Is it surprising to see Avalanche give permission to Predators to talk to Chris MacFarland?
The Nashville Predators have a new man leading their hockey operations department, hiring Chris MacFarland from the Colorado Avalanche after he led the Avs as a general manager to the Presidents’ Trophy in 2025-26.
He comes into the organization to take over from longtime executive and coach Barry Trotz, who will step into an advisory role after announcing earlier in the season that he was retiring from his general manager duties.
On Tuesday’s edition of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Jeff Marek from The Sheet joined co-hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton to break down MacFarland’s appointment and the changing tide of NHL executives
Tyler Yaremchuk: Chris MacFarland seems to be the guy for Nashville. The Avalanche seems to have given him permission to speak to the Predators. Were you at all surprised that Colorado was willing to do this?
Jeff Marek: A little surprised, but I mean, this was one of the names until Jonah Sigel put it out from the Toronto Star, and we all kind of went, well, that’s interesting, it’s an interesting name. I’ll tell you, one of the first thoughts that I had was, are other Toronto Maple Leafs kicking themselves now? I don’t know whether Chris MacFarland would have appreciated or been interested in the Maple Leafs’ executive structure, but that was one of my thoughts. Where the Maple Leafs were, that could have been an option somewhere down the road, but then, were the Maple Leafs gonna wait until June 2 to name a general manager? What would the fan base be like? I digress.
It’s obviously going to be a promotion and a raise, and going back to your permission point as well, I do want to point out one thing here, because there is some, there is some disagreement about this, even if it is a promotion, you do not have to grant permission for someone to interview, right? Because there’s always been this feeling that, oh, it’s a promotion, so you have to let someone interview. That’s not true; that’s just the gentleman’s agreement that everyone has sort of worked with in the NHL, not unlike the Bruce Cassidy situation. It’s always sort of been a gentleman’s agreement: this is how we behave, and the idea that if someone wants to offer you a promotion, you allow them to at least have the discussion, but the Avalanche doesn’t have to do that. Obviously, they did, and I wonder who goes in there.
I’m going to guess that, considering I don’t think that the Avalanche are going to go through a rebuild, it’s probably going to have to be someone veteran, and if they want someone whose background is sort of similar to Chris MacFarland, you know, I would probably look at a Ryan Martin, could make, could make a lot of sense there. This is just like a spitball off the top of the head. I do wonder about Joe Sakic and how his former pursuit of Kyle Dubas, which led to Dubas’ promotion to general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, would have influenced how much research he would have done into someone like Brandon Pridham, now that he’s no longer employed. I wonder if there could be a voice here for Brandon Pridham in any type of management structure for the Avalanche. I think you’ll start to hear, you know, Scott White’s name and a lot of the candidates that you’ve heard of the past little while, for either the Vancouver job or the Toronto job, so Evan Gold will probably be out there as well, but Ryan Martin to me, like right out of the gate, probably seems like the one that that is most similar to Chris MacFarland in the way that he’s he’s come up through the NHL ranks.
You can catch the rest of the segment and all of Tuesday’s show right here…