[Rumour] Dowbiggin is reporting a new head of hockey ops

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

Cliff Fletcher never made it past Junior C. He's in the Hall of Fame as a builder.

If you like some ancient history, Tommy Gorman never played hockey at any level, but won seven Stanley Cups as GM of four different teams — some of which he also coached. He's in the HoF, too. (By the way, like Ken King, he was a newspaper man before he went into hockey management.)

It's a safe bet that Jay Feaster will never be in the Hall of Fame, but his lack of personal experience playing hockey is not the reason. He just isn't a good enough manager.

Amen. The important attributes for a successful GM are:

-A good vision and a strong commitment to carry it through
-Bargaining skills
-Interpersonal skills
-Good eye for talent (or at least an appreciation for good scouts)



Which one if those can only be developed by playing high level hockey?

[kyuss275]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

Cliff Fletcher never made it past Junior C. He's in the Hall of Fame as a builder.

If you like some ancient history, Tommy Gorman never played hockey at any level, but won seven Stanley Cups as GM of four different teams — some of which he also coached. He's in the HoF, too. (By the way, like Ken King, he was a newspaper man before he went into hockey management.)

It's a safe bet that Jay Feaster will never be in the Hall of Fame, but his lack of personal experience playing hockey is not the reason. He just isn't a good enough manager.

2 great GM's but you really can not use them as comparisons in this day in age. The game on and off the ice has changed to much. Drafting has never been more important than it has in the last 10 years. Back in Fletcher days GM's could afford to make a bad trade in the summer and be able to make another trade by October to help correct the mistake. Good luck in todays game getting a trade to help you out before the end of January. Having some sort of hockey playing experience in a management team goes a long way. The first guy in the flames management team with any playing experience is our AGM. That is not a good thing.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by kyuss275

2 great GM's but you really can not use them as comparisons in this day in age. The game on and off the ice has changed to much. Drafting has never been more important than it has in the last 10 years. Back in Fletcher days GM's could afford to make a bad trade in the summer and be able to make another trade by October to help correct the mistake. Good luck in todays game getting a trade to help you out before the end of January. Having some sort of hockey playing experience in a management team goes a long way. The first guy in the flames management team with any playing experience is our AGM. That is not a good thing.

OK then. Stan Bowman or Peter Chiarelli?

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

Cliff Fletcher never made it past Junior C. He's in the Hall of Fame as a builder.

If you like some ancient history, Tommy Gorman never played hockey at any level, but won seven Stanley Cups as GM of four different teams — some of which he also coached. He's in the HoF, too. (By the way, like Ken King, he was a newspaper man before he went into hockey management.)

It's a safe bet that Jay Feaster will never be in the Hall of Fame, but his lack of personal experience playing hockey is not the reason. He just isn't a good enough manager.

Cliff Fletcher started out as a scout for the Canadiens and worked his way up.

Gorman was a star lacrosse player who also started out evaluating players. Both had hands on hockey related backgrounds. Feaster has never done this but has risen as a manager, with no evaluating or coaching training in any sport. I'd say this is an important part of a GMs duties. Doubly important when dealing with a meddling owner, when you can't make an argument why making a particular move is not a good idea.

Shanahan isn't the perfect candidate either but at least he has hands on experience with the game.

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Calgary4LIfe

Well, I feel that the role of any president is to be the liaison between the owners (or whatever stakeholders they may be) and lower management. What matters most in that position (in my opinion) is how you set the tone for the organization to be run and hire the most competent people you can below you.

I guess it all comes down to how much 'meddling' really goes on, and if they take King's and Feaster's words for the absolute truth when they came out and said that here is no meddling.

It all depends on how King has been. I am in IT, and I have worked for managers who were IT illiterate. Sometimes they would question my decisions - I would sit with them and explain why I thought 'such and such' was the right approach, and why 'such and such' was the wrong one. I had to 'sell' that manager on what I felt was the right way. How difficult is it to convince King? How often would he say no? How often would he have his own idea as to what was the right way, and force his ideas (or those of the ownership group) down through the pipeline?

I personally just don't think the 'braintrust' was good enough for the last 20 or 30 years. This organization is only finally catching up to other successful organizations now with the scouting and development, and the addition of some executives. I am not convinced that ownership is meddling outside of the occasional "Hey, WTF is going on here? Why do we suck?" now and then. Feaster came out and basically told everyone that he was able to make his decisions without the ownership group blocking him. He even commented on how he called the owners to ask permission to send Kotalik down, and their response was: "Sure, no problem. If you need to, feel free to send Hagman and Stajan down as well."

I think when a rumor starts, it goes around and around. All of a sudden, someone hears it from two different sources, and now the rumor has 'legs'. Someone more legitimate reports on it, and then the rumor has 'merit'. Doesn't mean it is any more true. That is why I just don't buy into the 'ownership is very meddling' in Calgary when these guys are very professional executives and owners who know how to run a business properly - hire good people to manage it for you.

Adding Shanahan (or any other good executive) will only help to reinforce ownership's confidence in the management they hired to run this business. I doubt a good executive would take the job or stay long-term if he felt he was unable to be more than just a messenger back and forth with no powers.

Surely you see the difference between your situation and hockey?

As for what level - ANY level that you are trying to win (i.e. any level they actually bother to keep score). I'll take junior or NCAA, sure. Even AAA. There are tons of stories out there from former players, just see the thread about building a team of winners. Look at Dean Lombardi interviews. We can keep trying to think we are outsmarting everyone else by showing the world we can get by with a team full of non-hockey people... but look where it got us? From a playoff team to bottom feeder. Tampa Bay tried to show the world they could get by with a non hockey guy, and within 4 years of winning a cup, they were last place in the NHL.

Is it possible that you can be a good GM without knowing crap about hockey until you are an adult? Its possible, anything is possible. Jay Feaster isn't an example of it though. But given the stakes for such a important position and a billion dollar franchise, I probably wouldn't try and outsmart everyone and prove we can win with a non-hockey GM. Its not working out very well for us right now.

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

OK then. Stan Bowman or Peter Chiarelli?

Chiarelli played for Harvard University between 1983 and 1987, serving as the captain of the team. He later played for the British Hockey League Nottingham Panthers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_C...li_(ice_hockey)

[kyuss275]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

OK then. Stan Bowman or Peter Chiarelli?

I was saying more of a management team as in President of hockey ops and a GM together. Chiarelli has Neely and had played some sort of hockey. I am not sure who the President was when Bowman was GM? Even if it was someone without hockey playing experience, that is one management team out of how many that made it look good?


Edit : oops my bad i thought you said Scotty Bowman. Phanuthier has all we need to know about Stan Bowman. Sounds almost cult like.LOL

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by kyuss275

I was saying more of a management team as in President of hockey ops and a GM together. Chiarelli has Neely and had played some sort of hockey. I am not sure who the President was when Bowman was GM? Even if it was someone without hockey playing experience, that is one management team out of how many that made it look good?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...man/index.html

Stan Bowman readily acknowledges he talks almost daily to his father, bouncing ideas off him, seeing what he thinks. But father calls on son for ideas a lot, too, and why not?

Also some stuff about Stan Bowman playing some hockey as a kid:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/news?slu...anbowman112410

Stan said he was “very into hockey” as a kid – playing it, being around it, learning about it. “The only thing I can remember is he seemed to be very intelligent,” said Ottawa Senators scout Nick Polano, whose son Michael played youth hockey with Stan while he served one season as an assistant under Scotty with the Buffalo Sabres. “You have to remember, if you live in the Bowman household, it’s hockey, hockey, hockey. And when you think that there’s no more hockey, then there’s more hockey. He had a pretty good teacher, I can tell you that.”

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

OK then. Stan Bowman or Peter Chiarelli?

From Stan Bowman's bio

He also tracked the progress of Blackhawks prospects by working closely with the staff of the club’s minor league affiliate in Rockford while assisting with player evaluation, prospect development and professional and amateur scouting.

Feaster has none of this training plus Stan's been absorbing Scotty's knowledge for a life time and still has him looking over his shoulder.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Phanuthier

Chiarelli played for Harvard University between 1983 and 1987, serving as the captain of the team. He later played for the British Hockey League Nottingham Panthers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_C...li_(ice_hockey)

That's the kind of hockey man you were referring to needing? A guy who couldn't make a good hockey school and played pro in England????

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

That's the kind of hockey man you were referring to needing? A guy who couldn't make a good hockey school and played pro in England????

Yes, playing hockey at university and pro is what I would consider "ANY level that you are trying to win" ... I thought that would be obvious, but in case its not, the answer is yes.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by kyuss275

Drafting has never been more important than it has in the last 10 years.

True. Fletcher didn't need to depend on drafting; for years, he was virtually the only GM looking for talent in the NCAA, and could sign whoever he wanted as a free agent. But he certainly didn't develop the skills to scout college hockey by playing pro.

Back in Fletcher days GM's could afford to make a bad trade in the summer and be able to make another trade by October to help correct the mistake.

Debatable. In any case, Fletcher didn't have to bail himself out of bad trades, because he seldom made any. Usually, when a GM made a bad trade in the summer, the trade he made to try to fix it would also be bad, because he was a bad trader.

Remember the Igor Kravchuk fiasco? Button made one bad move, claiming Krapshoot off waivers with a $2.5m salary. Within a year, he had to put Phil Housley on waivers to get the team back under budget, because nobody would take Krapshoot off his hands at any price. The 'fix' made a bad move even worse.

You couldn't ask for two guys with better hockey pedigrees than Mike Milbury and Doug Risebrough – but as GMs on Long Island and in Calgary, both of them were bad jokes. Having talent doesn't give you an eye for talent, and having no talent doesn't make you blind.

There's an old saying: You don't have to be a hen to know when an egg is rotten. I could add to that by pointing out that some hens will spend weeks trying to hatch a rotten egg.


The real problem with the Calgary Flames is not that they hired a fat little lawyer as GM. (If being overweight disqualified you from hockey management, Ken Hitchcock would be working at Burger King.) The real problem is that the owners have never had any idea how to hire a GM. Consider:

In 1991, Cliff Fletcher bolted to the Maple Leafs. The team promoted Doug Risebrough from within the organization, even though he had only one year's experience as an assistant GM and was doing a second full-time job as coach.

In 1995, the team fired Risebrough and promoted Al Coates from within the organization. At first he was designated interim GM; after a few months, they got tired of pretending to look for a proper GM and took 'interim' off his title.

In 2003, the team fired Craig Button and promoted Darryl Sutter from within the organization.

In 2010, Darryl Sutter 'resigned'. The team promoted Jay Feaster from within the organization.

The only time the Flames have ever looked outside the organization for a general manager was when they hired Craig Button, and they made a hash of that. (I have heard that they offered one of the lowest salaries in the league for a GM. Nobody with previous experience at the job was willing to apply.) Four out of five times, they have promoted from within. Now, I find it very hard to believe that four out of five of the best hockey minds not employed as NHL GMs just happened to be working for the Calgary Flames. Frankly, the owners just couldn't be arsed to do the job properly.

If they do hire Shanahan as an operations guy, and the only thing he does for them is to conduct a proper search for a new GM, he will have done something that the whole organization has never accomplished in 33 years.

[Calgary4LIfe]

Originally Posted by Phanuthier

Surely you see the difference between your situation and hockey?

As for what level - ANY level that you are trying to win (i.e. any level they actually bother to keep score). I'll take junior or NCAA, sure. Even AAA. There are tons of stories out there from former players, just see the thread about building a team of winners. Look at Dean Lombardi interviews. We can keep trying to think we are outsmarting everyone else by showing the world we can get by with a team full of non-hockey people... but look where it got us? From a playoff team to bottom feeder. Tampa Bay tried to show the world they could get by with a non hockey guy, and within 4 years of winning a cup, they were last place in the NHL.

Is it possible that you can be a good GM without knowing crap about hockey until you are an adult? Its possible, anything is possible. Jay Feaster isn't an example of it though. But given the stakes for such a important position and a billion dollar franchise, I probably wouldn't try and outsmart everyone and prove we can win with a non-hockey GM. Its not working out very well for us right now.

Ok, I am not an idiot and of course I see the difference between being in IT and hockey. I of course wasn't comparing the specific job functions, but comparing the level of skill and experience. Surely, you can make the leap there.

I am not defending Feaster. Re-read my posts please. I am asking a simple question - what makes a hockey guy, a hockey guy. I think I have asked this question about 100 times on this board, and I can't remember getting a single definitive answer in return. How long does it take a non-hockey guy to work in the industry before he is graduates into one? Obviously you are stating one needs to have played the game - then at what specific level has one to play the game until he is considered a hockey guy.

Also, Ken King is considered a non-hockey guy in this forum. Wasn't Darryl Sutter his recommendation for coach? As far as I recall, it was King who went and spoke to Sutter about coming on as a coach in Calgary. Seemed to work out pretty damn well for the next few years anyways.

I am not in support of Feaster - not because he isn't a 'hockey guy' - I actually consider him a hockey guy now that he has been around hockey for what.. 20 years? I just don't think he is a very good manager, that's all. It isn't about the Flames trying to 'outsmart' everyone else (well, EVERY organization tries to outsmart everyone else - it is a competition) - it is about the Flames trying to do their best in having the right people in their jobs. Last I checked, Lowe is the epitome if a 'hockey guy', and I can't think of anyone else I would rather NOT have work for the Flames.

Given enough time in the business, scouts, coaches, and managers tend to get better with experience - regardless of what their background is. Shanahan is not more or less likely to be a better president than King was just because he was a very notable player.

Maybe a definition of what a 'hockey guy' is would be a good start, as it seems a lot of posters are so adamant that any executive in the organization HAS to be one.

[Cleveland Steam Whistle]

Originally Posted by Red John

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two teams is ironically the greatest enemy of both.

The Oilers care too much about what the media thinks and is sure to keep them in their back pockets at all costs - they are never challenged and get to do what they want.

The Flames have a very negative media that is quick to turn on their team and organization. But management don't care one iota that they are constantly made fun of around the league - they still think they are smarter than everyone.

Frankly the Calgary Flames are like the person driving on the left side of the road, thinking it's everyone else coming towards them who is on the wrong side.

Edmonton could use a media that holds them accountable. Calgary could use management that actually cared what people think of them.

I sure hope Flames management never starts making decisions based on what the media thinks. Imagine a world where Francis and Dowbiggin actually influenced the Flames decision making.

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Calgary4LIfe

Ok, I am not an idiot and of course I see the difference between being in IT and hockey. I of course wasn't comparing the specific job functions, but comparing the level of skill and experience. Surely, you can make the leap there.

I am not defending Feaster. Re-read my posts please. I am asking a simple question - what makes a hockey guy, a hockey guy. I think I have asked this question about 100 times on this board, and I can't remember getting a single definitive answer in return. How long does it take a non-hockey guy to work in the industry before he is graduates into one? Obviously you are stating one needs to have played the game - then at what specific level has one to play the game until he is considered a hockey guy.

Also, Ken King is considered a non-hockey guy in this forum. Wasn't Darryl Sutter his recommendation for coach? As far as I recall, it was King who went and spoke to Sutter about coming on as a coach in Calgary. Seemed to work out pretty damn well for the next few years anyways.

I am not in support of Feaster - not because he isn't a 'hockey guy' - I actually consider him a hockey guy now that he has been around hockey for what.. 20 years? I just don't think he is a very good manager, that's all. It isn't about the Flames trying to 'outsmart' everyone else (well, EVERY organization tries to outsmart everyone else - it is a competition) - it is about the Flames trying to do their best in having the right people in their jobs. Last I checked, Lowe is the epitome if a 'hockey guy', and I can't think of anyone else I would rather NOT have work for the Flames.

Given enough time in the business, scouts, coaches, and managers tend to get better with experience - regardless of what their background is. Shanahan is not more or less likely to be a better president than King was just because he was a very notable player.

Maybe a definition of what a 'hockey guy' is would be a good start, as it seems a lot of posters are so adamant that any executive in the organization HAS to be one.

Any level above Peewee

What do I consider a hockey guy - a guy who grew up in a world where hockey is a 2nd instinct, not a job. Someone who outside of their job function, will catch a game if they got a few hours before they go to sleep (I believe it is said that Jay Feaster doesn't scout any amateaur games, didn't watch Cervenka before signing him, etc). Someone who will talk endless hours of hockey at night, every night because its like a religion to them. Someone who, for them, hockey is a way of life, not just a job. Can you have that kind of burning passion where you watch every ounce of hockey you can because you love it so much (hell, maybe even midget not just for scouting but because you love it so much)... or can you not be bothered catch a junior hockey game because you are put in 50 hours in for work already this week? I just can't see a guy who never really thought about hockey till it was his job, to have that kind drive; but I think you need to have it if you're going to be one of the best GM's in the league, and if the Flames want to be the best in the NHL, we need to hire the best.

[Erick Estrada]

If your GM can't scout then he's really only as good as the guys employed under him and if that's the case I have to wonder what is the point employing him as GM when he's more of a mediator. Not saying that a guy like Feaster doesn't offer value to an organization because he does but I really believe a GM should be qualified enough to effectively scout a player.

[Alberta_Beef]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

If your GM can't scout then he's really only as good as the guys employed under him and if that's the case I have to wonder what is the point employing him as GM when he's more of a mediator. Not saying that a guy like Feaster doesn't offer value to an organization because he does but I really believe a GM should be qualified enough to effectively scout a player.

I am not going to get into the whole should Feaster be fired thing, but that said:

I have no problem with a GM deferring to his staff for scouting purposes. To me the best quality a GM could have is their ability to negotiate both in the process of trades and when trying to sign new contracts.

[Azhouse]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

-Bargaining skills
-Interpersonal skills

Fail and fail

[Bend it like Bourgeois]

This whole 'hockey guy' thing is so ridiculous. Do you ask your surgeon if he enjoyed cutting up animals as a kid? Do you care if your aco####ant had a lemonade stand after school?

Some people should honestly take a step back and realize what utter #######s they sound like talking so bitterly and arrogantly about an organization and a business they are customers of not knowledgeable about (and some probably not even that).

It's stunning sometimes.

[Reign of Fire]

Like I said before, if King and Feaster are staying on and are still part of the decision making, then they can bring in anyone and it will still be the same ol'.