Burnside: Kent Hughes’ background as an agent brings new perspective to Canadiens

Scott Burnside
Scott Burnside
Burnside: Kent Hughes’ background as an agent brings new perspective to Canadiens

If General Motors hired a new president who had never been a mechanic, we’re still guessing that there wouldn’t be a great hue and cry when that hiring was announced.

Or if Kraft Heinz Company hired a new president, we’re guessing it would not be a news story if that man or woman had never grown a tomato or been a cheese maker.

That’s because being an executive in the real world is very different from being an executive in professional sport. In the real world, top executives are those that can create consensus, delegate effectively and ultimately make sound business decisions, often in difficult circumstances, even if they might never have changed the oil on their car or couldn’t tell a beefsteak tomato from a round of smoked Gouda.

In hockey, not so much. Hockey is a place where every important hire is often shot through, whether they’re correct ‘hockey people’ or not. And that’s the world – for better or worse – that longtime agent Kent Hughes formally entered Tuesday afternoon when he stepped onto the empty Bell Centre floor for his first press briefing as the general manager of the Montreal Canadiens.

If Hughes, 51, and a native of the Montreal suburb of Beaconsfield, has lived a relatively under-the-radar existence for the past two decades or so as an agent in spite of representing high profile players like Patrice Bergeron, Kris Letang and Darnell Nurse, well, those days are over as he takes over one of the highest profile, lowest performing teams in pro sports.

The fact he is making the relatively-unusual jump directly from being an agent to being a top NHL executive only adds to the intrigue and the scrutiny that follows his hiring.

It’s not that there aren’t many examples of agents making their way from the player representation side of the ledger to the team executive side. Pierre Lacroix and Brian Burke are two iconic hockey figures who made the jump decades ago.

Ray Shero and Jarmo Kekalainen both were agents early in their hockey careers before becoming team executives.

Bill Zito went from the agent business to Columbus, where he was an assistant general manager to Kekalainen, before becoming the general manager of the Florida Panthers. Zito, now in his second year as GM, has quickly molded the Panthers into one of the top teams in the NHL.

But in most cases, agents who make this leap do so by first taking on less senior executive roles before ascending to the GM’s seat. But Montreal is not most places and in talking to folks who know Hughes, he, too, is not most people.

Skeptics will point to the fact Hughes — one of 11 candidates for the job that became available when Marc Bergevin was fired in late November — never played at the NHL level. It’s true. He topped out at Division III hockey.

And the fact that he’s never worked in any capacity for an NHL team. True, too.

But here is something that Zito pointed out to us when we asked him about making such a jump.

Imagine for a moment the kind of information a forward-thinking agent can gather by watching closely the experiences of his or her clients around the National Hockey League.

Imagine the wealth of knowledge such a person could accumulate over the years by watching how teams deal with prospects, how they approach negotiations, how they develop players and reward them and, if need be, how they punish them.

“You have a unique, free window into the soul of every organization in the NHL, assuming you have clients in those organizations,” Zito said. “You learn an awful lot,” Zito added. “And you’re inside the room depending on the relationship with your clients and I know Kent’s close to his clients or some of them.”

It all makes sense.

Agents don’t just deal with NHL GMs. They run into NHL scouts at various events. They get to know the assistant GMs if they’re dealing with a prospect on an AHL or minor pro deal. There might be interaction with the player development staff.

“If you’re that kind of agent, which Kent was, you’re getting the inside scoop on how they do their business through the experience of your players,” Zito added. “It’s like a free-flowing source of information and it’s non-stop.”

So, imagine you’re interviewing to be an NHL GM and you can explain how you’ve been able to dip your toe into the inner workings of all of your competitors? That would be a good selling point if you were looking to make the jump to helping run just one NHL franchise, wouldn’t it?

Longtime agent Jeff Jackson, whose clients include superstar Connor McDavid and whose agency, Wasserman Hockey, represents some of the game’s biggest stars and rising stars, believes there is a great fit for both the new GM and the team.

“I think it’s a good hire in Montreal,” Jackson wrote. “Kent is a good agent and a good guy, and will bring an excellent perspective to the job. It’s a unique position to be an agent and deal with 32 GMs and see who does things well and who doesn’t, and to learn from that perspective.”

Hughes echoed those exact sentiments during Wednesday’s presser and if things unfold as he hopes, changes in Montreal will reflect some of what his clients have told him about their own experiences with a variety of NHL teams.

“We’re going to try and create a very modern organization that players want to be a part of it,” Hughes said.

Of course, the challenge for Hughes will be in shifting his focus from individual players working in different organizations to just one team, where all the guys are “his guys.” He’ll have to do this with a team that has managed to go from a Stanley Cup Final last summer to being dead last in the NHL in terms of points percentage, as of Wednesday.

What will be most critical to all this is the long-established relationship with executive vice-president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton, who was hired on the heels of Bergevin’s firing.

Zito calls Gorton, with whom he’s worked on international competitions, “maybe the ace of spades,” in this dynamic.

“He’s really smart,” Zito said. “He’s not a big ego guy, he’s a big team guy. He’s interested in what people have to say. He’s very supportive and helpful. And he’s got a great sense of humor. I think that type of leadership will be wonderful for a guy like Kent coming in.”

On Wednesday, Gorton downplayed the notion that this was a case of one pal hiring another.

”No offense, but Kent is not my best friend, okay?” Gorton said.

The two met when Gorton was in Boston’s front office and Patrice Bergeron was still on his entry-level contract.

“I was impressed then,” Gorton said. “We stayed in touch. We talked on the phone a few times a week probably for 20 years.

“I just admired him as a hockey person and a person. I know he was an agent. But I think of Kent as a hockey person first.”

In the coming hours, the two are planning to fly to meet the team on the road and then spend a lot of time in a short period of time making plans for starting the process of changing course.

The pressure for this tandem will come as they try and decipher which players can be jettisoned at the March 21 trade deadline and yield the most attractive assets.

They’ll need to come to an agreement on whether Dominique Ducharme is an NHL caliber coach saddled with an inferior and injury-decimated lineup or if he is just not a good NHL coach.

They’ll also need to come to an understanding, along with Carey Price — and his family, of course — what the future is for the franchise netminder, who has yet to play a game this season, after entering the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program. Price is under contract through 2025-26 with a $10.5 million cap hit.

The Montreal situation, pure and simple, is “upside down,” longtime player and analyst Dave Poulin said. “It just is. It’s a situation that’s so challenging and that’s arguably why he took it.”

Poulin was never an agent, although he’s held pretty much every other position in the hockey world, including NHL executive, top collegiate hockey executive, elite NHL player and now a top broadcast analyst for TSN who the Canadiens extensively.

Poulin doesn’t know Hughes personally, but like others believes his experience meshes nicely with the challenges of the job.

”I think a good agent is really well-suited for the job (of NHL GM),” Poulin said. “Look no further than Bill Zito.”

Poulin had two agents in his career, the first being Brian Burke, who he said was harder on him than any GM ever was.

Poulin suggested this exercise. Call up any NHL GM and ask if there’s an agent they’d hire in an executive role right now.

“Every GM will say, ‘yeah, I would hire so and so right now. But he couldn’t afford to take the job.’”

But an agent like Hughes, who has put in the time on that side of the business, can afford to take the kind of job the Canadiens’ job represents.

“It’s a job for a guy that’s earned his money,” Poulin said.

And there’s the interesting part of this discussion.

Why on earth would anyone who has a successful hockey business that doesn’t require you to be subject to daily scrutiny by a hockey-mad community ever want to be the GM of the Montreal Canadiens?

It’s both simple and perplexing.

It’s one thing to represent players and mark your victories in terms of contract length and AAV. It’s quite another to mark your victories in wins, losses and playoff appearances. And, maybe — just maybe — Stanley Cup wins.

To trade in the safety of a business team for a real flesh-and-blood NHL team is enticing to many in the hockey world. It was, obviously, to Hughes.

An admitted hockey junkie, Hughes said he was more of a “behind the scenes kind of agent.”

The fully bilingual Hughes – he gave his opening remarks in French only on Wednesday – acknowledged there is a much more public element to his new job, but that’s not what attracted him.

“Rather the challenges that lie ahead,” the new GM of the Montreal Canadiens said. “For me the public part of it is what it is.

“The excitement is the hockey piece.”

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