Did the Ottawa Senators just hire their next GM in Pierre McGuire?
If so, it would be a bold move. But so is hiring McGuire in the first place, since he's one of the most polarizing figures in the game to so many people. Everyone seems to have an opinion about him
You have to give the Ottawa Senators and owner Eugene Melnyk kudos, or something, for courage of conviction. As they begin to rise from the ashes of the tire fire that has been the Senators for the past couple of seasons, after all the embarrassing moves and terrible public relations blunders, after all the losing and mockery, they could have gone for someone safer as their new senior vice-president, player development.
Much safer. But in choosing broadcaster Pierre McGuire for that role, the Senators went out and got one of the most polarizing personalities in the hockey world. Everyone seems to have an opinion of McGuire and when they express it, there’s about as much room for interpretation as there is behind Andrei Vasilevskiy for a puck in a series-clinching game. There are fans out there who will be sending the Senators Thank You cards for removing McGuire from their television screens. Those in the analytics world will wonder, and they may have a point here, how a team in the 21st century could possibly hire such a high-ranking and influential executive who has no use for advanced analytics.
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Pierre McGuire has not worked in any capacity for a team in 26 years. But he has been omnipresent in the hockey world as a broadcaster and analyst. He has great contacts at every level of the game, has watched as much hockey with a critical eye as any pro or amateur scout and, love him or hate him, he has a passion for the game. He knows the game, the players and those who hold the levers of power. He’s interviewed for numerous GM jobs in the past and has made no secret of his desire to get back into the results side of the game. And as the personality ‘Inside the Glass’ for NBC over the past decade and a half, he’s seen a lot of hockey at ice level, where it’s faster, more vicious and more chaotic than it is on television or hundreds of feet up.
“When you do the TV job that I had the privilege of doing for over 20 years, you get to see a lot behind the scenes of what works with each organization in the league,” McGuire said. “And what doesn’t work, what players are trending up, what players are trending down because one part of working in the media that I think really works if you're doing it properly is you do it with an unbiased eye. You don’t care who wins and who loses. You don't care about things that maybe fans care about or GMs care about. You're watching it with unfettered access and with an unbiased eye. And I think that really helps when it comes to the evaluation process of players.”
The Senators have had a bare-bones front office for years now and adding McGuire to that will give them the senior hockey voice they haven’t had since the death of Bryan Murray. And you never really know who’s running things in Canada’s capital because of the polarizing presence of Melnyk. GM Pierre Dorion says he doesn’t feel the least bit threatened by the presence of McGuire as his second-in-command, but you can’t help but think that there’s a good chance the Senators have hired his successor. Both Dorion and coach D.J. Smith are entering the final year of their respective contracts, while McGuire received a three-year deal. Maybe there’s nothing to that, but it sure makes it easy to connect dots.
The organization has a full-time analytics person in Tim Pattyson, but it’s not clear how much power he has in the organization. You’d have to think it won’t be near as much as McGuire will have. It will be interesting to see how McGuire and Pattyson coexist in this regime. And who knows? Perhaps having competing viewpoints will be good for the organization. McGuire’s job will be multi-faceted when it comes to player development, but they would not have given him the job if they were not going to give him some significant say in all facets of player procurement, from the draft to trades to free agency. Even though McGuire denied that he “hates” analytics, he made it very clear how he feels about them.
"It’s not that I hate analytics, but I believe in scouting,” McGuire said. “I believe that there has to be people that are boots on the ground, hardcore hockey people that can actually evaluate a player without utilizing numbers and the player passes the eye test. I still don't know if there's an analytic equation for heart, for character, for hard work, for fearlessness, for determination, so that's part of the formula that hardcore, boots-on-the-ground scouting has to be. I don’t hate analytics. I think it’s a tool that can be utilized in any kind of evaluation, but I’m a big believer in boots-on-the-ground scouting.”
Well, what McGuire fails to point out is that there actually are analytic measurements of things like heart and hard work. A player’s willingness to go to high-danger areas can actually be measured. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. (My former colleague at The Hockey News, Ryan Kennedy, has a great analogy when it comes to analytics. He says they’re better coroners than they are doctors.) But if McGuire’s old-school eye test philosophy can coexist with analytics, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the Senators.
It’s pretty clear McGuire will quickly become the public face and spokesman for what the Senators are doing when it comes to their rebuild. They’d be crazy not to make him that. And although Dorion has done a terrific job with the reconstruction of the Senators, we’re all familiar with how this often works. It’s very rare that the guy who executes the rebuild gets to see it through. If the Senators don’t make the playoffs in 2021-22, which they probably won’t, it will be interesting to see where they go and whether McGuire will be the one making the decisions.
As a Sabres fan I am virtually certain McGuire won the interview with all his grit/heart = pure hockey nonsense. If he has a big role it’s going to be a disaster.