“The pressure to fill around the edges of the roster and make sure that we are performing well will fall directly on me. I know that is what myself and our management team will be judged by and what the fans and the media should be judging us on.”
-Kyle Dubas, Toronto Maple Leafs GM (Summer 2019)
Seven years ago, I came across a book that changed the way I think about management in hockey.
Behind the Moves (nhlGMs.com) was a unique concept. Author Jason Farris spent more than a year criss-crossing the continent in an effort to understand how successful NHL teams are built. He spoke with every living General Manager who had taken a team to the Stanley Cup Final and what resulted was 252 pages of sports management insight.
This wasn’t a PhD dissertation from Farris with his ‘Keys to Success’ or ’12 Pillars of Hockey Management’. Almost all of the content came directly from the mouths of the GMs he interviewed. The quotes and stories were fascinating.
The biggest takeaway that stuck with me is there’s no single formula for building championship teams. Lou Lamoriello’s philosophy is very different than Ray Shero’s, just like Shero prefers to build his teams differently than Brian Burke. What mattered is they all had a clear vision that was communicated and reinforced at every level of the organization.
When I spoke with Farris about the book in 2012, he talked about how Burke had convinced the Toronto Maple Leafs ownership group to take advantage of the power of ‘Big Blue’:
“Toronto has the best practice facility, a dedicated goalie coach, a player development staff, a scouting staff of 35 when most teams might have 20. You’re limited in what you can spend in player salaries, but they’re outspending everyone off the ice to try and create a competitive advantage.”
Seven years ago, Kyle Dubas was 26 years old and had just finished his first season as GM of the OHL’s Soo Greyhounds. Maybe Dubas was reading Behind the Moves too, but he probably didn’t realize that Burke was establishing the foundation for a Maple Leafs team he would later inherit.
Some of the efforts by Burke were intentional — like using the power of ‘Big Blue’ to make Toronto a world-class destination for players.
Others were not — such as continually missing the playoffs and positioning the Leafs to eventually land top-ten draft picks like Morgan Rielly and William Nylander.
Life is certainly different for Leafs fans in 2019.
Simply qualifying for the playoffs isn’t good enough anymore. Coach Mike Babcock is on the hot seat and no one in Toronto is happy with how Dubas is compensating the team’s growing pile of young, emerging superstars.
As we head into the 2019-20 season, instead of trying to predict whether Mitch Marner will score 85 or 100 points, I’m more interested in monitoring what Dubas called the “edges of the roster” in his quote at the top.
I want to know if Alex Kerfoot can fill the shoes of Nazem Kadri. Will Jason Spezza provide the veteran presence that Carlos Beltran did for the Houston Astros?
Superstar players are the necessary, but not sufficient pieces of a Stanley Cup winning team. Any Cup champion will tell you that it takes the entire 23-man roster to win and every role is critically important.
That’s the theme of Farris’ new book titled It Takes 23 to Win: Building and Being Part of Great Hockey Teams (23toWin.com).
The format is familiar if you’ve read Behind the Moves. A large, coffee table style book with over 250 pages of carefully organized quotes, presented in a variety of formats that appeal to any type of reader.
Hockey history buff. Fantasy hockey GM. Even fans of hockey outside the NHL like the women’s game and Olympic squads. All angles are covered in creative ways. There’s a choose-your-own-adventure feel to the content that allows you to flip to a random page and learn something new about building winning hockey teams.
What’s different about 23 to Win is that now we get to hear directly from the players. Farris says that while Behind the Moves was “going behind the velvet curtain of the GM society, this book is like walking down a couple flights of stairs and going into the dressing room with the same concept.”
The cover image captures that concept perfectly. Bob Gainey, who just happens to be number 23, lifting the Stanley Cup and being held up by an entire team of players around him.
After just working my way through the book for the first time, here are three quotes that stuck with me at this stage of my own learning journey.
(1) Accepting Your Role on a Team
“On teams that win, you have great people who are selfless. That’s number one. Everybody has to be selfless because you might not be put in a position where you have been successful before. You might be asked to play a different role than you’re used to — and it could be a bigger role or less of one — but the common theme of being on a great team is that you have to be selfless and willing to do whatever it takes to help the team be successful. That’s not always easy. At the end of the day, every NHL player has a little bit of selfishness in him. That’s why we made it to the NHL. You have to have a little selfishness in order to be successful. It’s just a matter of how much we keep inside us and how much comes out.”
-Mark Recchi in It Takes 23 to Win
One theme that appeared continuously throughout the book was the idea of establishing and accepting roles.
Not everyone can play 20 minutes a night or on the top powerplay. In a playoff series, it’s usually the depth players who make the difference between winning and losing, especially as injuries start to pile up. It’s the shutdown defenseman who can neutralize an opposing team’s star player. Or the veteran center who wins critical defensive zone faceoffs.
Joe Nieuwendyk told Farris that the 2003 New Jersey Devils team was defined by the timely contributions of their substitute players like Mike Rupp, Jim McKenzie, and Oleg Tverdosky. Nieuwendyk said GM Lou Lamoriello believed in his teams having “no superstars and a lot of people contributing to the team’s success”.
Take a look at this salary cap chart for Lamoriello’s New York Islanders team on CapFriendly and you’ll see the same team-building strategy. Nearly 20 players with cap hits between $1 million and $7 million this season. Lamoriello can afford to fairly compensate (or even overcompensate) his checking line forwards because he doesn’t have elite superstars demanding upwards of $10 million or more.
The Tampa Bay Lightning are trying to navigate through this challenge. GM Julien Brisebois and his predecessor Steve Yzerman have done a fantastic job using the example of Steven Stamkos taking less than market value to create collective buy-in from the rest of the roster, while also moving out those players who don’t want to accept their role in the pecking order.
Brisebois traded depth forward Adam Erne to Yzerman’s new team in Detroit this offseason and Erne’s comments to The Athletic after the trade hinted at why (emphasis mine):
“I think in the beginning it’s easy to not play the way that got you there. Sometimes you get caught up in just trying to play a certain role that the team might see you in or have you play, and that gets you away from what makes you yourself. I think, in Tampa, they didn’t have many big bodies, and I think there was a lot of emphasis on me just going out there and hitting guys and (bringing) that physical aspect, but I don’t think that’s what my value is. It definitely is a part of it, that’s part of my game, but I think I’m able to score goals and make plays and play with good players. I’m just looking to prove that with the opportunity.”
As Recchi said, every NHL player is probably a little selfish. No one can blame Erne for wanting an opportunity to produce offensively and ultimately earn a bigger contract than his current $1 million salary.
But to win a Stanley Cup, as Tampa obviously aspires to do this season, you need 23 players who buy into their roles for the collective good of the team.
Patrick Maroon showed that willingness with the St. Louis Blues during their rollercoaster, Cup-winning season last year. That’s probably why, 10 days after Erne was traded, Brisebois signed Maroon to fill that depth role of physical winger.
(2) Managing Faultlines
“I often compare a hockey dressing room to an office. In a dressing room you have 23 players. You have your leadership on one side, your fence-sitters in the middle and your naysayers on the other side of the spectrum. If your leaders are strong enough, they pull the fence-sitters — the ones who are the followers, if you will — to them and then you have a pretty good dressing room. But if the naysayers and the complainers, the bitchers and the moaners and the ‘grass is greener on the other side of the hill’ guys are stronger and pull the fence-sitters to them, then you end up with a bad, cancerous dressing room, just the same as you can end up with a bad, cancerous office workplace.”
-Brad Marsh in It Takes 23 to Win
Throughout 23 to Win, I also noticed a sense of how fine the line was between “winning” and “losing” locker rooms.
A few groups are doomed from the start, but most seem to follow the description above by Marsh. Some strong leaders, a handful of complainers, and a lot in the middle waiting to be pulled to one side or the other.
Adversity is inevitable during a long season. When it strikes, does the environment become toxic or is the leadership in the room strong enough to hold the line and pull everyone over to their side?
In The Cubs Way, author Tom Verducci described how David Ross stepped up and yelled “No, we’re not going to do that!” when a frustrated teammate threw his glove in frustration. A research paper titled “In Search of David Ross” at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference even tried to quantify the team chemistry impact of leaders like Ross.
In our discussion of Astroball, we discussed how Carlos Beltran found ways to diffuse conflicts and unite disparate factions. One anonymous player in 23 to Win talked about how he played the Beltran role on his own team. “I was a clique buster,” he said.
An interesting article in the Journal of Applied Psychology studied the emergence of “organizational faultlines” and the impact of conflict on baseball team performance.
I love the concept of faultlines.
Every locker room has the potential for earthquakes. Does the pressure building between ‘tectonic plates’ of various cliques get diffused quickly by a smart and vocal leader? Or does it linger under the surface, only to erupt in a massive way during a frustrating losing streak or critical playoff series?
(3) On the Brink of a Stanley Cup
“The low point of my career was being traded from San Jose [to Vancouver with Christian Ehrhoff to enable the signing of Dany Heatley]. I thought that team was going to win the Stanley Cup that year. In the summer, after we had lost out in the first round, the Sharks had a town hall meeting to answer questions for the fans and media. I remember watching that on TV, and all the answers were right from Pavelski, Boyle, Thornton — the difference makers. I thought, ‘Man, this is a team that is either saying the right things or has learned their lessons and I would stay out of our way. Don’t do anything, don’t change anything. We had such a bad taste in our mouth after winning the Presidents’ Trophy…Maybe we got comfortable, or guys didn’t take days off when they should have because we had personal agendas? I think we learned from it, and had we kept that team together, San Jose would have won the Cup that year [2009-10].”
-Brad Lukowich in It Takes 23 to Win
One of the best aspects of Behind the Moves and It Takes 23 to Win is Farris’ ability to get candid comments from General Managers and former players.
With this new book, players were asked to select a roster of 23 of their former teammates who best represented the roles of their ideal hockey club. The fantasy draft activity seemed to put players in a different interview space than they’re used to and gives us a window into their true feelings.
Some players talked about how much they appreciated the locker room staff in a particular city. “If I was becoming a GM and I wanted to know somebody’s character, I’d go to the trainers,” Ray Whitney said. “How you treat the training staff is telling.”
Others, like Lukowich above, didn’t hold back when it came to wondering about what could have been. Was he right? Did Sharks GM Doug Wilson throw away a Stanley Cup in 2010 with too much roster tinkering?
We’ll never know. I just love that Farris has created a vehicle where players felt comfortable being honest about these aspects of team building.
I asked Farris about that quote above and he said Lukowich had moved on and certainly wasn’t dwelling on the issue, but “it was palpable how strongly he felt about that team and what a great opportunity he felt that team really did have.”
Only one team can win the Stanley Cup each year. The Washington Capitals won back-to-back Presidents’ Trophies before finally coming in under the radar and winning it all in 2018.
Tampa Bay knows that feeling well after steamrolling the entire NHL last regular season, only to get swept by Columbus in the first round. GM Brisebois was forced to move out a handful of players due to salary cap constraints, but he told Joe Smith and The Athletic that after the devastating disappointment he wanted to stick with his core:
“The story of this team, the story of this nucleus of players, of this coaching staff (is that) it’s not over. It’s still being written. The best and most memorable chapters lie ahead. I have great faith that eventually we’ll get the job done and we’ll bring the Cup back to Tampa with this group of players, with these coaches. I don’t know when, but I know when we do, it’ll be all the more sweeter because of the disappointments we’ve experienced along our journey to making that happen, including the disappointment we’re feeling right now.”
I applaud the patience displayed by Brisebois and owner Jeff Vinik, who echoed similar sentiments in interviews this summer, but the reality is blowing up the roster isn’t really an option for most GMs. In this NHL environment with long-term player contracts and a stalled out salary cap ceiling, you can’t rebuild a core on the fly.
The solutions available to management have to largely be internal: improving the team culture, investing in player development, managing the edges of the roster to avoid earthquakes, and then finding a little luck along the way.
But Farris gives us a window into what really matters in the end: the 23 players themselves.
“Management’s job is to remove all excuses,” Gerald Diduck says in the book, “so all that’s left for players and coaches is accountability.”
It Takes 23 to Win was self-published by Jason Farris and is only available circaNow.com