If the NHL Awards were a Presidential Administration.........
I'll stop. It's just too easy.
But I have just one question: Who voted on this and what is wrong with them?
The General Manager of the Year Award is awarded annually National Hockey League general manager as voted by "a 40-member panel that included all 30 general managers, five NHL executives and five media members."
Thanks Wikileaks.
The questions that provides are almost endless:
Why doesn't this Trophy have a name (based on this year's nomination of Peter Chiarelli, might I suggest the Dave Nonis Trophy?).
Why is there an award to instantly gratify a position that takes long term planning? (If this award were to be meaningful in any real way, it would be awarded five seasons late. So, this year, we'd award the GM of the year for 2011, since we can now see how those moves played out).
How do they pick out which five media members vote? (Are they by any chance all Craig Button? Note: even in a wig, calling himself Greg Button, he is still unbearable).
Where 29 of the NHL's GM's trolling Peter Chiarelli when he was given this award?
I mean come on. Peter Chiarelli is routinely called the worst GM in the NHL.
He has traded not only Taylor Hall, but Phil Kessel and Tyler Seguin. The return he got for all three players was pure crap. (You can't even credit him with getting a good haul out of Toronto because there is no way anyone forsaw those picks being as high as they ended up).
The fact is, Peter Chiarelli is a perfect example of how most people won't even take five minutes to look beyond the results. The Oilers are finally good (with 56 #1 overall picks, and the best player the NHL has seen since Wayne Gretzky) so their GM must also be good.
The Oilers didn't play a single game last year with their optimal lineup. But so what? Chiarelli made a bunch of changes anyways. What patience!
The Oilers would have been good no matter what - I don't think Chiarelli's GM skills were necessary to a) draft Connor McDavid or b) heal his clavicle.
Peter Chiarelli acquired Cam Talbot - that's a great move.
He also singed Kris Russel and inexplicably gave 1 billion dollars to Milan Lucic.
Oh, and he made the single worst trade in NHL history.
Giving Peter Chiarelli a nomination for this terrible award saps away whatever credibility the NHL Awards had left.
This year, when the surviving member of Milli Vanilli finishes his musical performance and Chiarelli wins an award for being a good general manager, the NHL Awards will officially be worth less than a Latin Grammy or an Equadorian Daytime Emmy.
Giving Peter Chiarelli an award for being a good GM is like giving me an award for modesty, or giving a Trump supporter an honorary doctorate from Harvard.
And just to show you I'm not biased - it'd be like giving the Noble Peace Prize to the President most famous for drone strikes and murdering a guy.
In the end, rewarding the guy who made the worst trade of all time is a classic move for a league that denies concussions exist and where you have to do six cross-checks to even get a penalty.
I for one can't wait until Chiarelli announces in his acceptance speech that he has traded Leon Draisaitl to the Capitals for Brooks Orpik.
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