Last week when speculation was rampant I added my thoughts on who were the likely candidates for the Las Vegas GM job. Truth be told my own personal choices at what I thought were the best likely candidates were McPhee and Florida's President of Hockey Operations Dale Talon.
Word has it that seven candidates were interviewed while Foley, Foley's hockey advisor Murray Craven and a small group of Hockey In Vegas staff huddled in a ranch in Montana. They whittled it down to two candidates, and George McPhee got the nod.
McPhee is famous for a lot of things, perhaps most from the "Fire Sale" of 2003-2004 and infamous for the Filip Forsberg for Martin Erat. And a few comments made by McPhee at his introductory news conference resonated with me.
His first was an aside comment about being out of the GM chair for awhile which had given him a change to "recharge."
The second was from a question about if he was going to scout more the pros (for the Expansion Draft) or the amateurs (for the Entry Draft). His main response was that he was going to scout both, "every day" but had an interesting follow. He mentioned that his best trades were made "when I knew the players," but that over time, tied to his GM responsibilities, his ability to really know the players was not as good. He knew his own players, but his knowledge of other players in the league slowly degraded.
Since his leaving the Capitals he has been "watching a lot of hockey... I'll be watching hockey every day."
In the 2003-2004 season, with a fairly expensive and unbalanced roster, and with a messy lockout looming, ownership directed McPhee to blow up the club. After the end of the bitter lockout of 2004-2005 used smart drafting from the picks he had accumulated to build a fast, athletic team that peaked in a 2009-2010 season where the Capitals tallied an amazing 124 points and a one seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
From there a series of poor drafts and poorer trades including the Forsberg-Erat fiasco. In this one the shining but still developing star Forsberg was dealt for winger Erat. This transaction made with the seemingly good intentions to trade one roster spot (where Washington had an embarrassment of riches) for a winger (in which Washington had a gaping hole), Erat objected to how coach Adam Oates was using him, and demanded to be traded. Soon more players demanded trades. Oates, and by extension McPhee had lost the locker room.
From there a flurry of draft day trades were meant to clean the roster of malcontents but were receiving poor return for the assets jettisoned out. Not long after McPhee, who had been the highly successful GM of the Capitals for 17 years, was out.
Complacency, too-slow-to-adjust, married to a roster, or maybe just burn out after 17 years?
But this is a guy who built and rebuilt the Washington Capitals several times during his 17 years at the helm. No, his teams never won the Stanley Cop, and that is an issue. But he knows how to develop a roster and how to develop personnel. He was key in building the Capital's scouting and player development systems to give them a talented, athletic team that won games.
And now he has had a couple of years to recharge, to get the fire back in his belly, and to watch lots of hockey.
I can't wait to see what McPhee does as the Las Vegas General Manager.
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