More often than not, the victor of the NHL season, the team whose name is engraved on Lord Stanley’s shrine in June, has an incredible amount of leadership from top to bottom of the organization. Leadership is the key to success in the NHL if teams want to win championships.
Marc Bergevin, general manager of the Montreal and Julien Brisebois, assistant general manager to Steve Yzerman for the Tampa Bay Lightning, are both respected men in hockey circles for showing leadership in the office. They have taken similar yet opposite routes to where they are now; both men earned their stripes from other white-collared men around the league.
Bergevin, a former player and Brisebois, a lawyer, talked about the value of leadership and hard work at JMSM14, the 19th Annual Sports Business Conference (http://JMSM.ca) at Concordia University on Friday in downtown Montreal. Moderated by TSN’s Darren Dreger the hockey executives weren’t shy of proclaiming their need for leadership and quality players both on and off the ice.
“Not only do you need to develop talent but we also need to develop leadership from the bottom up” said Brisebois, who then used the example of Steven Stamkos as Tampa’s artifact from their experiment using that theory. Stamkos entered the league in 2009 after he was selected first overall at the draft that summer, held in Montreal.
While developing his skills into a 50-goal scorer and one of the best players in the game, Stamkos was under captain Vincent Lecavalier‘s umbrella for the first five seasons of his career. Then in his sixth season, with Martin St. Louis donning the ‘C’ before being traded, Stamkos was named captain of the Floridian team after many years of being under great leadership.
Since being named as GM of the Habs in 2012, after a hiring process in which Canadiens owner Geoff Molson had to google him because he didn’t know what Bergevin looked like, Bergevin has mentioned over and over again the value of character in the dressing room.
He signed players like Brandon Prust and Manny Malhotra and traded for heart-and-soul guys like Dale Weise and Mike Weaver. Those four men are known around the league to display a lot of character, and it is no different inside a Canadiens dressing room that has an abundance of leadership.
He has also given youngsters like Brendan Gallagher, Alex Galchenyuk and Michael Bournival shots at the NHL at a young age and he thinks “if a guy has character, he’ll find a way to make it.” The young players playing for the bleu-blanc-rouge right now no doubt have a ton of character because it was Bergevin’s team that decided to keep them on the roster.
A man that has confidence in the control by the veterans inside of the legendary four walls of the Bell Center, he decided to let captain Brian Gionta walk and traded Josh Gorges in the off-season. He then named four alternate captains in Andrei Markov, Tomas Plekanec, Max Pacioretty and P.K. Subban this season for the historic club. The lack of a stitched ‘C’ on the famous red is irrelevan,t as the Canadiens are now 10-4-1 and lead the Atlantic Division.
Cameras inside the Bell Center reveal Bergevin’s constant casual meetings with head coach Michel Therrien for the team’s reality show 24CH. The GM wasn’t shy in admitting how important it was to have a good relationship with the staff behind the bench of the team he built. “There’s dialogue everyday with the coaching staff. I see what they see. I see what they want. It’s all about a good relationship and the coaching staff’s respect,” he said.
Lucky for Bergevin and Therrien, the 24-time Stanley Cup champions have enjoyed success under their leadership, with a second-placed finish in their first season together then a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals last year, which the GM “didn’t think would happen”.
Brisebois went through some tough times in Tampa, especially when the Lightning finished second to last in the East and were forced to draft third overall- though they took Jonathan Drouin.
At the time of the faltering season (good for them that it lasted only 48 games) Brisebois explained how the players and management had different mindsets and plans of what was supposed to happen game to game. “Of course (the players) are always competitive, they always wanted to win. And if the team won, (the management) was happy for the coaching staff and the players, but we knew it wasn’t a good thing for the organization, we wanted the highest draft pick as possible.” he said.
A lack of leadership from both the dressing room and the front office would open the door for a lack of confidence from the top of the organization down, which may have led to Tampa’s suffering two seasons ago.
When both organizations are ran in a similar fashion by building from the draft and having rooms full of players that put in the effort as if they worked a regular-scheduled job, they can have very bright futures, but none of this would have happened without veteran knowledge and proper direction from their leaders. Leadership is the key to success.
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