A colorful NHL nickname belongs to Emile "The Cat" Francis, best remembered as the longtime general manager/coach of the New York Rangers during the '60s and '70s. But if a cat has nine lives, that nickname may be better suited for Mike Keenan, the NHL's vagabond, who just concluded his seventh life, the latest with the Florida Panthers.
If any NHL team is seduced by Keenan's two remaining lives, it should examine his results in the last 12 years since he walked away from the Stanley Cup champion New York Rangers. At that time, Keenan was appointed General Manager/Coach of the St. Louis Blues. That appeared to be a good move for the Blues, hiring Keenan, who had coached three teams -- Philadelphia, Chicago and New York Rangers -- to the Stanley Cup finals.
But when Keenan was fired, two and a half years later, in December 1996, his imprint on the Blues resembled a scorched earth. His subsequent tenures in Vancouver, Boston and Florida suggest that Keenan is overrated and still living off his 1994 Stanley Cup triumph with the Rangers.
The final pieces for that 1994 Cup team have been credited to a series of deals at the trade deadline that March when New York picked up Glenn Anderson, Stephane Matteau, Craig MacTavish, and Brian Noonan. Among those the Rangers traded away were Tony Amonte, Mike Gartner and Todd Marchant.
For those not familiar with the careers of those players, it may be helpful to know that the players acquired by New York would subsequently amass a combined total of 182 goals for the duration of their NHL careers (37 with the Rangers), while those traded away have combined 573 career goals (prior to 2006-07), including the still-active Amonte and Marchant.
It is widely accepted that Keenan pushed General Manager Neil Smith to make the deals. Here we see the traits favored by Keenan, pushing for veterans and/or grinders at the expense of youth and skill. Furthermore, the trades demonstrate that Keenan prefers veterans who have previously played for him and/or won a Cup.
With the GM title and full authority in St. Louis, Keenan indulged in his preferences by trading for or signing the following veterans of note: Glenn Anderson, Marc Bergevin, Adam Creighton, J.J. Daigneault, Greg Gilbert, Charlie Huddy, Doug Lidster, Stephane Matteau, Joe Murphy, Brian Noonan, Esa Tikkanen, Trent Yawney, and Peter Zezel.
All of them previously played for Keenan with the exception of Huddy and Murphy, who were both former Cup winners and played with Edmonton. Special mention goes to Matteau and Noonan who each played for Keenan on four different teams.
Of those veterans acquired in St. Louis, their average age was 30.2 years when they joined the Blues. The only two players under 29 were Matteau and Murphy. Of those veterans, Murphy was the only forward ever to reach 20 goals or 40 points with the Blues (he did it once), and Bergevin was the only defenseman to ever reach 10 points in St. Louis (he did it once).
The first major trade of Keenan's St. Louis regime was shipping out then 22-year-old Petr Nedved for 29-year old Esa Tikkanen and 33-year-old Doug Lidster. The still-active Nedved has gone on to score 239 career goals (prior to 2006-07), while Tikkanen scored 42 goals the rest of his career before retiring from NHL in 1999.
Keenan's go-for-broke strategy backfired horrendously at the 1996 trade deadline when he tried to emulate Smith's success in 1994. Just a month earlier, Keenan had obtained Wayne Gretzky from Los Angeles and wanted to add another piece for a possible Cup run. He consummated a package deal with Buffalo that boiled down to a St. Louis second-round draft pick in exchange for then 31-year-old Yuri Khmylev.
The second-round pick Keenan traded away had been obtained from the Ottawa Senators, then on the way to finishing dead last in the entire NHL for the second consecutive season. The draft pick turned out to be the opening pick of the second round, 27th overall.
To get that draft pick from Ottawa in the first place, Keenan traded away defenseman Steve Duchesne, a three-time all-star who had averaged 55 points a season. So, in return for an all-star defenseman, Keenan indirectly ended up with Khmylev, who had eight goals and 28 points that season at the time of the trade.
Keenan, on his own radio show that week, was quick to admit that he overpaid for Khmylev. "Sometimes when you're an hour away from the deadline and you're looking to improve the hockey club, you're at the mercy of the other general manager." But, with the pressures of that same 1996 trade deadline, other GMs fared much better than Keenan.
For a second-round pick, Florida picked up Ray Sheppard who had 29 goals that season at the time of the trade. For a third-round pick, Vancouver picked up Jesse Belanger (17 goals). For a fifth-round pick, Pittsburgh picked up Kevin Miller (22 goals), whom Keenan had traded away a year earlier. In exchange for fourth-liner Alek Stojanov (0 goals, 123 penalty minutes), Vancouver picked up a youngster named Markus Naslund (19 goals), who would blossom into one of the NHL's best wingers.
As if to confirm Keenan's denigration of the trade, Khmylev appeared in seven of the 11 remaining regular season games for the Blues that spring, scoring no goals and recording one assist. Khmylev then played in six of the Blues' 13 playoff games that season, scoring one goal and recording one assist. His St. Louis and NHL career ended after playing two games the following season.
Khmylev's St. Louis regular-season totals read nine games, one goal, one assist and two points, tying him with the career point totals of St. Louis goalies John Davidson (now the Blues' President), Phil Myre, Jacques Plante, and Roman Turek. At least Khmylev is one point ahead of other Keenan acquisitions, Dallas Eakins and Paul Broten.
The latter was obtained from Dallas in October 1995 for Guy Carbonneau, for whom Keenan had little use. Carbonneau went on to play five more seasons and win another Cup.
The Khmylev and Carbonneau deals portend Keenan's weakness in evaluating NHL talent. But the capper was his trade for prospect Pavol Demitra, often mistakenly cited as one of Keenan's good trades.
For Keenan, the deal was about getting rid of someone, specifically Christer Olsson. Just a month into the 1996-97 season, Keenan decided to exchange Olsson for Demitra, who was immediately sent to the minors, but not to the Blues' primary affiliate in the American Hockey League, rather on loan to an independent team in the now-defunct International Hockey League.
Only after Keenan was fired did Demitra get a chance to audition with the Blues. In his fourth game with the Blues, Demitra scored a pair of goals. The following season, his first as a regular, Demitra tallied 52 points in 61 games and his career took off.
Another trade for which Keenan has gotten too much credit was swapping Brendan Shanahan for Chris Pronger. Today, an exchange of those two all-stars would be considered a fair deal, but back then in July 1995, Pronger was a long way from becoming an all-star.
Pronger was a 20-year old struggling on and off the ice with the pressure of being a No. 2 overall draft pick. In two seasons with the Hartford Whalers, Pronger had averaged 22 points.
By contrast, Shanahan was a 26-year old, considered a prime age, with back-to-back 50-goal seasons. A year earlier, he was chosen as the first-team left winger on the end-of-the-year NHL All-Star Team.
Thus, Keenan overpaid for Pronger just as he had done with Khmylev. The headline on an analysis of the Pronger trade by Larry Wigge, longtime hockey reporter for The Sporting News, read: "The Whalers get a star; the Blues get a could-be."
Keenan would have been within reason to ask Hartford to throw in a proven commodity, without giving up any of its top six scorers, such as former all-stars Brad McCrimmon, Pat Verbeek and Jimmy Carson, all in the twilights of their careers. Or he could have asked them to throw in some grinders such as Ted Drury, Mark Janssens, or Jocelyn Lemieux.
Or he could have asked for one of Hartford's draft picks or prospects to further build for the Blues' future along with Pronger. The Whalers' farm system at that time had future NHL players Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Manny Legace, Sami Kapanen, Marek Mailik, and Jeff O'Neill.
Given the Blues' goaltending woes in recent years, either of those two future NHL goalies would have been welcome additions. The problem for Keenan in the Pronger trade and many others was that he appeared to be dealing out of weakness rather than strength, as he candidly admitted with the Khmylev deal.
Keenan wanted to move Shanahan because they clashed in their only season together. The idea of Keenan clashing with a team's marquee player seems borne out by his behavior with other teams before and after his tenure in St. Louis. In the case of Shanahan, it has become public knowledge that Keenan was prepared to trade Shanahan to the New York Rangers in a deal for Alexi Kovalev and Matteau (surprise!). This suggests that Keenan's primary motive was not to acquire Pronger, but rather to dump Shanahan.
Another star that clashed with Keenan was goalie Curtis Joseph, who got shipped out to Edmonton a week after Shanahan and a couple weeks after the free-agent signing of Grant Fuhr. The pickup of Fuhr, then a 32-year-old former all-star with chronic knee injuries, was another example of Keenan's fondness for former Cup winners and/or Edmonton Oilers.
The season before, Fuhr played 17 games combined with Buffalo and Los Angeles compiling a 4.03 goals against average and an .873 save percentage that ranked 60th in the league out of 68 goalies. By contrast, Joseph recorded a 2.79 GAA and .902 save percentage in his only season under Keenan.
Fortunately for St. Louis, Fuhr made a successful comeback the following season. In doing so, he set NHL season records by starting 76 consecutive games and playing in 79 of 82 regular-season games. Those records were a reflection of the Blues' dearth of goaltending depth.
Yet in his two and a half seasons as the Blues' GM, Keenan did not prepare for the post-Fuhr Era by trading for or drafting a notable goaltending prospect. He did not ask Hartford for either Giguere or Legace, who both were drafted in 1995 when Keenan ran the Blues' draft table. That same entry draft produced future NHL goalies Martin Biron, Brian Boucher, Marc Denis, Vesa Toskala, Mikka Kiprusoff, Chris Mason, and Brent Johnson.
(Sidebar: Johnson subsequently came to St. Louis in the summer of 1997, six months after Keenan was fired, in a trade conducted by Blues' interim GM, Ron Caron. Three years later, Johnson made the team as its No. 2 goalie and became its starter the following season.)
Because Keenan did not restock the Blues' goaltending cupboard, the team would eventually suffer in its search for a long-term No. 1 goalie. Following Fuhr were a string of disappointments from Roman Turek to Johnson to Chris Osgood to Patrick Lalime. Meanwhile, Joseph is still active and performing like an all-star, one who was a serious candidate for the Canadian Olympic team last season.
Goaltending was not the only position to undergo musical chairs because of Keenan's moves. By the end of his first season in St. Louis, Keenan had gotten rid of centers Petr Nedved, Kevin Miller and Craig Janney, all skilled players who did not fill Keenan's desire for grit. That left the team without notable playmakers, an incongruous fact given the presence of Brett Hull, regarded as one of the league's top snipers.
In attempt to compensate for those dealings, Keenan then signed free agent centers Dale Hawerchuk and Shayne Corson (a former Oiler) in the summer of 1995. By the following March, Hawerchuk was traded to Philadelphia for Craig MacTavish (another former Cup winner and/or Oiler).
Corson did not click as a No. 1 center for Hull, so Keenan pulled off a blockbuster trade in March 1996 by giving up three of the team's top prospects, and future first-round and fifth-round draft picks to Los Angeles for free agent-to-be Gretzky. Four months later, Gretzky signed with the Rangers, in part because of his distaste for Keenan, which meant the Blues had nothing to show for the blockbuster deal.
So once more Keenan sought to find a No. 1 center and Corson became the trade bait in Keenan's last and best trade. In November 1996, a month before Keenan was fired, he obtained Pierre Turgeon, Craig Conroy, and Rory Fitzpatrick for Corson, Murray Baron and a fifth-round draft pick.
Turgeon performed admirably as the Blues' No. 1 center for five seasons before leaving as a free agent. Conroy would blossom as a checking center for five seasons before being traded to Calgary where he evolved into an offensive role.
Keenan made another good move in signing free agent Geoff Courtnall (again a former Cup winner and/or Oiler). Courtnall played five seasons with the Blues before concussions ended his career.
After trading away Baron, only two players remained on the Blues from when Keenan first took over two and a half years earlier -- Brett Hull and Al MacInnis. Yet, as the team struggled early in the 1996-97 season, Keenan stated that he was not to blame because it was not "his" team. He implicitly laid the blame on Hull and MacInnis, two future Hall of Famers, for alleged lack of leadership and performance.
Following an 8-0 home loss to Vancouver, he said, "The future of the team is questionable, not very bright." Keenan seemed oblivious to the fact that he had built the team as its general manager and was further responsible for its performance as its coach.
Four days later, Keenan was fired with a 75-66-21 (.528) record for St. Louis. He was succeeded on a permanent basis by Larry Pleau as GM and Joel Quenneville as coach. The next season, Quenneville coached virtually the same team to 98 points. The duo then helped the franchise peak two seasons later when it captured the Presidents' Trophy for the league's best regular-season record with 114 points.
Keenan went on to coach without distinction in Boston, Vancouver and Florida. None of those teams made the playoffs. Since leaving the Rangers, Keenan's teams, with him as coach or GM, have won one playoff series (1996 with St. Louis) in 10 seasons.
Keenan holds two NHL coaching records of dubious distinction, most teams (seven) coached by a Stanley Cup champion, and most teams coached (four) after winning the Cup. If another team were to hire Keenan for his eighth or ninth life, he seems more apt to add to his record of futility rather than success.
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NOTE: Some statistical information and a quote provided by St. Louis Sports Online (April 9, 1996)
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