Favoritism is a struggle we all admittedly have. It could come in food, music, sports teams, and your favorite hockey players. It’s something that we naturally pick up on and something that gives us an option to choose if we like a specific thing over the other.
It’s good to have favorite things. It gets you through the day, it keeps you busy, and it lets you occupy yourself with something you like. That’s your basic everyday favoritism.
In sports, favoritism plays a little bit of a different role, but it essentially has the same meaning. For fans, it comes in players and teams. That’s why us fans cheer so loudly at games and put our hearts into the teams we like. With players, it’s a bit different. It’s never healthy to get wrapped up in a player on your favorite team, because that player could leave any second. But that’s why people are fans. Their jobs don’t rely on that player leaving or staying.
For GMs and front offices, favoritism should be something that should get you fired and never see the light of work in that field ever again. It’s a bit cruel, but it is the truth.
Let’s say a fan would be given the right to run an NHL team one day. That's fine, most GMs are hockey fans that put their hearts into the team they run. But in this case, this fan likes players for specific reasons that don’t have to do with how the player plays when it comes to skill and production.
Let’s randomly call this fan…
Mou Mamorielli. And he’s the general manager of the New York Islanders.
Mou is in charge of building a playoff contender out of a mediocre Islanders team, and he’s got limited cap possibilities to get the job done. He still needs to re-sign Mathew Barzal, as well as a few other players. Devon Toews– noted PPG defenseman– is one of the players looking for a new contract.
Instead of deciding to build his team off of proven skill, analysis, and even basic instinct, Mou decides to trade away Devon Toews to the Colorado Avalanche in exchange for a couple second round picks, just so he has less contracts to worry about and has a bit of extra cap freedom.
Mou does end up extending Barzal, but he also makes the ridiculous decision of extending older players that play a gritty type of game for long term deals that impact the cap negatively. So Mou ends up handing out Jean-Gabriel Pageau a six year deal at $5 million AAV, Matt Martin a four year deal at $1.5 million per, Kyle Palmieri a four year deal at $5 million AAV, and Ross Johnson a four year deal at $1.1 million AAV. None of these players have helped out the Islanders this year, and they’ll only make the situation worse as the years go by.
Mou ends up losing key players such as Devon Toews, and ends up keeping overaging depth players on expensive contracts, and as expected, it ends up coming out negatively for the Islanders all together. They’ll end up missing the playoffs, and they’ll end up not living up to previous expectations.
If you don’t understand where I’m going, here’s what I'm portraying. The ideology of keeping players you have a higher standard for because of reasons that really don’t make any logical sense, or because of reasons that have little to no impact with the on-ice performance, is stupid.
The St. Louis Blues have made the playoffs 9 times in the last 10 years, and are expected to make the playoffs once again this year, making it 10 times in the last 11 years. Granted, they've only won the Stanley Cup once in all of those years, but they’ve managed to create legitimately good hockey teams year after year.
The man behind it all is their general manager, Doug Armstrong. Doug’s been the GM of the Blues since July 1st, 2010, and he’s done a terrific job with the team ever since. Personally, he’s one of my favorite GMs, and that’s because of his lack of favoritism, his coldblooded heart, and his rare ability of letting go.
Two of my favorite stone hearted moves by Armstrong is when he let both of his captains walk in free agency. When David Backes left the Blues and signed with the Boston Bruins, Armstrong knew that Backes would’ve been asking for too much, and as a veteran who was aging, bringing him back on that 5X6m deal with an NMC in his first three years would’ve murdered the cap.
Sure, Backes was the booming leader in the room and the heart and soul of the team on the ice with his physical play and scoring strengths, but it wasn’t going to favor St. Louis in the future. Surely enough, it hurt the Bruins going forward. While still paying Backes $6 million AAV, Don Sweeney (the GM of the Boston Bruins) traded Backes to the Ducks in hopes of cap relief, and that was the end of Backes in Boston. During his time there, Backes put up 94 points in 217 games and by the end of his time there, Backes was described as a liability on the ice and he was even a healthy scratch at some points. The contract hurt the Bruins for a number of years, but while all of that commotion was happening, Armstrong was doing just fine knowing that he wasn’t the one dealing with that contract.
Same exact thing with Alex Pietrangelo. Alex led the Blues to their first cup in franchise history, and he had made the city of St. Louis a big part of his life, but he wasn’t even considered to be re-signed. Instead, Armstrong once again let his captain walk in free agency, and let another team deal with the cash and term. The Vegas Golden Knights ended up signing Pietrangelo to a 7 year deal that carried an AAV of $8.8 million. Pietrangelo hasn’t lived up to that contract whatsoever, and the funniest part is that the worst part is yet to come.
Vegas is in a massive cap crunch and it’s not even letting them play their best players who are on LTIR. While they’re stuck paying mediocre defensemen almost 9 million dollars, Doug Armstrong and the Blues are in a better financial and standings-wise position than the Knights.
Dough Amrstrong also jumped on the wagon when it came to buying low for Pavel Buchnevich and Ryan O’reilly, but that was common sense. Nobody trades Buchnevich for a second and a fourth line grinder. No matter how much you prefer physical players over skilled players. Again, the GM of the New York Rangers has his fair share of favoritism with grit over skill.
The willingness to let go and to not favor older players because of sentimental value is such an important thing to know about the hockey world, and surprisingly, there are still general managers who are afraid to trade specific players no matter how good or bad, because of how much emotional value they have to the team.
Building a team over feelings and not proven analytics and proper scouting seriously impacts teams in the worst ways possible, and yet GMs still continue to do it. The willingness to let go should be something every GM should be familiar with, but for some nasty reason, it doesn't happen. Some front offices refuse to take short term pain for long term helpfulness, and it hurts them. It’s not how you run a team. I still have no idea why GMs value borderline third and fourth liners so much to the point where they refuse to trade them knowing of the massive return that they could possibly get.
Sports management is a business and no matter what sport it is, it’s lethal to remember that keeping aging core forwards because of history makes little to no sense. Let the other managers make the mistakes of overpaying players with no on-ice impact and let yourself be the manager that takes advantage of the sellers. Be the Doug Armstrong when it comes to this sort of stuff.
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