The Athletic’s Sean McIndoe wrote a column focused upon whether the “failure” of the “Yzerplan” in Detroit is illustrative of any particular narrative regarding general managers’ abilities to pull off a strong “second act,” or the lack thereof.
McIndoe offers 5 potential explanations as to why even a Steve Yzerman can star in one team’s front office and struggle in another team’s front office, including the following:
Lesson 4: The NHL evolves faster than we want to think. This is a different way of looking at the problem. Maybe it’s not that the smart GMs get dumb. Maybe the [Glen] Sathers and [Ken] Hollands and [Brian] Burkes and Yzermans of the hockey world really were as smart as we all wanted to think, and maybe they stayed that way. The problem wasn’t that they changed, but that the league did.
In other words, maybe expecting Yzerman to be as good a GM in 2026 as he was in 2016 is no more unrealistic than expecting him to lace up the skates and go be the player he was in 1996. What works today won’t work tomorrow, and everyone gets left behind eventually. [Carolina GM Eric] Tulsky is making this all look easy now, but maybe in a decade he’ll be the old and out-of-touch guy struggling to keep up with these new-fangled ideas as he guides the Houston Scarlet Aeros to another last-place finish.
Lesson 5: Maybe nobody is good at this and it’s mostly luck. You knew this was coming if you’ve read my thoughts on the role of luck in the NHL over the years. And sure, it obviously can’t all be luck, and it would be depressing if it was. Besides, while it’s not always easy to figure out who the great GMs are, it sure seems like there are legitimately bad ones, which means there’s at least some skill in play here somewhere.
But maybe a lot of this all comes back to our desperate need as fans to feel like the right result always plays out in the end. If a team wins, their GM must be smarter than everyone else because the idea that everyone is basically rolling the same dice and flipping the same coins and some guys are just getting luckier on the results is kind of a bummer. It’s at least possible that being a successful GM is a little bit of skill mixed in with a lot of luck, and even if the first part of that equation is a long-term trait, that doesn’t mean the latter half will be.
I’m not sure. But I do know one thing: The next time a team breaks the bank to hire a sure-thing GM prodigy based on their success at their last stop, I’m going to be one of the skeptics. There’s something weird going on with these guys, and it should make us rethink how we feel about the job they’re being hired to do.
Continued; maybe some of what separates success from failure is hard work, some of it is luck, some of it is skill, some of it is situationally-based (as McIndoe argues in another one of his points) and a lot of it is this part:
Lesson 2: A front office isn’t just a GM. There was a time when it largely was, when guys such as [Sam] Pollock and [Harry] Sinden and [Cliff] Fletcher were wheeling and dealing based largely on their own gut instincts. These days, almost every team has ranks of assistants and analytics and consultants, not to mention an army of scouts. The GM might hire a lot of those people, and ultimately the buck stops with the boss. But that doesn’t mean you can airlift a guy out of one job into the next and expect anywhere near the same results.
Continued; the Red Wings’ pro scouting system struggled like nobody’s business after Mark Howe retired at the end of the Ken Holland regime, Kris Draper’s learned the hard way on the job at times as a rookie Director of Amateur Scouting…
And Yzerman pushed some of the wrong buttons while trying to recreate Tampa Bay’s successes in Detroit while not earning the same draft lottery luck or drafting skill (see: swapping a Kyle Quincey 1st round pick into Andrei Vasilevskiy).
None of this is easy. None of this is simple. And in a front office system that is increasingly about building a management team over building a manager who runs the ship via a cult of strong personality alone…
There’s an effing reason why weird bloggers like that George Malik guy keep on saying “GM X and the management team have to deliver” as opposed to pinning every move on the GM alone.
This isn’t just about a GM any more. It’s about the work produced by the management team that the GM builds, and, after inheriting Ken Holland’s post-Jim Nill departure amateur scouting mess, and not getting enough done on the pro scouting side to supplant the players that the Wings never really had to begin with as building blocks…
Yzerman overcorrected by trying to surround his team’s nascent core with Andrew Copp, J.T. Compher, Ben Chiarot, etc. etc. Maybe he got over-aggressive in 2022 and tried to get too good too quickly, and maybe that was the nexus of the middle-of-the-rebuild screw-up.
That’s a lot of “maybe’s” and “could’ves and should’ves” at 6:41 in the morning.
All I know is that the fact that Steve Yzerman’s plan didn’t fully succeed doesn’t mean that the next GM is set up to fail. It just means that building an “Yzerplan” isn’t easy, and isn’t about just one person succeeding or failing.
It’s a “management team” kind of success or failure, and there are many points of failure within that structure.
When absolutely everything has to go right, or the GM fails, there are lots of ways that things can go wrong. And, for better or worse, things “went wrong” repeatedly under Yzerman’s watch.
Some of those things are his fault. Some of them are not. And being a GM is hard.
