‘What the hell did I get myself into here?’: Doug MacLean on ‘Game Day,’ being an NHL GM and hockey’s evolution
TORONTO — Doug MacLean has worked nearly every job you can in the game of hockey, but he carries one accomplishment no one else has: the first employee in Columbus Blue Jackets history.
The Ohio city was awarded an NHL franchise in June 1997, just over a year after MacLean, then the head coach of another recent expansion team in the Florida Panthers, led the team to a Stanley Cup Final appearance. He was fired by the Panthers 23 games into the 1997-98 season. But three months later, he was the Blue Jackets’ first-ever hire, being named general manager in February 1998.
In a video interview ahead of the release of his book Game Day: The Uncensored Life of an NHL GM, MacLean said the transition from behind the bench to the front office was bizarre.
“I walk in there on my first day and I’m the GM, and there’s a desk and a pad on it, and I’m thinking, ‘what the hell did I get myself into here?’” MacLean, sitting in his home in Summerside, P.E.I., told Daily Faceoff.
A month into the job, MacLean told majority owner John McConnell they needed to hire a president to get things going on the business side of things.
“He looked at me and said, ‘oh, you can be the president, too.’ And I’m thinking, ‘holy shit,’” he said.
MacLean had two-and-a-half years before the Blue Jackets would play their first game, giving him time to hire support staff, form a scouting department and prepare for the expansion draft. Now he had to handle the corporate aspects of running a team: sales, marketing, sponsorship, the construction of the rink itself.
“I was sitting at home and took the Florida Panthers media guide out and said, ‘OK, I need a vice president of corporate sales, I need a VP of ticket sales, I need a head director of communications.’ I just wrote down everything,” he said.
“I’m not sure that’s the training you were looking for.”
These are just some of the anecdotes MacLean shares in Game Day, written with Greg Oliver and released in October. It’s the hockey lifer’s second foray into authorship after his 2024 book, Draft Day: How Hockey Teams Pick Winners or Get Left Behind, became a Toronto Star bestseller and remains one of Amazon Canada’s top-selling hockey books since its debut.
The minutia of management
While Draft Day looked at how scouts evaluated the next generation of hockey players, Game Day focuses on the granular details of life in the front office and how being a general manager is more than calling fellow executives and agents to negotiate trades and contracts. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of ink spilled on those moments, including the day-to-day conversations with figures around the league, monitoring the waiver wire and keeping tabs on pending free agents.
But where Game Day shines is in the minutia. MacLean opens the book by explaining “there is no typical day” in the life of a GM, but there is a pattern of habits and tasks that may read more as superstition than routine.
He would spend each morning reading the nightly reports from scouts across North America and Europe – “Poring over the notes and pouring some coffee,” he wrote – watching the team practice, making and taking calls, eating, dealing with the owner, getting a run in and taking a nap.
It sounds like a typical day for anyone who works in the game, but where cynicism bleeds through in books from other former players and coaches, MacLean’s love for hockey and things that go beyond box scores and dressing rooms is as clear as the ice at the start of a period.
It makes sense for someone whose path to the NHL was anything but ordinary.
Absorbing lessons
MacLean coached his hometown’s Junior A team in Summerside for three seasons in the early ‘80s, then spent a year behind the bench at the University of New Brunswick before Jacques Martin hired him as an assistant coach with the St. Louis Blues in 1986.
After Martin was let go by the Blues in ‘88, then-Washington Capitals head coach Bryan Murray hired MacLean as an assistant. He sooned followed Murray to the Detroit Red Wings and got a taste of working in a front office, being named an assistant general manager for the Wings and as the GM of their AHL affiliate in Adirondack.
MacLean, who dedicated Game Day to Murray, said “he made my career.”
“The reason I put that in the book for Bryan is because if I wrote a bunch of flowery stuff about Bryan, he would have called bullshit on it,” he said during our interview. “I thought Bryan’s style was very basic, but he was an unbelievable hockey guy.”
Murray was hired as GM of the expansion Panthers in 1994 and brought in MacLean as director of player development. One year later, MacLean would take over as head coach and get the team within four wins of a Stanley Cup.
“I’d absorb lessons from Bryan Murray,” MacLean wrote in Game Day. “When I was coach in Florida and he was the GM, Bryan wouldn’t say anything between periods. But after the game, he always had tips to give me. He’d been in the game for decades by that point and would start off every post-game pointer with ‘Maybe I don’t know anything about the game, but this is what I’m seeing.’”
Modern-day GMs
MacLean, now 72, splits his time between Summerside and Florida. He teaches a course on hockey management and scouting for Sports Management Worldwide and makes guest appearances on several podcasts and shows, including every Friday on Sportsnet’s Real Kyper and Bourne*.
*This is the part of the story where this unbiased reporter admits these segments are some of the best in sports media. Affectionately referred to as “Off-the-Rails Friday,” MacLean ends every call by telling the hosts, “Hey thanks for having me on guys, I really appreciate it” with a delivery that kills me every time.
MacLean told Daily Faceoff that while writing Game Day, he spoke with current and former GMs about the job and how it has evolved through the years with the implementation of analytics on a wider scale.
“I sort of became more interested, and the more I talked to the actual analytics people with each team, then I talked to the scouts and the assistant GMs who were really involved, I took on more of an appreciation for it,” he said.
“I think it’s really moved in that direction where they’ve become part of the team,” he later added. “Do the scouts really love it? A lot of them don’t, a lot of the old guys don’t, which is natural. But a lot of guys are really buying into it and thinking it’s a useful tool.”
MacLean’s comments differ from the friendly pot shots he takes during his podcast appearances at younger GMs or executives who go out of their way to bring up data in a news conference (e.g. Keith Pelley). During the interview, he said some will push their GMs to include more data analysis in their process, as some owners come from business or number-driven backgrounds.
“I think it always comes back to the attitude on both sides,” he said. “The most successful franchises are the ones that the analytics guys appreciate the scouts and the scouts appreciate the analytics guys.”
Game Day: The Uncensored Life of an NHL GM, is now available online and wherever you buy books.
