Eric Tulsky is the face of the new wave of NHL general managers
As the Stanley Cup Final is set to begin, one question that is always raised is “what will other teams learn from the finalists?” Teams often copy off of the winners to try and replicate their success, so what lessons can be pulled from the Carolina Hurricanes and the Vegas Golden Knights and how they are built?
Jeff Marek joined Daily Faceoff Live to talk about how NHL front offices are shifting in thought process, with Tulsky being the poster child of this movement.
Jeff Marek: There’s a real lesson here, and there was with Colorado too, but specifically with Carolina. The lesson here is: you look at the Carolina Hurricanes, you have a general manager in Eric Tulsky who is now the embodiment of the new way to think about management. Baseball did this 20 years ago. It’s taken hockey 20 years to catch up.
So what has happened now, and Carolina is the poster child for this: general managers now, teams are more interested in “can you think” as opposed to “did you play”. Look around the landscape of the NHL now. It’s becoming more and more “can you think” versus “did you play”.
The thing that I really admire about Tulsky is he’s brave. He’s not afraid to take a big swing. We saw that with Rantanen. And he’s not afraid to say, “you know what, it’s not working out, so we’re going to move on”.
If I told you that a team in the NHL, let go of Dougie Hamilton, Brady Skjei, Brett Pesce, Brent Burns, Dmitry Orlov, you’d say, “hey, I bet their defense sucks now”. They have the best defense in the NHL. If anything, it’s better now. Pierre McGuire always corrects me and says “you got to give Tim Gleason credit”, and he’s right. The defensemen do get better with Carolina. We talk about Lefebvre with the Florida Panthers, talk about Gleason with the Carolina Hurricanes.
But what Tulsky does is he accepts a challenge. When a player moves on or he’s got to move on from a player, instead of overpaying to keep them because “where are we going to find another Brett Pesce? We got to keep him. Where are we going to find another Dougie Hamilton? Where are we going to find another Dmitry Orlov?” What he does, he embraces the challenge of the job. And the job is to find another Brett Pesce, find another Brady Skjei, find another of these guys that can step in.
That’s what I love about how Eric Tulsky thinks here. It’s all about the opportunity, and it’s not just that “we got to keep them because if we don’t have them, then I got to go find someone else”. Yeah, that’s your job as the general manager, and he embraces it like few others around the NHL. I really respect that.
Tyler Yaremchuk: And in a cap world, when you don’t have to pay Brady Skjei $7 million because you’re confident you can go to the market or to wherever and find a guy who can fill those minutes at Sean Walker’s $3.6 million or Shayne Gostisbehere’s $3.2 million, then you all of a sudden feel a lot better about what you could spend your dollars on elsewhere.
You can watch the full segment here…