I found myself shaking my head about the New York Islander’s goings-on this summer and I am sitting here again in October, reading about the resignation of Philadelphia Flyers (that is a US hockey club) GM Bob Clarke and the firing of coach Ken Hitchcock.
Imagine a sports club giving a mainly unproven player playing in a crucial position a 15 (fifteen!) year contract. In todays economy where most contracts go year by year. I am not going to go into the reasons why this is a totally stupid move by the Islanders, but as PR consultant I found myself wondering, gee, how would I explain this to the fans? How do I sell management’s lemon as a golden apple?
But the Islanders were not done yet. After the end of last year’s campain they brought in a new GM (Neil Smith who lead the Rangers to a Stanley Cup in 1994). However, he got so upset with Islanders’ owner Wang that he quit after two months – the season had not even started. Then the owner introduced a new GM to shape the team – Garth Snow, who was back-up goalie the season before…
How do you sell this to the fans? Sure, this is similar to General Motors or Deutsche Telekom letting go thousands of people. This is bad news. Unfortunate inside the company, it should be communicated transparently. But somehow it is different, because in regard to shareholders the argument could be that General Motors or Telekom need the cost-cuts to be more effective (I am not saying that I am in favor of is, just playing the devil’s advocate). But just how do you justify binding an unproven goalie to the franchise for 15 years, making him untradable with this kind of contract? How do you justify putting a guy in the front office who used to sit on the bench 5 months ago? And how to you justify firing the coach because the team the GM put together is just not made for the new NHL (this refers to Philadelphia). To the fans who are supposed to buy tickets to see the consequences of these decisions.