Mirtle: Ken Holland is back as an NHL GM with Kings. It’s not the trend you might think it is

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There were some of the usual grumbles on social media, the type that follow a lot of hires when they’re announced in the NHL these days.

Word filtered out on Monday that the Los Angeles Kings’ next general manager was going to be Ken Holland, the 69-year-old Hall of Famer who ran the Detroit Red Wings and Edmonton Oilers for nearly 30 years combined.

Some were skeptical.

“Another retread,” was the refrain. “Can’t this league hire anyone new?”

If Holland were a head coach, these folks would have had a point. The NHL’s coaching carousel has devolved to the point of parody, with the same dozen or so names signing five-year deals, lasting two or three, and then moving around to different jobs while being paid by multiple teams.

The average tenure of an NHL coach right now is the equivalent of the lifespan of a Syrian hamster, and every so often, the little fellow makes a mistake or two and needs to be quickly replaced by another, similar option. (RIP Ginger.)

At the moment, NHL coaches have the shortest go between hiring and firing of all the Big Four pro sports, with the group of coaches presently employed having been in their roles an average of just under two years. Eleven of the current bench bosses are in at least their third NHL job, including five who have coached in four, five or six different places (Todd McLellan in Detroit, Lindy Ruff in Buffalo, Joel Quenneville in Anaheim, Peter DeBoer in Dallas and Paul Maurice in Florida).

Just 11 NHL coaches right now are first timers, one example of the perpetual reluctance of teams around the league to inject new blood at the position.

That’s really not what’s happening at the GM level, however. A whopping 24 of the 30 execs in that role before the Kings added Holland were first-time GMs, including the vast majority of those hired in the past five years.

One of the biggest differences for GMs versus coaches is that they simply have more job security, with the ability to withstand season-to-season ebbs and flows far more than coaches, who have become completely disposable. A GM is hired directly by ownership (or their proxy), and it’s a long-term commitment focused on building out an entire piece of a large organization.

The cliche that coaches are hired to be fired doesn’t apply higher up; in fact, you can argue GMs are probably kept on too long in a lot of cases. Hired to be mired, more like it.

The other thing separating GMs from coaches in this league is that it’s also far harder to get rehired as a “failed” GM. The execs that lead successful teams and win a lot of games are treated like gold and kept on for a decade-plus, i.e., Doug Armstrong in St. Louis, Julien BriseBois in Tampa and Jim Nill in Dallas.

The GMs that fail, meanwhile, have their track record very much out there in the open, with their teams’ win-loss record and playoff accomplishments easy to work out. Unlike a coach who may have been in the wrong situation or given a poor roster to work with, the GM is the ultimate arbiter of team success. When they struggle enough to get fired from a job that’s harder to lose, it doesn’t look great on the resume.

That said, it is still interesting that NHL owners have proven willing to turn the keys of their franchises over to rookies so frequently of late. If you look at the GMs hired over the past four or five years, the majority of whom are first-timers, there is no one throughline connecting them all.

About half of them played in the NHL — including Steve Staios (Ottawa), Craig Conroy (Calgary), Danny Briere (Philadelphia), Mike Grier (San Jose), Pat Verbeek (Anaheim) and Chris Drury (New York Rangers) — but the remaining recent first-time GMs did not.

Some of that is the trend toward analytics and younger hires, led by Eric Tulsky (Carolina) and Kyle Davidson (Chicago), but there are also now more agents taking on management roles, a trend that may just catch on given all of the success Bill Zito has had in Florida the past five years.

Have NHL GM hiring practices been as innovative, forward-looking and diverse as they could have been? As they are in other sports? No, decidedly not.

But as Columbus GM Don Waddell told me recently for this story on Tulsky’s rise with the Hurricanes, the league is evolving and becoming less insular. More people who didn’t play the game at a high level and don’t have hockey backgrounds are being hired — as interns and analysts and in all kinds of other roles — and over time the best of those staffers progress up the ladder until they’re in an AGM chair and one step away from taking over the big job.

“It was mostly — not all — but a lot of GMs came from (their) playing days,” Waddell explained. “That mindset has gone out the window here the last 15 years.”

It says something that most of the teams that have won the Stanley Cup in recent years had a GM who didn’t play in the league (including the Panthers, Golden Knights and Lightning). That’s a trend that hasn’t gone unnoticed by owners, who are now conducting more thorough searches and interviewing more unorthodox candidates than in the past.

Sure, there will always be some big names like Holland who get rehired, but I would argue that’s because, in some cases, it’s earned. The Kings went with a first-timer the last time around in Rob Blake, a former star player and captain, and it didn’t work out. Now they’re pivoting to an executive with a long track record whose former team has been knocking them out of the postseason again and again.

Only four teams have played more playoff games than the Oilers since they first hired Holland back in the 2019 offseason. Los Angeles is 18th in that stat, despite having a win-now roster.

There’s certainly some logic to that kind of hire, especially given the crossroads the Kings are at right now, needing some retooling and a bold move or two, rather than a full-scale rebuild.

In some cases, experience makes sense. In some cases, veteran executives with proven track records become available and deserve a chance in a particular role, and I think Holland’s recent resume in Edmonton — while not without warts — qualifies here.

But let’s not call it a trend when, for the most part, the Lou Lamoriellos are beginning to be phased out and replaced by those who haven’t sat in that chair before.

(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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