The Athletic’s Max Bultman provides answers to reader questions this morning, including a question as to the formation that Detroit’s future front office will take:
Discuss the separate responsibilities and/or functions of a GM vs. a president of hockey operations, and why you might want your analytics guy in one role and your “hockey” guy in the other, and which guy in which role. — Matt S.
There’s no one specific way to divvy up the roles and responsibilities in that kind of structure — it’s up to each organization how to define the roles.
Some recent examples of that front office structure have featured a former player as president with an analytics-minded GM — such as the Toronto Maple Leafs with Brendan Shanahan as the president of hockey operations and Kyle Dubas as general manager, or the Colorado Avalanche with Joe Sakic as president and MacFarland as general manager. In both of those cases, the GM was still the key hockey decision-maker, with the president providing guidance and input as needed and serving as a bridge between the front office and ownership.
But the Tigers, on the other hand, have Scott Harris as the key decision-maker in the president role, as is common in baseball. And the Predators, in hiring MacFarland away from the Avalanche, gave him both titles.
In the Red Wings’ case, it’s all going to come down to finding someone who can run a modern, forward-thinking hockey operations department. And that could still end up being just a single GM hire. That’s what the Devils did with [Sunny] Mehta, who certainly fits the descriptor of an innovative, sharp mind atop a department.
To me, though, the main appeal of a president-GM combo is basically that you get a chance to lure two bright people away from their current organizations via those title bumps. And if the Red Wings go that route, the real key is less about what the specific division of responsibilities and roles is, and more about making sure those two people are on the same page and well-suited for that kind of collaboration.
So yes, maybe it’s that familiar structure of an experienced president giving guidance to a forward-thinking GM, but it could also be a president focused on how the organization functions (the processes of staffing, scouting, development and data integration and usage) and a GM focused more on using those processes to make decisions. Maybe it’s more of a shared distribution of those subcategories, though one still has to have final say on hockey decisions.
The point is, there’s different ways to do it. But it all starts with picking your top decision-maker first, and going from there.
Continued (paywall)
