Quote:
Originally Posted by Joborule
Are they really that much worst though? I never paid attention to the front office aspect of the club until the Kipper trade. But with the Canadian dollar situation, I figured it made a GM's job pretty challenging around here in Buttons case. Though there were some fairly stupid moves in hindsight that screwed the Flames potential for sure.
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Button was the first and last GM hired from outside by senior management in the Hotchkiss era, and he simply wasn't up to the job. I can forgive him for letting Martin St. Louis walk: nobody else saw much in him at the time. But in his first months, he made a series of obvious blunders:
• He traded J.-S. Giguere, then a prime goalie prospect ready to graduate, for a second-round pick so he could protect Fred Brathwaite in the expansion draft. Brathwaite was a fan favourite, but he was a 28-year-old career backup who only became a starter in Calgary because the Flames had nobody else ready to play. A year later, Button traded him anyway, and Brathwaite went right back to being a backup.
To make matters worse, Button turned around and traded that 2nd for Miika Elomo and a 4th used to draft Levente Szuper – both of whom returned to Europe without playing a single NHL game for the Flames.
• He picked up Igor Kravchuk off waivers from Ottawa. ‘Crapshoot’, as Flames fans liked to call him, was a one-dimensional offensive defenceman who wasn't even very good at that, but he was paid like a borderline star. At a time when the team had a player payroll of $26.5 million, Kravchuk was making 2.5.
Because this waste of a contract was leeching the lifeblood out of the budget, Button tried to give Kravchuk away on waivers the following summer. No one was stupid enough to take him. So he had to get his $2.5 million back by waiving Phil Housley instead and losing him to Chicago.
• Perhaps worst of all, he hired Don Hay as coach to save a few bucks. Hay was and is a perfectly fine junior coach, but he was in over his head in the NHL and had to be fired before the season ended.
I'm quite certain the team would have done better with an NHL-quality coach and a bargain-bin defenceman than it did with a bargain-bin coach and Igor Kravchuk.
All these bonehead decisions were made before the Flames played a single regular-season game with Button as GM.
Harley Hotchkiss was a terrific guy, God rest his soul, but he and the team's co-owners just could not hire a hockey GM to save their lives. They inherited Fletcher. When Fletcher left, they gave the job to Doug Risebrough because Risebrough was already on the payroll. When Risebrough had to be sacked for incompetence, they gave the job to Al Coates – because Coates was already on the payroll. When Button was sacked, he was succeeded by Darryl Sutter – who was already on the payroll. The only GM they ever hired from outside was Button, and that hire was a complete botch.