PITTSBURGH — Penguins fans should know that when Fenway Sports Group executive Dave Beeston said there is “no limit” as to who the team will hire to lead its hockey operations department next, they were far from empty words.
The man tabbed with monitoring the Penguins’ day-to-day operations on behalf of FSG spoke with reporters last Friday about engaging in a “robust process” to reshape the organization’s hockey operations department once headed by Brian Burke, Ron Hextall and Chris Pryor, all of whom have been fired. If anything can be gathered from FSG’s run of over two decades in professional sports, it’s that analytics are likely to factor heavily into that search.
FSG’s emphasis on statistics stems from its first ventures. John Henry, founder and principal owner of FSG, once tried to lure then-Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane for the same role with the Boston Red Sox. When Henry struck out with Beane, famous for his role in the book and later movie adaptation of “Moneyball,” he pivoted to another forward-thinking baseball mind in Theo Epstein, then just 24 years of age, for the position.
Unlike Beane, who was a former first-round draft choice with 301 major-league at-bats to his credit, Epstein graduated from Yale without having played baseball beyond high school. But like Beane, Epstein was a proponent of sabermetrics whose strategy paved the way for the Red Sox to break an 86-year championship drought.
FSG also hired Bill James, noted inventor of several still-significant statistics, as a senior adviser to baseball operations. James worked for the team for 17 years, a stretch in which Boston won four World Series.
The ownership group’s insistence on the meaning of statistics isn’t limited to just baseball. A couple years after acquiring Liverpool Football Club of the English Premier League in 2010, FSG searched for somebody who could develop a mathematical model to aid with player acquisition.
Unlike with American sports, designated front-office roles like general manager aren’t quite as commonplace; oftentimes, those duties are bestowed upon the club’s manager.
So when FSG hired Ian Graham, a graduate of the University of Cambridge with a doctorate in theoretical physics, to be the team’s director of research, it was something of a groundbreaking move by English soccer standards. Graham developed a model to help determine which players would be worth acquiring. The model, in part, helped push Liverpool to a Champions League crown in 2019 and a first-place finish in the Premier League a year later.
Of course, not every front office under FSG’s leadership has been quite so statistics savvy. With the Red Sox midway through the 2015 season, veteran MLB executive Dave Dombrowski was hired to a new position within the team, president of baseball operations. Dombrowski’s arrival prompted current Pirates general manager Ben Cherington to step down from the same position he once held with Boston.
As has been the case with the other three franchises for which Dombrowski has served as president of baseball operations, he accomplished the goal of getting the Red Sox to another World Series, which they also won in 2018. Unlike Epstein or Cherington, though, Dombrowski’s approach is more of a blend between traditional and new-age baseball thinking.
It didn’t take long for the Red Sox to reverse course and get back to somebody with a serious background in analytics; in October 2019, FSG poached 36-year-old Chaim Bloom from the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office to take over Dombrowski’s post. With Bloom involved in Tampa Bay’s front office for close to a decade, the Rays were early users of more frequent shifts and openers.
While baseball doesn’t have the salary cap restrictions like hockey, Dombrowski’s philosophy of spending money and winning in the present is in contrast to that of Hextall, who sought to do the improbable with the Penguins by balancing both the future and the now. Should FSG deem it is in win-now mode with the Penguins, as it was with the Red Sox in 2015 when going with Dombrowski, a hire of a hockey equivalent could be in store.
No matter whom FSG chooses to lead the Penguins front office next, odds are the analytics department could use a boost. Since Sam Ventura, the former director of hockey operations and hockey research for the Penguins, was hired away by the Buffalo Sabres nearly two years ago, his role has been left unfilled by the team, coinciding with the Burke-Hextall-Pryor administration.
It could also be relatively soon that clarity emerges with respect to the Penguins front office. It took FSG a little over a month to replace Dombrowski with Bloom in 2019. Cherington was promoted to general manager just days after Epstein moved on from the Red Sox to the Chicago Cubs.
With the 2023 NHL draft a little over two months away, FSG does have some time to work with. But if precedent is any indication less than a week into the post-Hextall era, some new faces in a number of ways could be running the show with the Penguins quite soon.
