Walton the GOAT wrote:Since even NHL fans can't be bothered to follow the Hurricanes and their iconoclast billionaire owner Tom Dundon, I thought I'd provide some background and insight into how Dundon runs the team
Tom Dundon purchased a majority stake in the Hurricanes in January 2018. This came completely out of nowhere, and after years of then owner Peter Karmanos Jr. attempting and failing to find an ownership group that would promise to keep the Hurricanes in Raleigh while dealing with the ever increasing problem of being broke as hell. It also happened after negotiations between Karmanos and an ownership group based in Quebec City broke down, putatively over who would be the majority owner of the team in the new location. Tom Dundon's agreement came with a 7 year "no relocation" promise, but had a loophole: after 3 years he could sell out of the team back to Karmanos at the cost he bought in. Suffice it to say, it was a Hail Mary for hockey in Carolina. To not waste more time, the team got good the very next year, Dundon discovered he enjoyed being the owner of a successful sports club, bought up all the land around the Hurricanes' stadium for development, bought the popular nearby sports restaurant with excellent food and turned it into a degenerate gambling den with garbage food, and recently signed a 50 year lease extension for the Canes in Raleigh. Sometimes Hail Marys pay off.
(And for you conspiracy lovers out there, that summer the Hurricanes won the draft lottery for the 2nd oa- the NHL holds a lottery for the top 2 picks- with a 3.3% chance, moving up from 10th to 2nd and drafting Andrei Svechnikov)
When Tom Dundon bought the team, the Hurricanes had been under the rule of Jim Rutherford and his successor, Ron Francis, for the entirety of their tenure in Raleigh. I don't know who the analogue for Ron Francis is in NBA terms, but he is 5th in cumulative scoring in League history, mostly because he played all of his prime in the highest scoring era the NHL has ever seen and was never particularly physical, and therefore healthy for most of it. He was never considered the best player in the NHL, and his most successful years, in terms of Cup wins, came as the 3rd option to all time greats in Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr in Pittsburgh. A list from hockey history nerds on hfboards didn't even have him in the top 100 all time back in 2018.
https://forums.hfboards.com/threads/top-100-hockey-players-of-all-time.2567403/?_gl=1*vkl7on*_ga*MjE3OTA5NDIuMTczNjk2NzY4OQ..*_ga_LHGV6GZ7R0*czE3NTUxMTM0MjIkbzQwNiRnMSR0MTc1NTExMzQzMCRqNTIkbDAkaDA.
Ron Francis is polite and erudite for a hockey player, a group of people with barely a high school education who on good days speak in seamless cliche and on bad ones can barely string sentences together. After his career he was hired by the Hurricanes and tried his hand at coaching before settling in as Jim Rutherford's future successor, which Francis took over in 2014. Francis was a member of the good ol' boys club, a chaplain of their bro-code, is what I'm getting at. And within 3 months of Dundon buying the team Francis was out.
The first and foremost thing to realize about Tom Dundon is he has what we now recognize as a venture start up attitude to running his teams. "Explain to me why we do this in 30 seconds, or it's cut." He had no reverence for posterity or the good ol' boys club, and Francis was quickly out the door and soon seething to the media. Another example: Dundon quickly fired the longtime radio voice Chuck Kaiton and merged radio broachcasts into TV simulcasts. He also forced longtime (and expensive) TV voice John Forslund out the door for the a former local sportstalk radio host with zero experience in sports play-by-play. Out was expensive good ol' boys club coach Bill Peters (who would later get fired from the NHL for shouting the n-word at a black player) and in was zero head coaching experience Rod Brind'amour (I should say that Brind'amour turned out to be a very good coach and Dundon got lucky here).
This isn't to say Dundon will cut costs across the board, but rather, identify what matters to team success and send it there. And for NHL, that is the roster. Dundon has consistently spent to the cap for the Hurricanes, consistently tried to make trades for the Hurricanes with little regard for the salary this year, has taken on bad contracts to get good picks and players if he had the space.
For the on-ice product, Dundon has opened his wallet. For everything else, it's faced self-justification and cuts.
But Dundon isn't going to just throw money at problems, in fact, I'd say he does the opposite- the Hurricanes prioritize cap flexibility above all else. They never sign expensive contracts to players on the wrong side of 30, the only exceptions are current franchise players Sebastian Aho and Jaccob Slavin, everyone else gets Logan's Run'd and sent out the door. With those guys- which, again, is almost everyone except the two players above- Dundon doesn't negotiate. It's take it or leave it, and it isn't surprising most FA's on the Hurricanes leave it. For the younger players, Dundon loves giving out long term contracts, as seen on the current Hurricanes roster, where pretty much every major player under the age of 27 is signed long term. The team admitted earlier that as long as 1 or 2 of these players outperforms their contract (and with the rising cap this is likely), then signing the lot of them is worth it, even if some flop.
So prioritization of long term cap flexibility, a dismissal of "how things are done," pumping money into the roster and cutting elsewhere, becoming the development king of Raleigh and Portland- that's what you can expect from a Dundon owned team. There's one other thing...
The 2015 NHL draft is one of the best drafts ever, and in offseason 2019 an unusual number of good players were due for 2nd contracts. This led to a lot of them holding out and plenty of drama, one of which was Sebastian Aho. Aho was offer sheeted by the Montreal Canadiens, a 42 million dollar deal with 21 million of that allocated in signing bonuses in the first two years- in other words, Dundon would have to shell out 21 million in a calendar year to keep Aho. Canadiens GM at the time Marc Beregevin admitted to the press that the pushed the offer sheet because they learned of a vulnerability in Dundon- in other words, they suspected he was a poor.
Dundon immediately matched l'offre hostile (well, technically, he waited the 7 days and matched at the last moment to **** with the Canadiens, but he announced immediately his intention to match), but the implication he was a poor made left him furious.
2 years later, the Canaidens were going through there own negotiation trouble with one Jesperi Kotkaniemi (Aho's fellow Finn, as it turns out), and Dundon took the opportunity to strike back, offer sheeting Kotkaniemi. This time the club did not match the offer and Kotkaniemi became a Hurricane. It was reported at the time that Kotkaniemi signed because the Hurricanes promised they would extend him 6 months later: we don't know if this was true but we do know the Hurricanes did extend Kotkaniemi 6 months later. Kotkaniemi has not lived up to his contract and at times gets sat by the coach.
So that's Dundon too. He can be vindictive and petty.
