If you are a team on a budget, it’s smart to take big swings on outsiders.
If you are a team with a massive budget, it’s still smart to take big swings on outsiders.
That is the best way to look at the latest front-office hire by the Vancouver Canucks, who announced Thursday they have added Richard Seeley as an assistant general manager. Seeley will also serve as general manager for the Abbotsford Canucks.
Seeley knows the AHL, there’s no doubt: He spent the last eight years running the Los Angeles Kings’ minor-league squad.
He is 48 and a former player. But tucked into his work history is an interesting might-have-been.
In the summer of 2016, as the Florida Panthers were in the middle of a revolution, Seeley had just finished his first season as an ECHL head coach. The Panthers needed a new AHL head coach.
Even with a thin head coaching C.V., he still stood out in interviews, Steve Werier recalls a decade later.
Werier, who was one of two assistant general managers who were in reality directing the Panthers’ front office at the time (he and Eric Joyce had been empowered by owner Vinnie Viola, who had sidelined GM Dale Tallon), said that while Seeley was soft-spoken, his intelligence was obvious. You may recall that Werier and Joyce came to be nicknamed “the Computer Boys.” They were eschewing the norms accepted by old-school hockey thinkers, using, shock-of-shocks, more than just their gut to inform their decisions.
In Seeley, they saw a guy who had come through the game but who seemed self-aware of his experience and where the game was going.
“Impressive,” Werier said of how Seeley presented himself. The Powell River native had ended a WHL career as a hard-nosed defenceman and captain of the Prince Albert Raiders, then gone on to seven years in the AHL before spending a handful of seasons playing in Europe.
It was clear to Werier that Seeley knew where he was at and had a progressive mindset.
“We interviewed a lot of guys,” Werier said. “Most of them tried to pretend that they were innovative — thinking that’s what we wanted to hear — but (Seeley) was the most interesting and clearly not faking it.”
As Canucks GM Ryan Johnson continues to build out his staff, it seems likely he will continue to make bets like he is making on Seeley and Daren Hermiston, the former agent hired last week in a player development role, and finding staff who are perhaps off the beaten path, or early in their journey.
This is the question that we have asked since the hiring of Johnson and his bosses, the Sedin twins. They are good people, who treat their staff well, but will they be given the breadth of staff they need to be successful?
That’s why Werier and Joyce were keen to take a swing at Seeley, believing he would grow into a quality thinker and operator. They weren’t necessarily budget-conscious in their hiring, they were just trying to look in corners that hadn’t been explored.
In the end, the other decision makers looked elsewhere for their AHL coach and hired Geordie Kinnear, who had been an AHL assistant coach for more than a decade.
He was fine, but a decade later, Werier still stands by his preference.
“If you don’t get them when it’s too early, you won’t get them when it’s too late,” he mused. That was the pushback against hiring Seeley — that he wasn’t ready.
“He was my favourite guy. We hammered the table for him.”