Lamoriello a man if integrity and honor
Posted: Thursday, June 25, 2009 9:53 AM
If you had told anybody back in the spring of 1988 that Lou Lamoriello, then the rookie general manager of the New Jersey Devils, would end up in the Hockey Hall of Fame, they would have spat, cursed, laughed and maybe even vomited. They would not have believed you.
Lou had taken over the team after the 1986-87 season, the Devils’ fifth in New Jersey. Before that, the franchise had spent six years in Colorado as the Rockies and two years in Kansas City, where they answered to Scouts. In all those 13 years, the most pathetic franchise in sports had never won more than 29 games, never lost fewer than 40 and never compiled more than 64 points. They had been the playoffs exactly once, in their second year in Colorado where they played in a division so putrid they made the postseason with a record of 19-40-21. They lost in the first round.
By the time team owner Dr. John J. McMullen hired Lou, none other than Wayne Gretzky had called the Devils a “Mickey Mouse organization.”
None of the NHL’s power elite figured Lamoriello would change that history. He was a college guy, the athletic director at Providence, and he wasn’t even Canadian. He hadn’t played in the NHL. And he acted as if he knew better how to run a franchise than men who had spit out their front teeth on frozen farm ponds in Saskatoon before their 16th birthdays. I’d say he was looked at with disdain, but that would be an overstatement of the respect he got.
But on the season’s final day, in the old Stygian pit known as Chicago Stadium, the Devils needed only to beat the Blackhawks to snag the final playoff spot in the East. To put the team in the right frame of mind, Lou had them delivered to the arena in limousines instead of the customary bus.
I was a columnist for The Record of Hackensack, N.J., back then, and I found myself sitting next to Lou in the press box. It was a tight game, and Lou, who was a prodigious gum chewer, ran out of gum and started eating paper napkins as he watched his team trying desperately to score the go-ahead goal. If they tied, they would be out of the playoffs. Only a win would do.
With time running out in overtime, coach Jim Schoenfeld pulled his goalie for an extra attacker and John MacLean’s 23rd goal of the season won it.
Nobody expected that they’d do anything in the playoffs, but this upstart team knocked off the Islanders and the Capitals to get to the conference finals against the Bruins. After an emotional loss at the Meadowlands, Schoenfeld had a difference of opinion with referee Don Koharski under the stands.
Schoenfeld called Koharski a “fat pig,” and invited him to “have another donut.”
The league suspended Schoenfeld for one game. Instead of accepting that as a good rookie college guy was supposed to do, Lamoriello appealed the suspension. When the league had no choice but to delay action, the officiating crew refused to work the game. After a lengthy delay, three high-school officials put on yellow security slickers and worked the game.
Schoenfeld was forced to sit the next game, and Lou got behind the bench. The Devils pushed Boston to a seventh game, but lost in the old Boston Garden. When they went home, their general manager had a bull’s eye on his back.
Lou didn’t care. I used to see a lot of him in those days, and he never complained about how he was treated or perceived. Writers and fans thought he was a tightwad. Other owners thought he was a brat who needed to be slapped down. Everybody thought he was too tightly wound.
Everybody was wrong. The Lou Lamoriello I came to know over the years that followed was the most intensely competitive, the most highly organized, the best-informed and the smartest general manager in hockey or any other sport. The Devils were always strapped financially, and he did drive a hard bargain, but very few players ever had a bad word to say about him, and even the coaches he fired with alarming frequency stood by him. He had a great eye for talent, a great team of scouts, a great farm system. And he had more integrity than anyone I’d ever met.
He drove writers to distraction because, alone among GMs, he never told anyone anything until it was an official announcement. George Young was running the Giants in those days, and he would tell every writer he liked everything they wanted to know – as long as we didn’t say where it came from. Every other GM would dish rumors to writers, if only to float trial balloons in the newspapers. Lou wouldn’t tell us anything.
It didn’t make my job easier, but I admired that. We even talked about it. He just didn’t see any other way to operate, and I couldn’t tell him otherwise. That’s what worked for him. He treated everybody alike and played no favorites. That’s all any of us could ask.
The Devils missed the playoffs in 1989, but they’ve missed only one year since. In 1995, they won the first of three Stanley Cups, thanks to the goalie Lou had drafted a couple of years earlier – Martin Brodeur – and a defense corps anchored by Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko. That foundation also won the team’s other two cups as the Devils established themselves as second in the league as an organization only to the Red Wings.
All of that success – he also built a new arena – is part of the reason he’s in the Hall. The other part of it is because of that integrity and honor I mentioned. Over the years, the rest of the league learned what a few of us knew early on, that Lou Lamoriello was one of the most capable men in the game. He went from pariah to leader, a man who helped form policy, manage the NHL’s international team and negotiate a way out of the labor impasse that ate the 2004-05 season.
He said he was shocked to learn he’d been elected. He never even considered that he belonged there.
He did and he does.
Congratulations, Lou.
