Take someone who is a GREAT employee in their current role. Maybe they’re an awesome data entry person in an Office Space job; or maybe they’re the best 18-year-old sales girl ever at a typical retail store in Suburbia, U.S.A. Just because they are great at their job doesn’t mean that their success will translate to a good manager. There are a host of skills that will determine whether the person is a good manager or not—and those skills have NOTHING to do with the former position they excelled in.
Just because someone is great at 10-key and is focused for 40 hours per week, doesn’t mean that they will be good at defusing interoffice problems. Just because someone is good at greeting customers at the front door doesn’t mean they’ll be able to fill out a schedule for the entire staff. No matter which industry we’re talking about, they are a COMPLETELY different skill set. So why doesn’t anyone else understand this?
Case in point: Bob Gainey was a GREAT hockey player. He was the kind of guy that anyone would want on their team. He could score when he was asked to score. He was a two-way force. He could shut down any opponent on any given night. He was a leader. He was a winner. By any measure of a hockey player, he was everything an organization could ever want.
He was a better captain in Montreal than he was a GM...
But just because he was a great Montreal Canadien player doesn’t mean that he would be a great Montreal Canadien executive. It’s the Wayne Gretzky rule of management: Even a man named The Great One wasn’t great at everything.
Yes, he can speak both English and French. No, that doesn’t mean he knows how to effectively handle the Quebecois media when they anoint Carey Price as the next savoir on St. Catherines Street. Yes, he played in front of Ken Dryden. No, that doesn’t mean he knows what he was doing with the Jaroslav Halak/Carey Price situation. Yes, he showed leadership during his playing career. No, that doesn’t mean he knows how to work contracts under the salary cap. You get the idea.
His 7 year tenure as head of the Habs has been all over the map. He made the highly questionable trade bringing Scott Gomez’s contract into Montreal over the offseason. Whether Gomez has been productive or not doesn’t change the fact that he’s making WAY more than he should be in today’s salary cap climate.
He didn’t hesitate when making the decision to build his team around a bunch of small scorers that would have problems in a tight checking game. There’s no doubt that Michael Cammalleri, Brian Gionta and Scott Gomez are all highly-skilled players. But without time and space, they will be less than effective. Where are the players that are supposed to help create the time and space for the more talented members of the Canadiens?
Then there’s the defense: The way the team is built, the Habs cannot say they have an above average defenseman outside of Andrei Markov. No matter how much scoring they have up front (and money invested in scoring), their blueline is not going to get it done over the course of an 82 game season. This is a team that is depending on Paul Mara and Hal Gill for almost 20 minutes per game. Was that really the plan?
Gainey’s departure brings another idea to light. Just because an executive is successful in one situation, he is not guaranteed to thrive in a different situation. In Dallas, he helped build the Stars into one of the best teams of the 90’s. Apparently the success that he bred in the heart of Texas didn’t translate very well to the unofficial capital of French Canadian hockey.
Replacing Gainey will be his right-hand man, Pierre Gauthier. Gauthier helped build the foundation for some very stong, successful Senators teams in the mid-1990s before leaving for Anaheim. In the OC, he built the first successful Ducks team in franchise history at the end of the 90’s and the early part of the 00’s. There are plenty of things that Pierre Gauthier is going to do the minute he sits down in that Canadiens GM chair—but history says he should have an idea of what to do.
Gauthier will do a good job because he’s good at being a General Manager. After all, it’s not like they’re asking him to be a player.
