Examining the First Wave of GM Candidates from Model Organizations
John Davidson’s Criteria
From my last article, John Davidson’s criteria, in few words:
Knowledge of Winning Culture
Front Office Experience
Diverse Skillset
Strong, Brave Personality
The Fan Perspective
Fans never really get good looks inside organizations. This means that as much as we can try to ascertain who would be a great GM based on how hard they win trades, how much they underpay players or how their high profile draft picks work out, each of those things aren’t the result of a single persons labor. They are the result of a carefully crafted team and process working to make the best decisions.
Building these processes and crafting this team is a primary duty of an NHL General Manager and the evaluation and use of this this team and those processes are the other. This layer creates high quality information by way of creative and critical thinking and good player/development evaluation processes.
The second layer of GMing, the one we most often have access to, is in the high leverage decision making. The trades, the contract specifics, etc. However, if a GM isn’t working with high quality information the team will only go so far as their high leverage decision making can take them.
At the end of the day, a team of multiple smart people working well together will always be better than a single person(this goes for on-ice play as well).
In summation, we don’t, and can’t, properly evaluate GM hires from the outside whether or not the current Front Office decides to work in the shadows.
What we can do is try to learn from the best orgs and read through some of the words that potential rumored candidates have to say and what the best orgs look like.
The Model Org Frontrunners
The most recent high profile General Manager search has come from the Pittsburgh Penguins. Ultimately, they chose Kyle Dubas as President of Hockey Operations and he chose not to hire any GM, but within that search we can get a view of potential candidates for the Blue Jackets GM roles.
The Penguins are reported to have interviewed: Mathieu Darche (Tampa), Steve Greeley (Dallas), Jason Karmanos (Buffalo), Eric Tulsky (Carolina) and Dan MacKinnon (New Jersey).
From this list, Darche, Tulsky and Greeley stand out as being from model organizations (Tampa, Carolina and Dallas respectively). For now, they should be considered frontrunners for the Columbus role primarily because they all meet the criteria of inside knowledge on winning culture and were featured candidates for the most recent high profile GM opening.
From our perspective, we can’t know much about the actual qualities about the candidates outside of snippets from interviews. We don’t know what their plan for contention would be, how they interact with people in their org or the type of hockey identity they want to build within the Blue Jackets. We simply lack perspective.
What we do know is that candidates coming from these organizations have inside information into the structure and workings of model organizations (read: knowledge of a winning culture in John Davidson’s criteria). For that reason, we should be optimistic about their potential to bring that institutional knowledge into the Blue Jackets organization.
Eric Tulsky
Eric Tulsky is by far the most public facing of the above group, there’s simply a lot of information from and about him available to anyone with a bit of internet searching. He was one of the earliest proponents of hockey analytics and in creating new data and using it to improve hockey.
Front Office Experience
Tulsky has been in an NHL Front Office since 2014-15 where he started as an Analyst. In 2017-18 he moved to Director of Analytics when Ron Francis left the club and Don Waddell became General manager. In 2020-2021, he was given the Assistant General Manager title.
All in all, that adds up to 9 years of experience in an NHL Front Office.
Additional Insight
This article from John Matisz details his early journey from science to an NHL front office and it’s a worthwhile read if you want an idea of his progression in hockey spaces and insight into who he is as a person.
Tulsky's current gig pulls him in every direction. He's involved in all Hurricanes player personnel decisions, assists with contract negotiations and salary-cap compliance, and oversees 10 people working in analytics or pro scouting.
So we know that he can run and build a team, along with a full data platform, and we know he can wear many hats. He’s been behind the scenes and knows what a winning culture looks like. With these limited details, he checks all of the boxes that Davidson outlined as next GM criteria.
It’s hard to determine if Tulsky’s empathetic and collaborative style resonates with Davidson’s desire for a strong-willed, fearless disruptor but he certainly has the rest in spades. If I’m reading between the lines and connecting the dots of the past few seasons, JD is interested in someone who’s more of a “hardass,” but that’s largely conjecture.
Tulsky has presented at quite a few analytics conferences so we have proportionally more insight into his thought processes and insights.
While there’s a lot of good content available in his presentations, this particular insight into team construction bias stood out to me:
“There’s a bias that creeps into the team just from asking the people who made it what they think of it. Cause you’re going to tend to end up with the players who you like more than anybody else does.”
This is, essentially, the endowment effect, and it might explain a lot of the tension and frustration that was present within Jarmo Kekelainen’s Blue Jackets. He had a tendency to move on from prospects far after they had lost value and a tendency to believe his team, the one that just finished 4th worst, was close to ready for playoff competition.
Here’s another example of a Tulsky presentation that largely features the same theme, including the same title. There’s different information and it’s a more in-depth look than the previous slide but it still gives you insight into the type of information and style that Tulsky would bring to the Blue Jackets.
The Burning Question
Does Eric Tulsky have the direct and forceful personality that John Davidson and Mike Priest want in a general manager? Is he confident in bringing large and substantial cultural changes and is he more capable than the analytics personnel already on the Blue Jackets roster?
Said a different way, is John Davidson easily seduced by authoritative and charismatic hockey-forward men in the way that Jarmo Kekelainen, John Tortorella and Mike Babcock may indicate.
Mathieu Darche
Perhaps the current actual front-runner if the public media’s rumor-mill is to be believed. Darche has been firmly labeled an “up-and-comer” and his name has been constantly circling open GM positions and who was a player in bit-parts for the first three Columbus Blue Jacket seasons.
Front Office Experience
Darche has, what might be called, minimal front office experience. He’s only been associated with the Tampa Bay Lightning since 2019-20 when he was added as Director of Hockey Operations. He has 5 full seasons in a front-office role, but only two seasons as an Assistant General Manager, and did play in 250 NHL games over an 12 season pro career.
While there, Darche was deployed as a sort of understudy to new-GM Julien BriseBois.
Darche will be the right-hand man for general manager Julien BriseBois, who got to know him during the winger’s three seasons with the Canadiens.
Darche, who studied marketing and international business at McGill University, will focus on budgeting, negotiating player contracts and managing the salary cap. It’s an important role for a Stanley Cup-contending team hoping to keep its core together.
Additional Insight
Whether or not Darche succeeded in his abilities is up to interpretation. “Keeping the core together” did largely succeed (Cirelli, Cernak and Sergachev all signing very rich long-term deals) but the Lightning have faltered in the playoffs after reaching the Stanley Cup Finals three times consecutively and winning two of them.
Adding Hagel and Eyssimont has kept the team competitive, so it’s very possible Darche has had some positive influence on a team trying desperately to hang on, but that is primarily Jamie Pushor’s area of expertise.
Whether or not he has the player evaluation and amateur scouting chops that Davidson listed in his all-consuming criteria certainly remains to be seen.
We don’t have as many public facing interviews into Darche’s approach but the same article perhaps gives us a bit of insight as to the person and his techniques.
“She was in class with him, and they teamed up on a project. He did all the talking, and she did the grunt work. He just gets it. The people skills, the personality, the confidence, understanding big-picture things, he gets that.”
Largely, Mathieu Darche reads as a charismatic leader who may not possess stand-out information gathering skills but is a person who may be able to bring an energy that carries the performance of an organization.
From my perspective, he looks a lot like a Bill Zito in that regard.
At the end of the day, Darche’s many-hats, all-pies assitant role means he has a great look into the machine that is Tampa’s development system and a front-row seat into the everyday culture. Building a culture and maintaining it are different things. Darche knows what it looks like, but can he build the support structures from the ground up?
The Burning Question
Do the Blue Jackets have the quality information, decision making and talent evaluation present within the organization to support a charismatic leader or will they need further support in that regard?
If Cam Lawrence, Josh Weissbock, Rick Nash and Chris Clark are as talented as the organization seems to believe, the answer could be yes.
Steve Greeley
Front Office Experience
Steve Greeley is currently the Director of Strategy, Scouting and Player Development for the Dallas Stars, the role he’s been in since 2021-22. There is limited information available about his duties on official Dallas Stars websites but from Lebrun’s tweet and the Elite Prospect information page, we can get an idea of his journey.
He worked his was up from being an Amateur Scout in the LA Kings, spent two years coaching at Boston University (with Jack Eichel), two years with the New York Rangers and then three as an Assistant General Manager for Buffalo before finding his current role.
According to the Stars’ news release announcing the hiring, Greeley “will oversee the club’s scouting and analytics initiatives, and its application to evaluating player personnel decisions at both the amateur and professional levels
In total, he’s been in a Front Office role since 2015-16 when he was Assistant Director of Player Personnel. Is that significantly different from Tulsky’s position as an Analyst? It’s hard to say. If we only include roles with more decision making, his Front Office Experience clocks in at six seasons.
Additional Insight
Putting some pieces together and it appears that Greeley is a person who relates well with new players (he was involved with recruiting at Boston University) and brings a modern analytics approach with “old school” hockey knowledge.
“This was an opportunity to add a fresh face from outside,” Nill said. “He’s worked with different organizations. He’s got some different ideas. We just think it’s a good thing to bring somebody from the outside in and see what their [view is].
“Does he have some new ideas for scouting and for analytics? We’re building up our analytics department more. It’s a fresh face to come in and bring some new ideas and new philosophies.”
Largely, though, he was tasked with helping build out the Stars analytics department and bring new ideas into the organization. While that’s certainly welcoming to a Blue Jackets team that desperately needs new ideas, it’s difficult to ascertain what winning culture aspects he would carry along with him from Dallas.
His previous stops, the Rangers and Buffalo, did not experience a lot of winning while he was there and his stops were so short we can say that he likely didn’t have an influence on their top-to-bottom team culture.
That being said he, like Mathieu Darche, is something of a bright mind and fast-riser within the hockey ranks.
As far as public facing content, there’s little for us to work with. He wrote a few articles for Daily Faceoff though they aren’t substantial and don’t show much in the way of a behind the scenes process. He had a brief stint on the YouTube show with Frank Seravalli on DailyFaceoff if you want to get a read on some surface level aspects of personality.
Nothing from his analysis or YouTube presence really stands out to me but these are obviously quite a different medium than within or on top of a hockey operations department.
The Burning Question
Is Steve Greeley top of the organization material or is he simply a person who could better served as a member of a functioning unit? He doesn’t read off-the-page as a strong and brave personality but that might just be a function of his charisma not quite matching Mathieu Darche’s.
Wrap Up
In summation, Tulsky and Greeley would both bring experience building out full and integrated analytics departments and both have been involved across a broad spectrum of Front Office decisions.
Carolina does have a healthy team culture but hasn’t been able to get over the hump, partially due to their unique style of play and inability to find scoring talent. Similarly, Greeley does now have insight into the institutional structure of Dallas who looks like the now pre-eminent example of building through the draft.
Perhaps this seasons playoffs will offer valuable insight to either of these two executives.
Mathieu Darche has the best insight into the underlying operations of a team and culture capable of winning a Stanley Cup though does have the least Front Office Experience and hasn’t been as involved across operations as the other two.
Since none of these people have huge Front Office experience, perhaps we can turn next to some executives from winning organizations who have been involved in Hockey Operations for longer.
Similarly, we can look at some current or past General Managers who may be positioned for the President of Hockey Operations role. These people would be replacements for John Davidson and serve as architects of the operation going forward.
Since this title potentially presents a promotion we can look for executives who have bona-fide contender builds on their resume and can “take a chance” on a less well-rounded General Manager.