this board hates with a passion. They have had no success in any shape or form and don't look like a team with much of a future. If the team is an extension of its management, this move bothers me. I like the direction the Flames were headed. They have developed a stable of good young prospects in a very short period of time. They play an exciting brand of hockey. There is a future here. I don't want a guy who learned how to build a 7th-11th place team to work his magic and build the Flames in that image. That is my fear and why I will take a wait and see attitude.
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It's not like they sat down and decided "okay, let's be the 7th team this year - build it!". Hell, if that were mindset then I think we ought to be pretty damn excited that we have a GM that is able to attain his exact goal. The reality is though, the hope in the hiring is of course that Treliving is no longer resource-starved. He did a great job without having resources - he helped build a team that had some measure of success inspite of their constraints. So that's where the Flames and Burke step in and give him the resources he lacked in Phoenix.