By Jim Coffman
Hey John McDonough, the next time you’re going to fire a flat-out successful general manager (the Blackhawks improved every season Dale Tallon was at the helm, culminating in an exciting run to the conference finals this year), maybe you should do it before he makes so many moves in the off-season that your roster is just about locked in for the next year. In fact, the Hawks are essentially locked in for the next couple years given all of their multi-year contracts and the NHL’s iron-clad salary cap (a team has to keep its payroll below the cap even if an owner would be willing to pay a luxury tax, like he could if he was an NBA owner).
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At least you should do that, John, if you hope to convince fans with at least an intermittent pulse that the move was due to anything other than a childish personality conflict. McDonough’s team was so lucky last year when it made another knee-jerk decision with significant consequences. That was when the Blackhawks waited until several games into the regular season before firing coach Denis Savard and bringing in Joel Quenneville. Of course, if they were even considering making a change early last season/pre-season, they should have done so well before training camp began, let alone the regular season. That’s what competent teams do to give the new guy a chance to comprehensively implement his system. But they caught a huge break when the veteran Quenneville hit the ice skating and was successful immediately and over the long haul of last season.
This time the Hawks went in the other direction, hurriedly anointing a whipper-snapper with no significant team-running experience. It is hard to be even a little optimistic about how that scenario is going to play out.
The team also caught huge breaks when both Savard and Tallon played the roles of loyal soldiers, refusing to rip their employer. The fact that they were both reassigned rather than dismissed clearly had a great deal to do with that – so let’s hope McDonough is at least giving wholehearted thanks to his owner’s deep pockets. And the fact that Savard and Tallon both held their fire markedly reduced the fallout with the fans. We’ll see if luck is a Blackhawk again in the aftermath of this move.
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Hey Stan Bowman, congrats on the new general manager job (though I must point out – sorry – that it is disappointing that a Chicago franchise once again hired a cheap minion from within rather than going out and at least looking at who might have been available elsewhere – then again the Hawks made the change so late in the off-season that other candidates with promise were long gone).
And congrats on being the son of hockey legend Scotty Bowman (who coached his teams to something like a half dozen NHL championships and who also named his son after the primary object of his desire – Lord Stanley’s Cup).
Bowman’s hiring is a delightful milestone for me as well. At all of 36 years old, he is a full seven years younger than I am and I think that makes me officially middle-aged at least.
I remember when I was covering sports in the western half of the North Shore for the Pioneer Press about a half-dozen years ago when two of the high schools where I plied my trade hired new athletic directors within a couple years of each other and both were younger than I was. That took more than a little getting used to.
It was close when the White Sox hired Kenny Williams. He was born in 1964, a scant two years prior to my arrival. And John Paxson (I’m going to stick with Paxson as the guy most responsible for the Bulls’ roster until he comes right out and says he isn’t) graduated college five big years before I took home my diploma.
Otherwise, the local teams have been run by grizzled veterans for a while now – from Jerry Angelo to Jim Hendry (Okay, okay, Hendry isn’t as old as Angelo – but it seems like he has been around forever and is getting older in a hurry, isn’t he?) to Dale Tall . . . whoops.
There is also the question of Rocky Wirtz’s role in all this. The fans have applauded since Bill Wirtz’ older son took over the family team a couple years ago and made the obvious moves (increasing TV coverage, giving legends some money to end their feuds with the team and come back for regular appearances at the UC to name two). The fact that he agreed to give the reins to a guy whose primary asset is his family tree may not be surprising but it is troubling. You have to believe that sort of thinking is going to come back to kick the Hawks in the butt at some point.
There is also the fact that if Rocky hadn’t kept Tallon on the payroll he still would have had to pay him after the owner dim-wittedly spoke of the 20-plus year gap between Tallon and Bowman’s ages as a factor in Tallon’s dismissal (lawyers specializing in discrimination had to be salivating).
So now you have an owner whose primary selling point is the fact that he won the family fortune lottery supervising a team president who hadn’t worked in hockey before taking the job supervising a general manager with no significant managerial experience.
The bright side?
I’m thinking the consequences should be worth at least a column or two.
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Jim Coffman rounds up the sports weekend in this space every Monday. He welcomes your comments.
Posted on July 20, 2009