Rookie Habs GM Kent Hughes on his first trade deadline
There are learning curves associated with any new job. Then there is the learning curve from hell which might best describe what confronted Kent Hughes when he left a lucrative job as a veteran player agent to become general manager of the struggling Montreal Canadiens.
Hughes was announced in his new gig on Jan. 18 exactly two months and three days in advance of what might prove to be one of the most important trade deadlines in the team’s recent history. And yet in the wake of a deadline period that saw Hughes and his staff move out four key players – Tyler Toffoli, Ben Chiarot, Brett Kulak and Artturi Lehkonen – for seven draft picks, including two first-round picks along with three solid prospects in Justin Barron, William Lagesson and Tyler Smilanic, he is being widely hailed for pulling off a masterful deadline period.
Daily Faceoff caught up with the rookie GM three days after the deadline. He described how things changed in the team’s boardroom after hiring new head coach Martin St. Louis on Feb. 9 and what lies ahead for the Habs leading up to the draft, which the Canadiens will host in Montreal July 7 and 8, armed with two first-round picks and 10 selections in the first four rounds.
Scott Burnside: How are you feeling, Kent? Have you decompressed at all?
Kent Hughes: I think depending on the circumstances of an individual team’s trade deadline and how things unfold, it can be more or less stressful. In our case, because we had done two of the trades earlier in the process – I mean Chiarot wasn’t so early in the process, but it wasn’t at 2:30 on Monday – that kind of alters how I feel. It’s very similar to free agency where you’ve got a bunch of players and you’re going to go into July 1 and you don’t know how it’s going to materialize. Back in the time when we had the interview period, if you figured it out in advance, it could be less stressful. if you went undetermined, it could be a more stressful process. For us on Monday, we really had two players that, if the deals were right, we would trade them, but we were more than happy keeping them.
SB: I am curious about the whole process from your perspective, because I assume it’s very different than your experiences as an agent. How different was it than you imagined it would be?
KH: There are certainly things that you learn in terms of the method of evaluating and discussing options. When you’re talking to teams about prospective trades, there were a lot of parallels, a lot of similarities, not trade deadline as an agent versus trade deadline in a general manager’s chair, but probably trade deadline in a general manager’s chair versus free agency as an agent. With the trade deadline we have less of a role as an agent, and we’re kind of waiting and hoping if you’re looking for somebody to be traded or not to be traded. On this side, if you make a trade, you trade away players that have been here for an extended period, and they’re part of this. This is their friends, their family, their everything. So you’re impacting their lives and you’re impacting the locker room, the coaches, everybody. So that part of it, I guess, without being on this side of it, you don’t realize the effect it can have on the moment.
SB: You understand how deals come together as an agent, but when you actually consummate that first deal, when Tyler (Toffoli) goes to Calgary, what’s it like when you make that call to Tyler to tell him? And what was it like when you sat back and said, OK, this happened to me, we’ve done this deal, we’ve got a lot of other work between now and 3:00 p.m.. on the 21st. Did you learn something through that one single process?
KH: They were kind of different circumstances (the four trades), right? When we traded Tyler, we were still really struggling. That was right at the beginning of All-Star break, I think. And it was almost like you’re giving a guy who’s won two Cups, who’s played a lot, played on teams that have won, he went to the Stanley Cup final with Montreal, who was now part of a team. We were struggling in a pretty meaningful way. Losing 7-1, 8-2, things of that nature. It was almost as if you were giving the player a new opportunity at the right point in his career. So that call wasn’t that difficult. It was, “Hey, you’re going to Calgary. You’re going to play for Darryl (Sutter) again.” I think he knew a lot of the players on the team. Pretty close to Milan Lucic. I think that was different. Ben Chiarot, I think he knew he was being moved all the way through, and by the time he was moved I think he felt good about it. He had been expecting it. He got to go to a really good team, have a real chance to win a Stanley Cup. The other ones were a little more different because all of a sudden Marty (St. Louis) came in, and we started to have success. We started to see the group really buy in and have fun being at the rink and that new renewed energy that comes even though we were pretty much already out of the playoffs. You see this new tide, this new wave of excitement and energy and then we turn around and pluck two guys out of it who have been here a long time. So the last two trades were probably a little bit more difficult.
SB: Your dynamic changes when Marty comes in, then? When it comes to these kinds of discussions?
KH: The process was different, no question about it. The considerations were different. Now you have a coach, a new coach, they’ve had a lot of success. He likes his group. He thinks the players are great. We traded away two guys (Kulak and Lehkonen) who are very positive influences in the locker room and we’re starting to think about how much can we subtract from that locker room without losing this renewed enthusiasm, energy, and altering or risking altering the culture of the group. We certainly talked about all of that before ultimately making the deals that we made. But also, we kept writing on the board that we’re still 32nd in the league and we’re still at the top of the page of CapFriendly. For us to take meaningful strides at putting together a team that can win on a consistent basis or a sustainable basis, we had to live through some of these difficult trades, players that we don’t necessarily want to trade away because they’re helping us win games.
SB: You are new to the management side. When you start to talk about the assets that make sense for you to bring back into the organization and how you are building this foundation out and bringing in players and picks that are going to hopefully lead you to great success and sustained success, relying on your scouts and the hockey ops group, what was that like for you?
KH: I’d love to be able to tell you that I could have done it all on my own, but there’s not a chance, right? having the benefit of two pretty experienced guys in Jeff Gorton (executive vice-president of hockey operations) and John Sedgwick (deputy director general), he’s been here for a long time and been through a lot of trade deadlines. And then having our scouts here and having a new but kind of fresh player voice in Vinnie Lecavalier and Eric Crawford, Marty Lapointe, Nick Bobrov, there was a lot of discussion, a lot of debate ,and I think for the most part consensus on everything that we did.
SB: You trust people to provide dissenting voices or provide alternative options, but at the end of the day the buck stops with you. What was that like for you to say, “OK, this is the deal, this is what we’re doing,” for the first time?
KH: I’ve never had an issue making decisions. Different people go about their decision-making processes differently. I’ve coached hockey for a long time, too, more at the youth level but competitive youth level hockey, and I love having input from coaches and hockey people about our team about our players but ultimately making my own decisions. Sometimes it runs opposite to what advice I’m getting but then sometimes I have to sit back and say, whoa, I really need to think about that. But the other benefit is that I’ve talked to Jeff a lot about hockey over the years as an agent and then a general manager, so I feel like we were pretty aligned in terms of how we see the game and how we value players and same for Marty (St. Louis). That’s important to as you make these decisions to understand the way we would like to play and how that player fits within how we want to play and if he meets the characteristics in terms of competitiveness and culture. So all of that went into it.
SB: I think there’s a perception, and I’m probably guilty of it too: you’re passed deadline, put your feet up. It’s probably not how it’s working for you. What are the priorities for you and your group moving forward?
KH: Scouting is at the forefront. We’ve got a significant number of picks this year and again the year after. We have to expend the appropriate amount of energy and time to make sure we get it as right as we think we can. So that’s certainly one area. From a hockey operations side we have, since coming in, talked about building out our analytics department. We started the process and then there was a coaching change and there were a lot of other things. I always talk the same on the agent’s side that you can plan your day, wake up in the morning and you have your action items for the day and you’re done your day and you got to point one on your 10-point list because it’s a reactionary business. It’s the same on the team side. We’ve got to get back to doing that. We’ve got to get back to our focus on the hockey development piece. We’ve hired Adam Nicholas (director of hockey development) and we’ve got to make more hires and then we’ve got to figure out the right process. How is it all going to work? And how does our development group work with our coaching staff here in Montreal and in Laval? And then how do we create a process to maximize how we develop our prospects? We’ve got a lot of planning to do. I would think in the subsequent year or two years from now, our focus might be very different post-trade deadline but for the time being we’ve got a lot of different items to focus on.
SB: Was there a moment during the deadline process that you felt, I am so glad I’m here, that I took this job?
KH: I’m a very competitive guy. There are a lot of things I loved about being an agent and I would say when I really look back on it over 25 years, beyond the group of people that I worked with who are close friends of mine and almost like an extended family, there’s also the clients and starting a relationship with a family of a 15- or 16-year-old kid and watching them grow into a professional hockey player and into a man and knowing that in some small way you helped them along that process. So that part of it was really meaningful. I’m hopeful that we’ll have that here. It probably took me seven or eight years to finally figure it out but I was a guy that loved hockey and wanted to find a way to stay in hockey. I decided that getting into the agency side of hockey was the way to do that. The one piece that I lacked was having a stake in the outcome of a game. And it’s very energizing for me to wake up every day thinking about how we’re going to do this, how do we get to this point and that’s exciting.