Reply To: Articles

[hockeygod]

What We Learned: The best general manager in the NHL

Ryan Lambert, Yahoo! Sports, 2011-12-19

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

By any measure, Don Maloney worked Bryan Murray pretty good this weekend.

He somehow traded known-malcontent Kyle Turris, who admittedly had a very moveable contract, to Ottawa for David Rundblad, a highly-regarded and very young rookie defenseman, and a second-round pick that's probably going to end up being pretty high.

Of course, if we're being completely fair, this wasn't entirely the result of Maloney being phenomenal at his job. For some reason, the media has spent much of this season treating Turris's holdout not as it actually was (a sub-mediocre player asking for an absurd amount of money over a silly term) but as though this was a legitimate talent whose absence from the lineup was somehow having an adverse effect on his team.

Somewhere along the way, Turris became a guy who just needed a little bit of help to unlock his potential, whatever that might be. He'd posted a career high of 11 goals and 14 assists in 65 games last year, though he did so on just 11 minutes or so a night. Theoretically, given extra time could result in that number increasing significantly. But the magic of what Maloney did here is to maximize and take advantage of the hype surrounding Turris's holdout, which presumably came simply because no one holds out that long any more.

Wrangling a second-round pick on top of a 21-year-old former first-rounder (whose biggest mistake in Ottawa seems to have been not being as immediately good as Erik Karlsson) that's supposed to be able to lug the puck in a manner not unlike Sergei Zubov. Adding him to a D group that already has Keith Yandle and Oliver Ekman-Larsson could make the Coyotes' backline terrifying in two or three years.

Maloney let the Senators (and reportedly two other teams) come to him, even after repeatedly insisting that Turris wasn't going anywhere, and in fact telling the center himself that he wasn't being traded the morning before the swap was made. But the Senators, resolute in wanting to acquire Turris in an attempt to acquire every foundering young talent in the league, were not to be deterred.

Not that fleecing Bryan Murray in a trade is especially praiseworthy in and of itself. The tragicomic way in which he mismanages his organization's assets is well-documented. But what makes Maloney exceptionally good at his job is that he has built from having a very successful team on a shoe-string budget in 2009-10 and has continually been improving it even if the odds have continually tilted away from his favor.

(Coming Up: Why does Pierre Gauthier still have a job?; Barry Trotz, villainous character; Dan Boyle's fantasy team-hampering injury; Sean Couturier hit with a puck; Pegulaville losing its sunshine; Sutter time in LA; Tom Renney is obsessed with Ales Hemsky's stick; Mike Green's importance to the Capitals; the rare Erik Johnson goal; Selanne is a pro, but one Jets fan is delusional; the goal of the weekend; Elias makes Devils history; Stamkos should fear Kessel; and a terrible trade proposal for Shea Weber.)

Let's not forget, this is a team that is, at any moment, about 24 hours away from getting moved out of the desert and to who-knows-where, and it must be incredibly difficult to attract free agents to play there. This is particularly true given that Phoenix's budgetary restrictions are widely known to be quite severe (for instance, the Coyotes were 29th in the league when they won 107 points and their division in 2009-10). And in a way, getting that kind of success under budget has even held him back further.

Had the Coyotes not made the playoffs last year for the second consecutive season, Maloney almost certainly would have offloaded outgoing world-class goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov for more than the third-round pick his negotiating rights eventually garnered.

But having faith in his own club — and Dave Tippett's system, specifically — led him to enter this season with the tandem of Mike Smith and Jason LaBarbera between the pipes. Everyone laughed, said it was a remarkably deft decision. Defensive systems work great when you have an excellent goaltender, but Smith and LaBarbera are anything but.

He also has gone about trying to lock up some of the team's better players for the future while not trying to weigh it down too heavily for new ownership. Yandle and Martin Hanzal are on the books for the next four and five seasons, respectively, both at fair, affordable rates, and one suspects that there will be more of the same in the future for the younger member of the team's core.

So here we are, with the Coyotes admittedly ninth in the West, but also just two points out of both a playoff spot and the division lead despite a really poor team shooting percentage of 8.3. This team could very well go on a strong run here, put together more than a few wins and make a very strong case for itself when it comes to the postseason.

If the Coyotes qualify for the playoffs for the third straight season, Maloney is going to have had a hell of a lot to do with it. And even if they don't, he's building a really strong set of youngsters who could become a low-cost force in the NHL for years to come.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."