Welcome to DK Sports Radio and a new Daily Shot of Penguins, my every-weekday, half-hour program on the local hockey franchise. Today's episode: Pittsburgh’s next GM might just be a franchise icon for an arch-nemesis … and that’s OK..
Also, hey, just below, you'll find a full transcript of the opening segment:
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THE TRANSCRIPT
OK, would it help if I told you that Ron Hextall grew up in Pittsburgh and, at one point in his life, and I quote directly from a recent interview, "hated the Flyers" as a kid?
Yeah? That help?
Hextall did grow up in Pittsburgh, of course, the son of Bryan Hextall, who played for the Penguins at the time. He was 5 years old, and his family lived up in Green Tree, right on the other side of the Fort Pitt Tunnel from Downtown. A lot of the Penguins and Pirates of that era were living there, and the Hextall just happened to share an apartment building with Roberto Clemente, Rennie Stennett, Manny Sanguillen and others from those great Pirates teams. Hextall recalled a time when Manny and Rennie -- Stennett's my favorite all-time childhood athlete, you should know -- came out into the street and asked little Ron and his buddies if they could join in for a game of street hockey. And it just so happened that the kids had some extra sticks and let the Pirates' star second baseman and catcher join in.
There. Now can you at least listen to the possibility that Hextall could be -- and maybe should be -- the Penguins' next general manager?
Because there's a very compelling case to be had there.
Even for those of us who've been watching hockey around here long enough to recall when Hextall was the enemy from the wrong end of the commonwealth -- and look, I'm no different than you, I only see him in one uniform attached to one logo -- he was the most impactful-from-a-presence-standpoint goaltender I've ever seen. That doesn't mean he was the best. That doesn't mean he was the most successful. But I can't recall ever being in an arena and being more aware of who the other team's goalie was than when it was Hextall. You had have been appreciating hockey in his era in the 80s to know how and why he stood out, as he did. It was partially because this is a really, really tall guy, which was not normal at the time for the position. Really tough. Really animated. Really spirited. Very much a Flyer. Everyone here remembers him chasing Robbie Brown out of the corner after Brown scored on him and started doing that windmill celebration, while Hextall looked like he was gonna literally decapitate him with his big goal stick. But he got into it all the time.
More than anything, it was that stickhandling that made him stand out. We'd never seen a goaltender never, never, never seen a goaltender do that. Just like hockey had never seen a defenseman rush up ice the way Bobby Orr did, Hextall was doing something nobody had done. He wasn't just collecting the puck behind the net and leaving it there for his defenseman. He was making plays. He was scoring goals, the first goaltender to do so by shooting the puck. A truly great player in NHL history. And that's to say nothing of his beyond-belief performance in the 1987 Stanley Cup Final, when he singlehandedly carried Wayne Gretzky's Oilers to a Game 7 even though Edmonton was outshooting Philly, like, 700-1, in every game.
That doesn't matter right now, though. The GM part does.
If Hextall were to become the Penguins' GM -- and, of course, there are reports now over the last 48 hours that the Penguins have sought and received permission from the Kings, where he's currently employed as a senior advisor, to interview him -- that's not going to be an accident. I've looked over this field. I don't see anyone on there that I'm more impressed with than Hextall. As an executive, his track record's been that he shows that same skill and toughness he showed as a goaltender in terms of maintaining his will and, most important, in terms of building a roster.
What have I been talking about here ever since the Jim Rutherford resignation?
To me, it'd be easy and lazy for the Penguins to just go out there and find Jim Part II. I keep citing Dale Tallon, which sounds really mean because Tallon isn't the only Tallon in the world. But I don't want Tallon running the Pittsburgh Penguins. That's how you become the Florida Panthers. It just is. You just kind of drift from year to year, you don't really have a direction, you see two three holes on your roster, so you go out and get to three guys. That's the Florida Panthers.
Do you want the Penguins to become the Florida Panthers?
Jim was right for when he arrived. He was perfect for when he arrived. He wasn't perfect now. And a continuation of him wouldn't be perfect. This team needs to build. Notice I'm purposely leaving off the prefix re-, as in rebuild because rebuild sets off all kinds of flames in everybody's ears around here. Rebuild means, you know, doing what the Pirates just did. It's not gonna happen. Sidney Crosby is in your employ. But you can build. You can acquire younger players. You can have a prototype and build from that.
Who are the players on the Penguins' roster that we've been glowing about the most lately?
Yeah, Pierre-Olivier Joseph on the back end, Kasperi Kapanen up front. I've liked what I've seen of Drew O'Connor, too. I like seeing the kids add some energy, some skill, and I like seeing them be the ones who are supporting Sid and Evgeni Malkin and, ideally in Geno's case, lifting them up a little bit. I like seeing the young defensemen come in once Kris Letang's out and have everybody asking why the defense all of a sudden looked like it had all kinds of energy. Good. That's what this team needs.
Hextall has done that. You might not think that because the Flyers haven't exactly bowled anybody over in the playoffs in forever. Or because Hextall was dumped by the Flyers a couple years ago. But the fact of the matter is that Philadelphia's roster is in better shape now than it's been in a very, very long time. And again, I'm talking about, you know, Hextall's playing days. Hextall built these Flyers into a young, very fast, sharp, skilled and quite deep team that a lot of people around the hockey world saw coming for a while, including while Hextall was still there. These players that you see now in Philadelphia -- not Claude Giroux or Jakub Voracek or the handful of older holdovers, but the younger ones, those were players who were found the right way, by Hextall, then sent to Allentown to play for the Phantoms and they grew up there. And you know what, they didn't goon it up. The one thing that Hextall ended up exorcising from the Flyers franchise is this idea that the only way they were ever going to win the Cup again was to beat the living snot out of everybody like they did in the 1970s. He changed that. That was not popular in Philadelphia. It wasn't popular with the fans, and it wasn't popular with the people over his head, the dinosaurs the Paul Holmgren, Bobby Clarke and, while he was still alive, Ed Snider. Hextall had the guts to do that because he wanted to build a modern fast team in the mold of, oh, you-know-who.
So give him some thought. But give him some fair thought.