Colorado Avalanche: Joe Sakic is Over-Reliant on MacFarland
Jun 24, 2016; Buffalo, NY, USA; Tyson Jost shakes hands with Joe Sakic after being selected as the number ten overall draft pick by the Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the 2016 NHL Draft at the First Niagra Center. Mandatory Credit: Timothy T. Ludwig-USA TODAY Sports
The Colorado Avalanche face an uphill battle to improve as long as the assistant general manager, lawyer Chris MacFarland, is influencing decisions.
The Colorado Avalanche are in a terrible state. I don’t mean Colorado — it’s lovely here. (Unless you’re planning on moving here, then it’s a pit — stay home.) Rather, the team appears to have hit rock bottom.
Or, in the case of center Matt Duchene, a teammate:
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) December 21, 2016
This is not the season any of us wanted. For Avalanche fans, I don’t think it’s the season we really envisioned either.
It’s the season we’ve got, though. The team is dead last in the NHL and seems more in the Nolan Patrick draft race than in the playoff hunt.
So, in the grand tradition of sports fans everywhere, it’s time to start laying blame. We heard a lot last year about how it was the coach’s fault. Both last year and this year fingers point more at the players, especially the core.
It’s time for us to look at the man behind the scenes, though, the man who’s orchestrating the team personnel, staff and overall operations. He is the man who should bear the brunt of the blame for the Colorado Avalanche’s lost season.
That man is assistant general manager Chris MacFarland.
About Chris MacFarland
As you can see from the image above (he’s the one on the right), Chris MacFarland is a seemingly unassuming man. He’s from the Bronx in New York and graduated with a degree in business. His highest level of hockey accomplishment as a player is he played in college.
MacFarland later graduated with a law degree from Pace University. He is a lawyer by training.
Chris MacFarland is best known in the hockey world as being the assistant GM to the Columbus Blue Jackets. He started as the manager of hockey operations in 1999, as the team was still taking shape. He was promoted to assistant to the general manager in July 2007 and actual assistant general manager in July 2008.
MacFarland served as assistant general manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets from 2008 to 2015, when he got hired by the Colorado Avalanche for the exact same position.
While with Columbus, MacFarland worked mainly with Scott Howson as his GM, thoug he spent a year with Jarmo Kekalainen before jumping ship to Colorado. For coaching, he worked briefly with Ken Hitchcock and Claude Noel at the beginning of his assistant GM tenure. He worked two years with Scott Arniel and three with Todd Richards.
During his tenure with the Columbus Blue Jackets, the team only made the playoffs twice, getting ousted in the first round both times. The rest of the time they tended to dwell near the bottom of the conference, and usually near the bottom of the league as well. One season they only got 65 points. No, it was not the lockout season.
Jun 27, 2013; New York, NY, USA; Colorado Avalanche executive vice president of hockey operations Joe Sakic arrives at the Westin Hotel for the NHL Board of Governors meeting. Mandatory Credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
MacFarland and the Colorado Avalanche
The Colorado Avalanche hired Chris MacFarland to be an assistant manager in May 2015.
According to Mike Chambers of the Denver Post, MacFarland already had ties to the Avalanche. He was well familiar with fellow assistant GM Craig Billington from their fellow AHL days. He also had a “strong relationship” with sometime defensive coordinator and Avs great Adam Foote.
While on the face of it, leaving a job as assistant GM in Columbus for a job as assistant GM in Colorado seemed like a lateral move, it represented more of a promotion. According to CBJ blogger Aaron Portzline, MacFarland mostly worked with the AHL affiliates, though he did some contract negotiating, too.
Also according to Portzline, MacFarland’s new role with the Avalanche would be primarily pro scouting and being GM Joe Sakic’s “right hand man.” Those are Portzline’s words.
From 2013 to the MacFarland hiring, it was understood that Sakic’s teammate from his Stanley Cup years, Hall of Fame goalie Patrick Roy, was Joe’s “right hand man,” and that he had final say in player personnel decisions.
Roy had unprecedented influence with the Colorado Avalanche as head coach and vice president of hockey operations. The understanding at the time was that the two Avs greats were working together to bring the team back to elite status using the power of their hockey brilliance.
Bringing MacFarland into the fold changed that.
Jun 30, 2013; Newark, NJ, USA; Colorado Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy (right) talks with executive of hockey operations Joe Sakic (left) during the 2013 NHL Draft at the Prudential Center. Mandatory Credit: Ed Mulholland-USA TODAY Sports
MacFarland’s Detriment to the Colorado Avalanche
It should come as no surprise to my readers that I consider losing Patrick Roy as head coach to be a huge detriment to the team. I think he has a hockey mind that’s unrivaled in the world — his players have said his in-game decision-making is unparalleled.
What’s more, Roy is a player hero. He helped bring the first-ever pro sports championship to the sports-loving state of Colorado. His loss stings for Avs Nation.
I think his vision for the Colorado Avalanche would have eventually come to fruition (more on that in a later post) if he’d had a partner with as much confidence to make the hard decisions as he has.
He didn’t, though. Joe Sakic has ever been careful — he’s never been known as having swagger or even a grand vision. He was an amazingly talented and skilled player, a diplomat both on and off the ice. He’s generally considered a true gentleman.
So it should come as no surprise that, when it all started hitting the fan, he didn’t choose the cowboy way. He didn’t stick to his guns and see his vision through. Instead, he brought in a lawyer who was most comfortable in negotiations.
That would have been fine if he hadn’t supplanted Patrick Roy’s role with Chris MacFarland’s. Roy is no negotiator. But he took a liking to pro scouting and general player matters. That’s what MacFarland’s new role took away from Roy.
Indeed, Joe Sakic stated that, while Roy was “aware” of team decisions, he envisioned Patrick focusing more on coaching. When he resigned, Roy specifically identified his lack of input:
“The vision of the coach and VP-hockey operations needs to be perfectly aligned with that of the organization. He must also have a say in the decisions that impact the team’s performance. These conditions are not currently met.”
Roy stated outright that his vision no longer coincided with Sakic’s. There’s no reason to think Roy’s vision had changed. Therefore, it must have been Joe’s. And the big change was the addition of MacFarland.
Ok, what’s done is done. However, let’s examine a little more closely what exactly got done — and why I state Sakic is still over-reliant on MacFarland.
More from Mile High Sticking
The last few years, the Columbus Blue Jackets were one of the few teams worse than the Colorado Avalanche. They tried the usual — coaching change — but it didn’t come to fruition until this season. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this CBJ season represents one in which little if any of McFarland’s influence is still in evidence.
Look at some of the hires that the Avs made over the summer. The most obvious is Jared Bendar, who had literally no NHL experience (as a coach or a player). Yet he was chosen over more suitable candidates — every single one of whom had NHL experience. The list included a man, Kevin Dineen, who’d been the assistant coach on a Stanley Cup winning team, the division rival Chicago Blackhawks. Seriously, how could Bednar be a better candidate?
Here’s how Bednar was a “better” candidate: He worked closely with MacFarland in the Blue Jackets’ AHL affiliate system.
The other hire was assistant coach Nolan Pratt. While it’s true he was briefly a Colorado Avalanche player (he did win a Cup with the team), his coaching experience came with — you guessed it — the CBJ, or their AHL affiliates. It was understood that Sakic hired Pratt to be Roy’s assistant. Roy didn’t have input.
More From Mile High Sticking: Jared Bednar in Over his Head
The CBJ connection continues with some of the player acquisitions. For example, Columbus bought out defenseman Fedor Tyutin. Colorado snapped him up right away — and gave the 33-year-old a fat, $2 million contract. What’s more, he gets playing time whenever he isn’t injured, despite being the Avalanche’s #6 defenseman for Corsi For. He’s #4 on the blueline list for points. He’s #5 on the defenseman list for plus/minus.
Eric Gelinas, on the other hand, is higher on each of those lists, and younger and cheaper to boot. Yet Gelinas gets scratched so Tyutin can play whenever Fedor is healthy.
Even with Erik Johnson out with an injury, Gelinas can’t get a chance because there’s another former Columbus Blue Jacket on the roster, Cody Goloubef. The 27-year-old has spent the majority of his career in the CBJ’s AHL system. But Gelinas gets scratched so he can play.
But then, Eric Gelinas never played in the CBJ system. What’s more, he’s a player in Patrick Roy’s preferred mold.
To my mind, this all leads back to Chris MacFarland. It’s perfectly natural that a man in his position will return to what he knows. Unfortunately, what MacFarland knows is the CBJ organization at its worst. And what he and the Colorado Avalanche have access to is that organization’s rejects.
I don’t know why Joe Sakic chose to start listening to Chris MacFarland over his Stanley Cup buddy Patrick Roy. Hell, he still has access to Craig Billington and Adam Foote. Yet their hand seems little evident in current Avalanche moves.
And what this has gotten us is a Colorado team with a 11-19-1 record that’s bottom in pretty much every statistic and last in the NHL.
The Columbus Blue Jackets got exponentially better without MacFarland. I daresay the Colorado Avalanche would start on the upswing again, too, without the lawyer’s influence. It’s time for the Avalanche to fire Chris MacFarland.
