Meeting the New Blues Management Team
St Louis Dispatch/Star Chronicle/Home Shoppers weekly (AP)
After weeks of speculation the sale of the St Louis Blues was finalized this week as a consortium made up of several Wall Street Trust Funds, high tech firms and the Lethbridge woman's fire auxiliary and quilting circle. The deal was signed earlier this week and the owners group promptly hired Captain L. Crunch as the teams GM and President of Hockey Operations.
Mr. Crunch a former football coach with a long track record of knowing winning and backing it up dabbled in team management and the ownership group felt comfortable in handing the reigns of the day to day operations of the franchise.
"We were really happy to get him" stated Ethel Bonaventure the ownership spokes person and head of the Lethbridge Quilting circuit and former hall of fame exotic dancer. "He seems like the right combination or smarts, toughness, tight but flattering slacks, and he calls a mean game of bingo, we're excited to see what he can do"
The Dispatch errr dispatched crack ace sports reporter Irving R Shyster to conduct an exclusive interview with the teams new GM at the luxurious team facilities.
On the getting started
Obviously I'm excited and honored to be here and to bring a scientific and fact based approach to running this team. We've already started working towards a future CPHL championship.
Once I was settled in I worked with the folks at Dell and the IBM Business Intelligence decision and we installed the awesome yet hideously expensive Hockytron 1000 Super Computer. By using advanced BI functions and a custom built AI we've spent the last couple of days feeding in factors such as payroll, player attributes, future needs and it spit out a nice thick report that I promptly put on my desk to make me look important and engaged.
On the current situation
There's a lot to like with this team, there are some really great assets and players that can drive this team to be a winner. I mean how can you argue with guys like Ovie and Stone and Eichel as cornerstones to your team. They're all great players and great assets. So I'm excited about that, also having a up and comer like Vince Dunn is exciting as well as goalies like Demko Sheserkin.
On his concerns
Well, we took a long hard look at the cap situation of the team and we're obviously concerned. Cap space is the cruise missile of the modern hockey team, if you have room you have options and you can use it to quickly improve your team, especially if your in a situation where you think you can make a hard run to the cup.
I'd also be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about the future of the team. The next two years doesn't have a lot in terms of draft picks with two second round picks this year and 2 second round picks next year. Young players are great cost control elements, and draft picks are future currency, and right now I'd have to say that on the teams balance sheet we're in dire straits.
When we ran this through the Hockeytron it literally started laughing in a weird Amazon google help type of way and asked if we were kidding.
Also we're not a young team and we're not an old team, so I think we need to work on our identity, we're not a fast moving team with strong blueline transition, we're not a nasty physical team that will pin you in your own end. We're not a team that's going to win a knife fight in the playoffs right now. So we need to decide on an identity.
On his next steps as GM
I think we're going to be aggressive in terms of letting teams know what we have available, and what we want. I believe in being proactive in terms of defining where we want to go. There are some great teams run by great GM's who have already made us feel welcome, and some who wanted to talk deals.
We made our first minor move last night in bringing Demko up as we wait to hear from Craig Andersson on his future.
We're probably going to let teams know who we're willing to look at moving and see what interest is out there.
We look forward to a long tenure with the Blues and we hope the fans will be excited by our future direction.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
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