Elliotte Friedman | November 17, 2021

• Sports organizations are changing what they search for in front office hires

• The ramifications of a possible Pittsburgh Penguins sale

• How the NHL is dealing with positive COVID tests

Let’s start with Vancouver.

This is what I think is going on: When you start a season, you try to prepare yourself for all outcomes.

A. “We could be good”
B. “We’re going to battle for the playoffs”
C. “We know we’re going to be bad, but we’re going to make the best of it”
D. “Oh God, I hope we avoid a worst-case scenario. I’m going to pray to my deity this will happen to someone else.”

For the Canucks, unfortunately it’s “D.”

Organizationally, the franchise is reeling from top-to-bottom. They were expected to contend in the unpredictable Pacific. Instead, they are seventh, six points out of a playoff spot, returning from an 0-3 road trip where they were outscored 19-6. Ownership met Monday, and Francesco Aquilini met Tuesday afternoon with GM Jim Benning. A change at the position was not expected, and that didn’t occur.

The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Under Aquilini ownership, a top-level management change isn’t made without a ready replacement. Dave Nonis to Mike Gillis. Gillis to Trevor Linden. The Canucks haven’t had an in-season coaching change since Marc Crawford replaced Mike Keenan during the 1999 All-Star Weekend.

I don’t sense any kind of management/coaching search from the organization over the last few weeks. Benning/Travis Green was to be their combo for the next two seasons. Absolutely, that could change and no one can feel safe. You can sense uncertainty throughout the organization from four provinces away.

I periodically spar with Vancouver’s extremely passionate online fanbase, but you can’t blame them now (I’ve seen all of your hot dog-costume memes in reply to the report of the meeting). Everyone is scrambling; this was supposed to be a breakthrough year.

Several of our Vancouver-based Sportsnet compatriots — with a much better grasp of market dynamics than mine — are saying they believe fan reaction during Wednesday’s return versus Colorado could determine course of action. That’s insane. Certainly, a cratering of ticket sales affects change, but to base moves on one night’s festivities is awful process and doomed to fail.

The ownership meetings on Monday were very much about, “Ok, we didn’t expect this. If it doesn’t change, we’re going to have to do something. What’s that going to be?” In the short term, more than the GM or the coach, it’s going to be about fixing on-ice. Part of that is practical, part of that is a desire to inform the players that they have to share in the blame. There are several problems to address, but no greater mystery than what has happened to Elias Pettersson.

According to our daily Sportlogiq report, Pettersson is tied for sixth in the league in cycle chances with 28. Other than that, he’s a stunning non-factor. Two seasons ago, he had 24 goals from the slot in 68 games. In 2021-22, he’s got 0 in 16. He’s simply too good for that. It’s never solely on one player, but his descent from the usual eliteness torpedoes Vancouver’s attack.

The Canucks have been working for some time to build up his play and confidence, but there are no answers so far. I’m not in their room, but that sounds like the largest frustration point among the team — adding to the tension in the room, on the bench, on the ice and throughout the organization. They are thinking about trades, but this is the time vultures circle and you’re thrown anvils instead of life preservers.

You work in an office environment long enough, you know when things are nearing DEFCON 1. They’re not there — yet — in Vancouver. But the events of the last 48 hours mean we’re headed down that road if things don’t get better.

32 THOUGHTS

1. If the Canucks do eventually consider any changes, it comes at a time when organizations are extremely nervous about the challenges of properly vetting candidates for current/future openings — and consequences for failing to do so. Anaheim and Chicago absolutely cannot afford mistakes. The league office holds major influence in these decisions, and I’m not sure that’s going to change much. But I can see more and more teams turning to outside entities in search of fresh perspectives, or to make sure they aren’t missing anything. It’s extremely common outside the NHL, and inevitable within.

One influential name many of us wouldn’t know is Mike Forde, executive chairman of Sportsology, billed as bringing “a wealth of strategic, performance, creative and technical expertise to help your organization realize its full potential.” Last April, The Ringer’s Yaron Weitzman billed him “The NBA’s GM Kingmaker.” A former Premier League executive with Bolton and Chelsea, he created his current business at the start of 2014. It has a worldwide reach among several different sports. New Jersey’s parent owners, Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, is one client, which meant Forde had a role in the process that led to Tom Fitzgerald being promoted to full-time manager. Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis used Forde to oversee the NBA Wizards’ GM search in 2019. “Mike was recommended to me by (NBA Commissioner) Adam Silver,” Leonsis said via email. Forde taught him “not to be bound by doing the same old things in the same old ways. We took our time to build a leadership group with complementing talents and skills. Traditionally, front-office searches look for the ‘one great person,’ and I approached the process thinking about how to bring together great people around ‘one big goal’ of winning a championship.”

Interestingly, both of those situations resulted in promotions for internal candidates, Fitzgerald with the Devils and Tommy Sheppard with the Wizards. “Everyone says, ‘Well, that was a long process to get someone who was in the building,’” Forde said on this week’s podcast. “Actually it was a great process because (Leonsis) could say, ‘I looked around, I spoke to multiple people, I saw where the market was, I saw what our needs were, and hired two or three different people around (Sheppard), built a braintrust that hopefully now is going to take him in year three to great success.’ That’s the silhouette of the future for me and it starts with the curiosity of the owner.” That’s the thing that intrigued me most about Forde’s work. It’s not simply “We have to get rid of the old,” because that doesn’t always make sense and, in the media business in particular, it’s led to terrible mismanagement. It’s “we have to find the new and merge it with the old that still works.” It’s early, but the Wizards currently lead the NBA’s Eastern Conference and the Devils, who are fun to watch, show real signs of progress. That Dawson Mercer looks terrific.

2. Forde isn’t crazy about Sportsology being called a “search firm.” If anything, what he wants to do is ask owners to slow down the process when they search for someone new. He says that, for example, the average coaching/GM search in the NFL lasts 17 days. “(What we do is) less about coming with the latest piece of wearable tech or face-recognition technology, it’s about suspending judgement,” he says. “And in 17 days it’s pretty impossible to suspend judgement, do a deep dive to learn best-practices, next-practices etc., and then come out the other side. So what happens is people go, ‘I want to move past x individual, I think I’m going to take some time,’ and they get pushed into the next thing which is to go to a Super-Bowl winning program, find a number two and hope by osmosis that creates success.” His experience is “you have more time than you think.”

3. “The first thing is, can you just allow the owners to take a deep breath?” Forde adds. “To not listen to the media, not listen to agents, not listen to other executives, to say you have to hire someone in three days.” The Wizards took four months “just to understand what the future could look like before (Leonsis) decided on the front office. Not everyone has the luxury of that time, but they certainly have (some) time. We’ll encourage ownership groups: stop, stand still. Don’t think there’s a unicorn at the end of this, one person who’s going to run it to change the future of the franchise. It’s probably going to be built around several people in a braintrust. We go through different phases of transformation. It might be re-imagining strategy, re-imagining the front office, re-imagining the type of people that could work for that franchise, re-imagining a target operating model or different processes, it could be re-imagining anything that could do with data or technology.”

I loved his take on five-year plans. “In our experience, that is four years of trying things and then in the fifth year, you throw a lot of things at the wall and see if it sticks. Right? The challenge of an owner is, when they hear that — and an owner said it to me in a different sport last year — I’ve had two of these guys before, now I’m eight years in and I’m still where I was on day one. So how can your business plan as a GM fit the needs of the business, not this sort-of utopia four or five years from now?” He also says head count has zero correlation to winning, and refreshingly, has little time for the analytics vs. eye-test debate, because he doesn’t think either is the most important skill. “The people who do this job successfully year-after-year…their ability to communicate up and down a vertical is non-negotiable.” MLB Oakland’s Billy Beane, immortalized by Brad Pitt in Moneyball, had the gift of being able to translate the information he considered valuable to the people who needed to understand it.

4. Earlier this week, the NHL’s Executive Inclusion Council commissioned a voluntary demographic study of the league-wide workforce in order to gain a better understanding “and appreciation” of who works in the business. In addition to diversity of people, there’s also diversity of thought and experience. When I first joined Hockey Night in Canada and watched practice with the Garry Galleys, the Glenn Healys, the Kelly Hrudeys, the Greg Millens and the Craig Simpsons, that’s where I realized how little I knew. How much there was still to learn. To intuitively “see” things that happened. It’s really important to look for fresh blood, but I still think about making a critical decision for a hockey team without that intuition.

“Let’s qualify this,” Forde says. “Do I think there’s a baseball president who could run an NBA team at a leadership level? Yeah I do, absolutely I do. Do I think there’s a leading NFL person who could add value at a leadership level in European soccer? Absolutely, because I think 80 per cent of the mechanics of the job are very similar. You’re building teams, you’re hiring people, you’re managing a process, you’re managing the owners, you’re managing the media, there’s a lot of similarities. Now, there are thunderbolt moments in every calendar year of each sport where you are required to have knowledge that creates a competitive advantage. But I do believe that building this commitment to (intellectual) diversity into the management is really important. If we have 10 people, do we want the top four ranked people to be from outside the sport? Probably a bridge too far…But the challenge is this bias, which is unless you know and have put the time in and grinded around the league — you can’t have value. And that is not true in our experience. Because we have seen people move between sports, come from outside of sports and come in and add huge value…Six or seven years ago, the NBA was very linear in its thinking about where it could get a competitive advantage. It was, ‘Go to the next generation of people who had been trained in the some way as the last generation, and ask them to do the future job better.’ Which really produces the same results.”

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