Las Vegas General Manager George McPhee seems to be on a big game hunt in Northern Virginia. Tuesday, the team to be named later announced the hiring of Vojtech Kucera as its Director of European scouting. Kucera’s previous employer is the Washington Capitals, where he had been a European scout for 16 years, most of them under McPhee.
This is the fifth former member of the Capitals front office hired by McPhee and the Vegas franchise in August alone. On the 4th, the team hired Wil Nichol, a player scout for Washington since 2011, as its Director of Player Development. The next day, McPhee tabbed Katy Boettinger as the team’s new Director of Hockey Administration. Andrew Lugerner, an intern in the Capitals’ legal department from 2011-2013, was hired as Vegas’s Director of Hockey Legal Affairs. But the big catch was Dave Prior, the Caps’ goalie coach from 1997-2014, who was hired less than a week later. Prior oversaw Capitals great Olie Kolzig and was instrumental in drafting NHL goaltenders Semyon Varlamov, Michal Neuvirth, Philipp Grubauer, and Braden Holtby. Varlamov and Holtby are both Vezina Trophy finalists. Holtby won the award last sesson.
Maybe Vegas will pay big bucks for an eccentric blog next.
Here’s the release from Vegas is Hockey:
LAS VEGAS (Aug. 16, 2016) – Bill Foley, majority owner of the newly awarded NHL franchise in Las Vegas, and Black Knight Sports & Entertainment, LLC, announced today that Vojtech Kucera has been hired as Director of European Scouting.
Before joining the Las Vegas team, Kucera served as a European Scout for the Washington Capitals since 1999-00 and owns the Ice Arena Letnany in the Czech Republic.
Kucera holds bachelor’s degrees in education and social sciences from Saint Thomas University; a Master of Arts in social sciences from the University of Toronto; and a degree in natural sciences from the Libensky Zamecek School.
The Las Vegas NHL franchise will begin play in the 2017-2018 season.
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under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)– unless otherwise stated or superseded by another license.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