It was a long time coming, the Pittsburgh Penguins were going to eventually lose the services of Jason Botterill. Yesterday, the Buffalo Sabres officially named him their new general manager.
Botterill has been with the Penguins organization for the majority of the Crosby/Malkin era. He was a Ray Shero hire that was able to experience the ups and downs of that regime and then stayed on with Jim Rutherford to help construct the Penguins most recent Stanley Cup championship.
Botterill has famously managed the salary cap for the Penguins. He was able to identify and take advantage of many of the quirks and loopholes that the current CBA has. This was always important to a team that spends up to the cap ceiling. The ability to understand how to manipulate LTIR was something that the Penguins unfortunately needed more times than not, but they had a guy in place with the skills to navigate those issues. Examples of this include Botterill sending players all the way to the ECHL to maximize the space that the team had to work with. Mike Colligan provides a detailed account of what it looked like behind the scenes a number of years ago, including this passage.
Botterill didn’t even wait until Day 1 of this season to start maneuvering. Twenty-four hours before opening night the Penguins demoted promising prospect Eric Tangradi to Wheeling of the ECHL – bypassing their Wilkes-Barre affiliate in the American Hockey League altogether.
Tangradi was recalled back to the Penguins the next day, but the casual fan assumed Tangradi must have done something wrong to earn the temporary double-demotion. In reality, the quick move created millions of dollars in cap space for the team. Extra wiggle room allowed the Penguins to avoid playing without a full roster for a brief stretch in October like the New Jersey Devils were recently forced to do.
Managing the cap is a fine science and when you don’t do it properly things can go wrong quick, especially if you are a cap ceiling team. One glaring example would be when the Penguins were forced to play with only five defensemen at the tail end of the 2014-15 season because the team chose replacement level Nick Spaling’s 2.2M salary instead of a draft pick, something Botterill advised against.
Being a cap expert isn't limited to understanding your own team's needs. Having a high understanding of the situations of other teams in the league can help guide you to trade opportunities. When trading leverage is everything and if you can strike when a team is vulnerable you are able to maximize your return. A very valuable skill in a cap restricted league.
This offseason is incredibly unique with the expansion draft looming. Having a CBA expert on hand seems like a great resource during this time period.
That wasn’t Botterill’s only skill. He was also the general manager for the Baby Penguins. He was deeply committed to building and developing players at the AHL level. His commitment to development at the AHL level has given the Penguins many functional players who have been promoted to the NHL and found various levels of success. These players were generally effective and carried inexpensive cap hits. This allowed the big club to manage their cap and maximize the potential of acquiring proven impact players (IE: Kessel, Hagelin). Some of the players who spent time in the AHL and then came up to help the Penguins include, but are not limited to: Matt Murray, Jake Guentzel, Conor Sheary, Bryan Rust, Brian Dumoulin, Simon Despres, Tom Kuhnhackl, and Scott Wilson.
Given the volume of injuries that the Pittsburgh Penguins have suffered over the years having an AHL affiliate as strong as the one in WB/S has been a much needed lifeline. Pittsburgh has always been able to navigate the regular season and maintain a playoff spot despite leading the NHL in injuries for a large portion of the Crosby/Malkin era.
This success wasn’t magic. It was hard work. In yesterday’s press conference in Buffalo (which you can find
here) Botterill spoke about how somebody from management (himself, Guerin, Recchi) were in Willkes Barre for 95% of the games. There was an invested presence that Botterill desired that other organizations don’t have with their affiliate. It's hard to argue with the results.
Mike Sullivan has done a great job with the Pittsburgh Penguins (obviously). It was Botterill who hired him to coach the Baby Penguins. The basis for hiring Mike Sullivan was his attention to detail on the developmental/strategic side of things. Something that we have seen carry over to the big club as recently as the practice before Game 7 this week.
Buffalo is in desperate need of revamping the relationship their NHL team has with its AHL affiliate in Rochester. The product in Rochester has been garbage for years and as a result when the Sabres need players in a pinch those players aren't as effective as they need to be. Revamping the quality of the Rochester Americans won't happen overnight, but it was made clear in Botterill's press conference that he will be investing a lot of resources in order to get that relationship to function much like the one he had in Pittsburgh/Wilkes Barre. Having valuable draft picks is a necessity in building up an organization. The Sabres have done that part. The other way to improve your team is to maximize the abilities of those other players through development at the minor league level.
No team has a center duo like Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Trying to chase that would be a fruitless endeavor. However, Buffalo does have a pretty great 1-2 center combination with Jack Eichel and Ryan O'Reilly. This should make Botterill's job in Buffalo a little bit easier. Chasing top six centers is one of the most difficult jobs a GM has to do and Botterill won't have to do it. This will allow him to focus on Buffalo's miserable defensive situation which is completely anchoring the ability for the franchise to improve.
Jason Botterill’s resume reads like what most people would consider the perfect modern general manager candidate. He has an excellent understanding on how to develop from within, wizard with the salary cap, progressive on the analytics front, well-prepared, good communicator, and still has youth on his side with plenty of room to grow his skillset even more.
I will forever be puzzled why the organization did not make a better effort at keeping somebody with these qualities around. You can give credit to the job Jim Rutherford has done as general manager of the Penguins and also acknowledge that he is 68 years old and not exactly in it for the long haul. There is room for nuance in this discussion even if some ignore that possibility. Having Botterill in-house and only 40 years old should have been a slam-dunk transition and one that could have been successfully executed by promoting Jim Rutherford to another role within the organization. You can look at other examples of this with Brendan Shanahan, Cam Neely, John Davidson, and Luc Robataille.
For now Jim Rutherford says there are no plans to make a new hire to replace what Botterill has done. We'll see in the coming months/years how that plays out.
When the Penguins attempt to transition from the Crosby/Malkin era to the next chapter the team will probably be searching for a candidate that has all the qualities that Jason Botterill does.
What is Pittsburgh’s loss will be Buffalo’s gain.
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