The most important stories in the world of hockey are often born in news reports that no one reads.
On August 16, 2010, for example, almost no one cared about a brief news report revealing the hiring of veteran scout Al Murray to the Tampa Bay Lightning.
A few months earlier, Steve Yzerman had taken charge of this organization as general director. In the 2010 draft, Yzerman and his new assistant Julien BriseBois chose Steven Stamkos first overall, a strong take that added to the selection of defender Victor Hedman (second overall) in 2009. But in the end, Martin St-Louis being aging and Vincent Lecavalier arriving at the dawn of his thirties, there was still a whole team to build. And in a masterful way, it was Al Murray who did it.
As soon as he took office, Murray began recruiting gems who would eventually lift the Stanley Cup in the early 2020s: Nikita Kucherov (58th) and Ondrej Palat (208th) in 2011; Cédric Paquette (101st) and Andrei Vasilevskiy (19th) in 2012; Brayden Point (79th) in 2014; Mitchell Stephens (33rd), Anthony Cirelli (72nd) and Mathieu Joseph (120th) in 2015 as well as Ross Colton (118th) at the 2016 session.
Magicians like Al Murray are rare. In the early 2000s, it was he who laid the foundations of the alignment that would allow the Los Angeles Kings to win the Stanley Cups in 2012 and 2014. And these days, you find many Moreover, his mark in the identity of Team Canada Junior, of which he was the chief recruiter for this year’s World Championship.
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When Steve Yzerman was named general manager of the Detroit Red Wings in 2019, Al Murray remained with the Lightning. Yzerman therefore entrusted his amateur recruiting department to his former teammate Kris Draper. This strategic hiring was announced in a few lines on the team’s website.
However, things did not go as they did in Tampa.
Since Yzerman’s arrival as GM, the Red Wings have picked in the top 10 on four occasions in the draft. Detroit also benefited from the 6th and 9th selections in 2017 and 2018, during the two years preceding his arrival.
During the seven drafts covering the period from 2017 to 2023, Red Wings scouts benefited from a whopping total of 61 selections. But of those 61 at-bats, only three turned into hits: forwards Joe Veleno and Lucas Raymond and defenseman Moritz Seider. To these three regular NHL players, we can add forward Marco Kasper (8th in 2022) and defenseman Simon Edvinsson (6th in 2021), who are settling into the NHL.
This explains why there has been no real rebuilding in Detroit. This is also why the Red Wings are on track to miss the playoffs for a ninth consecutive year. And that explains why Yzerman, who fired coach Derek Lalonde on Thursday, is already on his third head coach in five years.
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Derek Lalonde
Photo : Associated Press / Paul Sancya
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When we look at the Red Wings roster, we see a team patched together with free agents and veterans from outside like Vladimir Tarasenko (33 years old), Andrew Copp (30 years old) and Patrick Kane (36 years old) on offense; or like Justin Holl (soon to be 33), Ben Chiarot (33), Jeff Petry (37) and Erik Gustafsson (32) in defense.
The Red Wings roster does not reveal a project likely to lead to something bigger or more solid. Rather, it reveals the portrait of an organization whose amateur recruiting department underperforms and whose CEO must try to move forward by improvising and constantly putting out fires.
In short, the Red Wings are not out of the woods.
The two – diametrically opposed – experiences of Steve Yzerman as general manager of the Lightning and the Red Wings remind us how much the hierarchy of NHL organizations has changed. Since the introduction of the most restrictive salary cap among the major North American professional leagues, general managers can no longer be creative when they find themselves in difficulty.
Accounting now makes transactions more difficult to complete. Resorting to the autonomy market most of the time amounts to overpaying and making your organization less competitive. So there remains only one alternative: you develop talents or you die.
The most important employee of a sports organization is the one who can feed it with talent. In today’s NHL, if the head scout is not efficient and consistent, the general manager and coach are nothing and control nothing.
In the NHL, chief scouts should therefore be the highest paid administrators within their organization. After all, they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the quality of the show over many years.
It is therefore an amusing anomaly that their hirings are always announced to the public through discreet and laconic press releases.
