Photo: Dave Sandford
On Wednesday, ESPN’s Pierre LeBrun released a fascinating feature on former Capitals General Manager George McPhee and former Penguins GM Ray Shero, which you must read right here right now because you have nothing else better to do.
So what did we learn today?
“I’m starting to accelerate again by going to a lot of games. I had great discussions with Dean Lombardi about scouting after termination. He said it was clarifying — that he regained perspective of all the leagues, and what he wanted to do with his next team. Sure served him well.”
“I knew at the time what the issue was, and I should have addressed it. I was trying to be patient and hope things would work out. It’s easy in hindsight. But if I say anything else, then I’m pointing fingers, and I don’t want to do that.”
(This may corroborate Brian MacLellan’s comments that the team was hurt when they missed out on free agent defenseman Willie Mitchell. “I mean the Brooks Orpik signing is the type of guy that we’d been coveting for a number of years,” MacLellan said to 106.7 The Fan over the summer. “I think it was 2010, we went hard after Willie Mitchell. He was 33-, 34-years-old at the time, and we lost out to him in the finals. It was down to two teams. And I thought it had a big impact that we did not get him.”)
“The difficulty right now not working is that you feel you have all this knowledge and experience that is going to waste. You’d like to help someone. Certainly if there are opportunities next year, I would like to be involved.”
“My son is playing for the U.S. national development here, the U-17s. So, we decided this would be a great year to keep the family together. Because he was up at Shattuck’s [high school hockey] in Minnesota for two years, and it’s hard when your kid goes away at 14. So this is a year to spend time together. And it’s been great getting to know him again.”
“The quality of life is really good right now. It’s been really fun.”
Miss you, GMGM.
Russian Machine Never Breaks is not associated with the Washington Capitals; Monumental Sports, the NHL, or its properties. Not even a little bit.
All original content on russianmachineneverbreaks.com is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)– unless otherwise stated or superseded by another license. You are free to share, copy, and remix this content so long as it is attributed, done for noncommercial purposes, and done so under a license similar to this one.
Share On