Hiring practices in major sports leagues were under the microscope of late. Especially in the NFL, where overqualified black candidates Looks like he can’t get jobs before the white ones who apparently come from nowhere, or are retreaded or if you’re lions you find a guy who had spent the previous decade banging his head on a door like Goldberg. But football is not German.
Anything related to race in the NHL is a huge problem. Everyone knows that. The league has only one black assistant coach and one black GM assistant. But maybe before the league gets to a point where it can push teams to hire more minorities, it might have to push teams to hire crazy people first. And based on today’s evidence, I’m a few miles away.
The Pittsburgh penguins had been on the market for a new GM since Jim Rutherford resigned just before dawn this season. Today, not just them Find a glass to occupy this position who did almost nothing to deserve it, but then found the king of bricks to watch over him.
First, they hired Ron Hextall as GM. Hextall’s previous phase as GM came with cross-state rivals Flyers, and there aren’t many things that would make anyone get up from the chair and shout, “I have to have this guy!” His editing file is acceptable, maybe even OK. Travis Sanheim, Oskar Lindblom, Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Carter Hart and Nolan Patrick were added by Hextall. Neither is the finished article yet and two of them have been subjected to physical illness, but still a lot of promises, but more promises than production.
But none of that made a difference to the Flyers, who never finished third in the division in Hextall’s tenure. And some of his other decisions were puzzling. Brayden Schenn’s trade with St. Louis for someone who claimed to be called Jori Lehtera and who claimed to be a hockey player.
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He managed to fire Craig Berube after a season as a coach, then watched Berube and Schenn win a Blues Cup two years ago. the name sounds like Hextall’s.
It could be argued that the basis of this current Flyers team that currently leads any team still in the Eastern Division has fingerprints everywhere, so maybe we can leave it for now. Clearly, the Penguins will need a few hits in the project, given the age of their key players and the head situation, and maybe I think Hextall’s record is enough to project that he’s the man for that. Arguably, but not a murder.
The real coup is that the Penguins are hiring Brian Burke as president of Hockey Ops. While we should all be glad that this move will make Burke and Don Cherry, troubled and more confused, refrain from our TVs, but the way he got another job in the league is surprising. Burke could be the biggest painful fraud around him, camouflaged by the love for him by the hockey media because he provoked a guy to a fight once in a barn. If it involves a barn or simply say “barn”, hockey writers will pick it up.
Burke’s brilliance comes from the fact that he was the GM of the Anaheim Ducks when they won their only Stanley Cup, almost entirely with players who were there when Burke arrived. The only thing he added to that team was the collection of assets that he did not purchase or write for Chris Pronger, who had asked him from Edmonton. This is. And that’s as good as it has been for the Ducks so far.
Burke managed to take that one achievement and his tough nature and convinced the Toronto Maple Leafs to hire him as GM, where opening press conference he gave Don Cherry the last erection he ever had (enjoy the rest of your day). And that’s it. He used “truculence” correctly in a sentence. Hang a banner!
The Leafs did not enter a $ 50 walk with a playoff spot and included giving up the two first-rounders for Phil Kessel, trading for Dion Phaneuf’s dead end, and drafting two useful NHLs in four attempts. Nazem Kadri and Morgan Rielly. Ah, then he was essentially an advisor for Calgary for five years, where they won exactly one playoff series. The Midas bastard, this guy.
And just for kicks, Burke was a major voice in building the 2014 US Olympic team and the 2016 World Cup, which won exactly the cock. This guy has been busy all the time to look upset at a reputation he’s earned almost nothing to earn.
There is a distinct lack of innovation in the NHL and this is due to the fact that teams continue to hire the same 40 guys, either in the GM sphere or in the coaching sphere. Everyone is a “good type of hockey player,” despite what they did or probably didn’t do.
As a reward for mediocrity, Hextall and Burke try to bring Sidney Crosby another Cup.
In the NHL, if you get one job, you get 17.