While they may be too polite to say so, the Devils aren't happy with the homesick Brent Sutter suddenly coaching the Flames.
Back-tracking over the Sutter-New Jersey issue and a few other notes before the draft and free agency wash over us like a tsunami:
I'd be a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of Brent Sutter leaving the Devils and the idea that Devils president and general manager Lou Lamoriello was fine with it if everyone in the Devils organization signed off on it.
Lamoriello said he's moved on and that once he made his decision to release Sutter from the remaining year on his contract he had no other choice but to move on, but he also made it very clear that he made his decision based on Sutter expressing a very real need to return home to be with family and tend to his Alberta businesses. There was never any mention of coaching his brother's NHL hockey team.
That came a few days later when Darryl Sutter called and asked permission to speak with Brent about the Flames coaching job. Lamoriello has too much class to say publicly if he had a problem with it and for the record, when exactly was the last time he made noise in the media about any club issue. He simply doesn't, he moves on and the dirty laundry stays in the laundry room.
But you get a sense of what the Devils really felt about the matter when you listen to team owner Jeff Vanderbeek.
"Yes, it puts a different light on things," Vanderbeek told Rich Chere of the Newark Star Ledger after Sutter was named head coach of the Flames. "It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
"All of the conversations we had throughout the year with Brent had been regarding his family, them not moving here, about Red Deer and changes he was contemplating back there. Certainly I was surprised when the prospect of coaching another team raised its head one month after leaving this team. It's upsetting".
"I certainly feel disappointed because I thought Brent was the right coach for the long term," Vanderbeek said. "It doesn't do a team or organization any good to employ somebody that does not have 110 per cent of his head in it."
Vanderbeek also has some class and he chose his words carefully, but the message is out there and one suspects that Lamoriello is at least on the same page as the owner who also signed off on the deal.
There is no compensation for the Devils for Brent Sutter's move, but Lamoriello made a fair point when he said there should be.
It used to be that there was compensation for this kind of thing but commissioner Gary Bettman, in order to end a series of disputes and headaches that often landed in his office, ended that process just a few years ago. When it was taken away, there were assurances that people were expected to live up to their contracts in return; you know, the old "a contact is a contract" concept that has been stomped on more times than a rookie bull rider at the Sutter ranch.
But shouldn't there be compensation? Sutter was a rookie head coach when he came to the Devils, at least by NHL standards. He got to learn the very complex ways of the NHL on their dime and it was actually a lot of dimes, a good many more than most rookies receive no matter what their junior or minor league pedigree. No doubt the Devils benefited from Sutter's abilities, at least in the regular season, but Darryl Sutter got a buffed and polished finished product from the Devils while Devils' fans got a sense that the boys from out west put one over on the city slickers back east.
Perhaps the final chapter has been written, but I'll wait awhile before closing the book on this one. It's now illegal to demand compensation for a broken contract, but there are other ways. A one-sided deal at draft day, a contract buried in the minor leagues when the Devils need some cap relief, it's not like we haven't smelled those kinds of deals in the past. Lamoriello is a class act, but that doesn't mean he's not a shrewd bargainer who knows how to call in a favour owed and I don't for a minute believe that Darryl Sutter doesn't have a sense of justice no matter what the by-laws say.
I know there's some occasional value in calling in a university "expert" or university trained "specialist" to explain a complex issue or give a point of view from an area of expertise not found anywhere else, but I had to laugh when a CanWest News Service writer felt the need to bring in a specialist in the business of sport to help defuse the argument that there might be too many Sutters in the Flames organization.
"The one thing you can't argue with is the reputation the Sutter family has for hard work, success and a willingness to win," is the quote from a University of Alberta professor who is said to specialize in the business of sport. "Under normal circumstances, you might think it silly to keep hiring within the family. For people who follow the Flames, they would probably be comfortable with that. In other businesses, people might be a bit worried."
He then went on to add: "You can't really go wrong in Alberta with the Sutter name, and the expectations that come with being the Sutters. Fans of the Alberta teams expect hard work game in and out. At the end of the day, win or lose, the fans want to see that effort."
To borrow a trademark phrase from Jon Stewart: Really!
Given the amount of playoff success by the Flames with the Sutter named attached, especially with Darryl Sutter as GM, one might actually argue that part about not being able to "go wrong" and for the record what fan in what city, win or lose, doesn't expect to see "hard work game in and game out." And wasn't Mike Keenan, brought in by Darryl Sutter, supposed to see to it that the Flames did exactly that after Sutter fired the "lax" Jim Playfair who "only" managed a 104-point season in his stint at the top before taking his turn at going out in the first round of the playoffs?
No offence to the reporter, but perhaps a "specialist" from outside Alberta might have been a better choice and no offence to the specialist, but what most fans want to see is wins and when they don't, well that's when people hire their brother and their other brother and their nephews and even their son.
Perhaps it would have been better to consult a historian, one who might have pointed out that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Exhibit A: Bryan Murray, then general manager of the Florida Panthers, once hired his brother, Terry, to coach. Ask the Panthers and the Murray family how that worked out.
A few other points on this matter:
--In his two seasons with the Devils Brent got the team into the playoffs before being bounced after one round. Isn't that Mike Keenan's record in Calgary? Maybe Lamoriello bought into the missing home and family speech, but even if he didn't could he really afford to keep a coach who didn't want to be his coach?
-- Does hiring one's brother get Darryl Sutter a pass for the botched job he did at the trade deadline when he over-accumulated players and then had to break the rules and play less than a full roster in games? Sure, no general manager can fully plan for a rash of injuries, but then how many others managed their cap space to the point where they couldn't call up players from the minors because they had overspent on trade-day acquisitions that didn't get the job done anyway?
-- Will Brent get to get an adequate backup goalie for the overpaid Miikka Kiprusoff, and will it be his fault (as it seemed for Keenan) if Kiprusoff comes to camp out of shape again this season. Writers tend to use the buzz words of "traditionally slow starter" when it comes to players who aren't ready to play at the first drop of the puck, but you can usually translate that into "out of shape." The best players in the game today train all year round and are ready for real competition in August. Kiprusoff does not have that reputation.
When you count up the early losses when Keenan had no choice but to play his only real goalie into shape, you can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been in management's best interests to either have a personal trainer assigned to Kiprusoff, or to make a move during the season to get a goalie who could provide some rest when there was no choice but to overplay the only experienced goalie the coach had. Either way that mess fell on Keenan when it was the general manager who created the conundrum.
-- Darryl Sutter has chosen a "made in Alberta Solution" to fix all this and maybe it will work, but if we're dealing in absolutes here what's absolutely true is that the Flames as an organization should have deleted a Sutter to fix what ails the operation. One hardly needs a "specialist" to determine that.
Pardon me if I don't for a moment believe that a meeting with the commissioner fixed all the problems that ail the ownership group of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
What the commish really did was call them in and give them the old verbal spanking regarding airing all of their problems in a very public fashion. What he also did was tell them to shut the heck up through a week when the club will be very much in the public eye at the draft in Montreal and that when things quiet down into the summer, the other issues can be addressed.
You might wonder why they couldn't come to that conclusion without the aid of Bettman, but then think twice. This is the Lightning we're talking about and from the day owners Oren Koules and Len Barrie came into the league they've been good at making more noise than Mark Cuban while producing results on a par with the Los Angeles Clippers.
The end product of this will not be pretty. Neither man can afford to buy out the other nor, at this point, could one argue that they shouldn't. What's needed in Tampa is an owner like outgoing Montreal owner George Gillett Jr. who ran the organization with class and appears to be leaving the same way.
Which of course begs the question: why do men with real money want out (or are being kept out in the case of Jim Balsillie) of the NHL, but that's a column for another time.
