How are the GM searches going for Nashville, New Jersey, Toronto?
For non-playoff teams, the time for working on hiring new coaches and general managers is underway.
The Nashville Predators, Toronto Maple Leafs and New Jersey Devils got head starts on their searches by either announcing the departures of parting ways with their previous general managers.
Florida Panthers assistant GM Sunny Mehta is a hot name for the jobs in Toronto and New Jersey, while Nashville is casting a wide net in its search for a replacement for Barry Trotz.
On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton were joined by NHL insider David Pagnotta to discuss the state of the GM searches around the league that are already underway.
Carter Hutton: What are the updates on certain teams? Like for me, it’s what’s going on in Jersey, what’s going on in Toronto. Every time I open my computer on some sort of website, it’s about Toronto and the next run of who’s going to be who. What’s going on there? And then the other one for me is Nashville. These are all teams that potentially need GMs.
David Pagnotta: We we all know Nashville, they’ve been ahead of everybody because Trotz made the decision that he’s going to want to hang up, you know, his skates, or tie, or whatever and move on off of the GM position once they find a new guy. When the new guy comes in and they’re comfortable with them, then they’re going to… see him retire… Now they’ve kind of started to narrow down some of their candidates to see who fits the bill really for this club, and we know that they’ve ha interest in a number of guys. We know that they’ve been denied interest or requests to speak to guys like Johnson in Vancouver, like Eric Tulsky… But they’ve explored a variety of different options right now. Brett Peterson, the AGM in Florida, has generated a lot of interest from Nashville. And I think we’re going to see Toronto and Jersey kind of in that mix as well. Sunny Mehta is the other guy, the other AGM who’s head of analytics who, I think it was Pierre LeBrun that reported today that they’ve given permission, Florida has, to both Toronto and New Jersey to speak to him about their vacancy. Both of those teams are looking at both President of Hockey Ops and GM as well. Toronto is just starting now, just this week, has started to reach out to clubs to get this permission… And I think, it wouldn’t surprise me if they make a call over to Jersey to see if they can talk to [Tom Fitzgerald] for one of the roles. Chuck Fletcher’s name is starting to be bandied about a little bit as well, and we have already been aware of some of the other suspects like Mike Gillis and others. Jamie Langenbrenner’s name has been popping up as well. So both of these teams, New Jersey and Toronto, are going through the similar steps that Nashville has gone through.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…