The Franchise: The Business of Building Winning Teams - Hardcover

Custance, Craig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668035448 ISBN 13: 9781668035443

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Draft Day meets Burke’s Law in this incisive and entertaining behind-the-scenes look at hockey’s highest ranks.

Why do some franchises consistently win, while others may never get to see their players’ names etched on the Cup? Why do some teams draft poorly and others draft all-star teams? Why do some teams just seem to know how to win?

In The Franchise, The Athletic’s Craig Custance delves into the stories about thepeople who make the biggest decisions in hockey. For more than three years, Custance travelled far and wide to connect with the inner circle of hockey, from the owner’s suite of the Carolina Hurricanes to a private championship ring ceremony with the Vegas Golden Knights to a country club for a breakdown of the Pittsburgh Penguins.He had frank conversations with new Leafs’ GM Brad Treliving and former Leafs’ GM Kyle Dubas, and discussed the revolution in women's hockey with three-time Olympic medal winner and Devils’ executive Meghan Duggan.

For fans of any stripe, there are stories behind memorable trades and the biggest free agent signings, and insights into how some of the most successful teams of the last two decades were built. There are never-been-told details about trade demands, a prominent hire that one general manager regretted immediately, and how one general manager risked his life to sign a player he thought could change the course of his NHL team.

The Franchise will change the way you look at hockey. Custance shows that it all starts at the top, not on the ice. The players win, but it’s the people up in the box who break down every aspect of their teams, execute the hard decisions, and make the magic happen. This is essential reading for every hockey fan who wants to get beyond the x’s and o’s in an absorbing testament to why teams win.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For over a decade, Craig Custance has been a national hockey writer at ESPN and The Athletic, developing a reputation as a trusted source for thoughtful and comprehensive coverage of the NHL. He’s the author of the book Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey’s Greatest Coaches, named as one of the greatest hockey books of all time by Book Authority, and was the longtime host of the in-depth interview podcast The Full 60. He’s currently the Head of Creative Development at The Athletic, a New York Times company. He lives in Michigan.

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Chapter 1: The Power of Relentless Preparation CHAPTER 1 THE POWER OF RELENTLESS PREPARATION
That’s it. That’s all I care about. Those are the only things that really bring me happiness.

—Julien BriseBois

I was sore. Not hit-by-a-truck sore, but my legs were starting to tighten and there was a slight pain in my lower back. What concerned me, while writing next to a pool at the Channelside Marriott in Tampa, was that I knew enough about athletic exertion to understand that what I did that morning should have absolutely zero physical impact a few hours later on my body.

Pickleball, by its nature, isn’t a strenuous sport. If you haven’t played, it’s essentially a mix of tennis and ping-pong. Until the last several years, best I can tell, it’s been played mostly by seniors. But one thing that happened during the NHL playoff bubble of 2020 is that teams and their staff played a lot of it. In that same time frame, my wife and I found it a great way to get outside and spend time with some of our close friends during an era in which you couldn’t interact otherwise. I actually started thinking I was getting pretty good at it.

Julien BriseBois ended that illusion.

Julien, who won back-to-back Stanley Cups as general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 and 2021, has one of the most fascinating paths to success of any NHL GM. He arrived at Heenan Blaikie, a Quebec law firm, as an intern hoping to one day become a tax lawyer. He grew up playing baseball. In a sport filled with former hockey players running teams, he’s not that. But he was trained by two of the best. In that 2020 NHL playoff bubble, created because it was being played during a global pandemic, he ended up raising the Stanley Cup. Then his team won it again the following season. All while honing his pickleball game.

He’s thoughtful. He’s analytical. He’s the kind of person I love chatting with.

My initial pitch was to spend the day together with the Stanley Cup in Montreal. But there were travel bans and limits on people who could join him. All the things we dealt with in 2020. So months later, I circled back. His Lightning were facing the Florida Panthers in the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs, the first time these two Florida rivals competed in the playoffs. It seemed like a good time to go to Florida.

“Come down and let’s play pickleball,” he suggested.

I didn’t consider the idea nearly long enough. At that moment, I didn’t know Julien had been playing it for years. That he also boxes for fun. That he doesn’t drink or smoke. That he is a believer that a healthy body means a healthy mind. That he has the wingspan of an oversized condor. Why would I know any of this?

“Let’s do it.”

It was the morning of the day before our pickleball showdown and I regretted a couple of things. One, that I never shed my quarantine weight. And two, that I waited so long to prepare. My solution was to go for a light jog outside the Marriott along the channel in Tampa. It was 9:30 a.m. and already hot. At least hot for someone who was coming from a prolonged Michigan winter. The smallest of hills slowed me down. I was not feeling great about any of this.

A few minutes after I returned to my hotel room, my phone rang.

It was the Honorable Daniel Dumais, a judge in the Superior Court in Quebec. But before that he was a lawyer at Heenan Blaikie, then considered one of the best sports law firms in Canada. He had NHL teams as clients, and in some ways, he was the guy who launched BriseBois into the hockey universe.

I answered and explained what I was doing. That I wanted to get to know BriseBois’s backstory a little better before we had an extended conversation. That Julien had mentioned him as one of his biggest mentors.

“Anything for my friend Julien.”

Dumais started describing Julien and he was doing it through the lens of someone who has known him for years, who knows him as well as anyone. Who knew him at the start. But as he kept talking, I thought only of what it meant to me, his pickleball opponent.

“Julien is very serious,” Dumais explained. “He’s very committed to whatever he does. He’s structured, he has a plan. Julien is someone who has an idea, what he wants to do, what he wants to achieve.”

Dumais was in charge of the firm’s NHL work—arbitration cases and salary negotiations—and after BriseBois joined the firm as an intern, he let him know that there were boxes in the archives with all the firm’s work in sports, the decisions on arbitrations that had been awarded over the past decade. So that evening, BriseBois found the boxes and got to work.

He started indexing each case. He built out a binder for easy access to the decisions in an organized way. During the day, he was working on his regular assignments. In the morning and at night, he was organizing years of arbitration cases. Dumais and BriseBois didn’t cross paths for a month. But when they finally did, BriseBois pulled out the binder that took a decade to accumulate and showed it to Dumais.

“I’m ready to call GMs whenever you’re ready,” BriseBois said.

He was twenty-two.

“He didn’t say anything. He just took it and left. But I knew I impressed him,” BriseBois said. “I had to. It was impressive work, I have to say.”

So they started cold-calling general managers and the business started to grow. Nobody knew it was a twenty-two-year-old intern on the other end of the line, just somebody who NHL teams started to believe could help them win arbitration cases. A few weeks later, a group of NHL executives flew to Quebec City so they could work together in person. They gathered in a conference room and started going over all the arbitration cases. For the first few hours BriseBois was quiet, but right before lunch, Anaheim Ducks GM Pierre Gauthier looked over at him and asked him what he thought.

As BriseBois does, he shared his well-prepared opinions with confidence.

“?‘This is what we should do for this because of this award and that award. This is the number for your guy, that guy. This is the number for your guy,’?” BriseBois said in recalling that moment. “And then Pierre said, ‘That sounds awesome. Let’s grab lunch.’?”

Word traveled fast about the arbitration cases this firm was helping teams win. Since Disney owned both the Ducks and the Angels, the success spread into the baseball world. That winter, the firm started doing arbitration cases for the Royals and the first general managers meeting BriseBois ever attended was in baseball. He was now working in the Montreal office, so Dumais told him to meet him in Washington, D.C., at Dulles Airport, where the MLB managers were gathering. A snowstorm wiped out Dumais’s flight, so BriseBois, now twenty-three, was the lone representative from the firm. He walked into a conference room where baseball general managers, most decades older than he was, were going over a list of players eligible for arbitration. At one point, an opposing general manager suggested paying his player an extra half million more than planned. It was put to a vote.

Who thinks it should be the higher number?

The lone GM raised his hand.

Who thinks it should be the old number?

Every other hand went up.

Royals GM Allard Baird leaned...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668035448
• ISBN 13: 9781668035443
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien