i'm too cheap to subscribe.
maybe it's time to cash in my empties.
seriously though....the atlantic seems to have the best of the best in articles i'd like to read.
Mike Smith is talking about xenophobia in the Blackhawks front office, about Bob Pulford’s relentless two-year quest to get him fired, about the organization actively sabotaging his chances at landing future jobs, about how his name has been all but erased from the history books when it comes to the modern Blackhawks resurgence.
But while there’s a clear bitterness to the words, it’s nowhere to be found in his tone. He says it all calmly, matter-of-factly, dispassionately. These are the facts as he sees them, that’s all.
No use dwelling on what happened some 17 years ago, no use raging against people who are no longer relevant, no longer working in hockey, and in some cases, no longer alive. Those Blackhawks aren’t these Blackhawks. He knows that.
And come on, who’s got time to be bitter when there’s some sweet, sweet honey on the way?
“The beehives came yesterday,” Smith says over the phone. “It’s too cold to get them set up yet, though.”
Smith is a farmer now and he’s spending the pandemic alongside his wife, Phoebe Cole-Smith, working their land in Weston, Conn. Hockey was his past life, and even then, it never was his whole life. He never played higher than the college level. And even when he was running NHL teams, he was into Native American art and old books, not just goals and assists. Maybe that’s why he seemed to stick out everywhere he went.
“I want to be defined by who I am, not just as a hockey guy,” he says. “David Poile wants to be a GM his whole life, that’s how he’s defined, and that’s fine. There are people desperate to get back into hockey when they’re out. I don’t know. That’s not me. I want to do more than just hockey.”
Wait, hold up. Let’s start over.
Do you know who Mike Smith is? It’s a fair question in a city with a gaping, decade-wide hole in its hockey memory. Have you ever heard the name, or is it just another one swallowed up by the murky fog of the Blackhawks’ dark ages, between the Roenick/Amonte and the Toews/Kane eras? Do you include Smith in the never-ending debate between who deserves the most credit for the Blackhawks’ decade of dominance, or have you kept it strictly between current GM Stan Bowman and previous GM Dale Tallon, like most fans do?
Smith was the Blackhawks’ general manager from September 2001 through October 2003, and the manager of hockey operations for the 2000-01 season. His legacy might be lost to younger Chicagoans who fell in love with the sport in the late 2000s, but someday you’ll be able to see it hanging from the rafters of the United Center. Hell, you already can.
In 2002, Smith drafted an undersized defenseman named Duncan Keith. He says he almost got fired for the pick. Then, in 2003, he drafted a slow-footed defenseman named Brent Seabrook, a goalie named Corey Crawford and an overweight defenseman named Dustin Byfuglien. It’s the only draft in Blackhawks history in which three future All-Stars were selected, and one of just two such drafts league-wide over the past three decades (Carolina, 2010), per Hockey-Reference. But four months later, Smith was fired.
And while he’s not overly bitter, he’s also not shy. So ask him what happened, how it all went wrong, and he won’t hesitate to share the unvarnished, often ugly, truth — or at least, his version of it.
“If I ever write about a book about this,” he says with a chuckle, “it’ll be a burner.”
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Two nights before the 2002 draft, Smith’s hand-picked director of amateur scouting, Bill Lesuk, said he wanted to draft a scrawny Michigan State freshman named Duncan Keith in the second round.
“What’s wrong with that?” Smith said. “Take him.”
“Well, he’s only 5-10, 165 pounds,” Lesuk said. “And you’re going to be really criticized for taking him.”
“Bill, we’re criticized no matter who we take,” Smith said. “I remember being cut to shreds when I took Teppo Numminen in Winnipeg.”
“Well, I think he’ll grow, but he has every aspect for the game needed for where this league is headed,” Lesuk said.
“Then take him,” Smith responded. “He’ll grow.”
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Smith can’t really say how he felt when he saw the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup in 2010. He had long ago been numbed to the fateful whims of managing an NHL franchise. Thirty-one years earlier — when a New York Rangers team he helped build as an assistant coach and college scout reached the 1979 Stanley Cup Final, a year after he was canned as part of a front-office house-cleaning that replaced GM John Ferguson with Fred Shero — Smith learned that you rarely get to see your work come to fruition.
“That’s when I realized I was in a business where you can be part of a group that does some really good things, but you’re not going to be there when things finally work out,” he says. “That’s just the way the sport is.”
There were a few holdovers from his time in Chicago. He hired both Bowman and senior vice president of hockey ops Al MacIsaac. Smith says he received a few nice calls from former coworkers. But even though Keith, Seabrook and Byfuglien all played massive roles in the city’s first Stanley Cup in 49 years, his name barely came up at all.
He wasn’t surprised.
“I don’t get mentioned much because the Blackhawks make sure not to mention me,” he says. “They had actually cost me jobs. An owner would call and they’d say, ‘Don’t hire this guy, he’s a jerk, he’s incompetent.’ I know the people there speak highly of me; John McDonough has told me that. But you’re not going to see the Chicago Blackhawks mention my name, because then you have to go back and ask why they fired me. If all of a sudden you hear the Blackhawks say, ‘Mike Smith did a hell of a job,’ isn’t your first question as a journalist, ‘Then why’d you fire him?’ They’re not going to want to answer that question.”
Mike Smith hired Stan Bowman in 2000 as a special assistant for the Blackhawks. (Photo by Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images)
Smith calls his time in Chicago “a living hell.” His affinity — some around the league thought it was more of an obsession — with Russian hockey and Russian players, along with his early embrace of analytics, rubbed the old guard the wrong way, and he says he very quickly began to butt heads with team vice president Bob Pulford, who was both his predecessor and successor as GM.
“You can go back to when I first got there (in December of 1999),” Smith says. “Chicago had a very poor history of drafting, mainly because they were terribly biased against anyone who’s not from Canada. When I came in, I completely changed their approach to scouting.”
In his first season as GM, the Blackhawks made the playoffs for the first time in five years, and Smith was named Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. But he says he was constantly being threatened with dismissal.
“Bob Pulford was trying to get me fired for a year and a half,” Smith says. “I was being internally criticized by the person I worked for, for having the two worst drafts in the history of the organization. I was told repeatedly that Duncan Keith was the worst draft pick ever, and Dustin Byfuglien was the second-worst.”
Pulford, a favorite of Bill Wirtz, was famously loyal to his guys, and famously contentious with countless others, from Smith to Mike Keenan to Bobby Hull. A longtime team source says Pulford was signing off on every move Smith made, a front-office dynamic that can only lead to tension. By the summer of 2003, it had become an untenable situation, and Pulford, with Wirtz’s blessing, made his move. In a statement released with the news, Pulford said the decision came down to Smith’s tumultuous relationship with head coach Brian Sutter.
“It had become apparent to me toward the end of last season and the beginning of this year that our general manager and head coach were not on the same page,” Pulford’s statement read.
A smokescreen, Smith says.
“It fell apart as soon as Bob Pulford found out I wouldn’t do what he told me to do,” Smith says. “It was always, ‘Get rid of these fucking guys, fire this guy, what’d you hire this fucking guy for?’ The players never knew there was a problem between me and Brian Sutter. That only came out from the Blackhawks afterward. There was a huge problem with Brian Sutter and the players, both ways. He hated the players and the players hated him. It was a constant parade in my office of agents and players complaining about how he treated them.
“But Pulford was in love with (former Blackhawks forward and coach) Daryl Sutter, and had to protect Brian. So that got added to the fact that I wouldn’t do what he told me to do. It took him almost two years to get me fired. That’s how long it went on. I had a chance to leave at one point, but I decided not to, because what kind of a leader would I be if I had left? There were people I had hired who left good jobs to come there. And what about the players? Once I was gone, they started purging the Europeans the moment I was out the door. So yeah, it was a living hell. But those are some pretty good drafts when you’re working in an environment where no matter what you do, you’re being told you’re going to get fired.”
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There are no sure things in the later rounds of the NHL draft. Back in 2003, there were nine rounds.
“When you get down to the seventh, eighth, ninth round, they’re all maybes,” Smith says. “There’s something you like about them, but not much, otherwise you’d take them earlier.”
Byfuglien, a burly defenseman from Minnesota playing in Prince George, was on the Blackhawks’ radar. In pre-draft discussions, Blackhawks director of player development Marshall Johnston and western scout Bruce Franklin were at odds over Big Buff. Smith vividly recalls the debate.
Franklin: “He’s so fucking fat, he can’t fucking play.”
Johnston: “I don’t give a fuck how fat he is, he can fucking play.”
Smith told them he’d consider taking him as a late-round flyer, and the Blackhawks wound up grabbing him in the now non-existent eighth round. Less than a week later, at prospect camp, Smith was thumbing through all the shirtless photos of all the players taken during their fitness tests as a way of evaluating body types and potential growth.
“Oh, my God, this guy is fat,” Smith recalls saying to no one in particular.
Brent Seabrook, Dustin Byfuglien, Corey Crawford and Duncan Keith were Blackhawks in large part thanks to Mike Smith. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
The next afternoon, after a morning of drills, the first camp scrimmage began in earnest. Byfuglien chased down a puck in the corner behind and to the left of the goalie, but as he was going down to retrieve the puck, he quickly glanced over his shoulder to see the play developing behind him.
“That right away puts him in a different category, because the good players know what they’re going to do with the puck before they get the puck,” Smith says. “So he gets the puck, he spins and one-times it across to the far blue line on the stick of a winger. I lean over to Nick Beverly, our assistant GM, and I say, ‘Jesus, this is a player.’ And that’s the story of Dustin Byfuglien.”
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Less than four months after the Blackhawks fired Smith, star center Alex Zhamnov was traded to Philadelphia and Ville Nieminen was sent to Calgary. A month later, Alexander Karpovtsev was dealt to the Islanders. Igor Korolev wasn’t re-signed and left for Russia.
Now, the Blackhawks weren’t very good back then. They won just 30 games in 2002-03 and just 20 games in 2003-04, so a roster shakeup was clearly justified. But through Smith’s eyes, history was repeating itself.
“The Chicago team got destroyed after I left, just like the Winnipeg team (he spent 14 years in the Jets organization, including six as GM) got destroyed after I left,” he says. “Call it a change of leadership, or a lack of leadership. My vision was gone, and they started getting rid of players. I mean, Winnipeg got rid of Teemu Selanne. How the hell do you do that? But that’s the business I was in. I didn’t need (the Blackhawks) to win a Stanley Cup to know that we left them really good players. We left them with so many good players that, until they had to fire Dale Tallon, they couldn’t completely screw it up.”
In his memory, Smith claims that there were “10 or 12” players on the 2009-10 Blackhawks that were taken during his four drafts. That’s a significant stretch, as only Keith, Seabrook, Byfuglien and Adam Burish were Smith draft picks (Dave Bolland, Bryan Bickell, Jake Dowell and Troy Brouwer were all taken in 2004).
Tallon gets the lion’s share of credit for building the 2010 juggernaut; he was the Blackhawks’ director of player personnel from 1998-2002, and assistant general manager from 2003-05, when he succeeded Pulford as GM. But for that crucial 2002-03 season and draft, Tallon was back in the broadcast booth for a year.
Smith’s impact and legacy are undeniable. But the way Smith sees it, history is written by the winners.
“That’s the other part (of my relative anonymity), is Dale Tallon taking a lot of credit for these drafts,” Smith says. “People don’t follow up on it. He had nothing to do with any of the draft picks when I was there. One of the first things I made clear to Bill Lesuk when I got there was, ‘Don’t pay any attention to Dale Tallon. Just let him talk.’ He even takes credit for the 2003 draft. He was in the TV booth that year; he didn’t even work for the team. He’s quite liberal taking credit for it.”
Is he, though? Or has the inexorable march of time simply blurred memories of fans and front offices alike?
In a text, Tallon responded: “I have never taken credit for them.”
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When you’re picking in the top two or three, you can usually zero in on one guy. When you’re picking 14th, you have to have a group of players you’re willing to select. But Lesuk and Smith were pretty sure Seabrook would be there at No. 14.
“Part of the word on him was he had slow feet,” Smith says. “Which ended up being accurate.”
But the Blackhawks saw the bigger picture and hoped the lack of speed would scare away other teams so he’d fall to them.
Well, OK, not all the Blackhawks saw the bigger picture.
“There was a lot of controversy behind this pick,” Smith says. “At one time, I was told by Bob Pulford, ‘If you draft this particular player, you’ll be fired by the end of this weekend.’”
Despite Duncan Keith’s size, Mike Smith thought he could thrive in the NHL. (Christopher Hanewinckel / USA Today)
The Blackhawks had no third- or fourth-round picks in that 2003 draft, so the two they had in the second round would be crucial. The second one, defenseman Michal Barinka, didn’t amount to much. But at No. 52, there was a heated discussion at the draft table.
“They were debating over three players,” Smith says. “Now Bill Lesuk always had final say. But they always tried to come to a consensus at the draft table, where everyone’s in agreement that, yes, we should take this guy. But they just kept talking and talking, so finally, I said, ‘Pick the goalie.’ So they took Corey Crawford. That’s not the first time I said that. You can never have enough goaltenders.”
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Now, Smith calls this a “grapevine thing,” so take it with a grain of salt. But to him, it’s a perfect example of how right he was for the job, and how wrong Pulford was. The way Smith tells it, Pulford was this close to trading then-prospect Duncan Keith to the Flyers, packaging him with three other players to bring 34-year-old Jeremy Roenick and 34-year-old Tony Amonte back to Chicago in the twilight of their careers.
The only thing that stopped him was the 2004-05 lockout, as the trade market was frozen for an entire year. And during that lockout, Keith had a stellar season for the Norfolk Admirals of the American Hockey League, which was loaded with just about every top prospect in the league because of the wiped-out NHL season. The following fall, Keith made the Blackhawks roster out of camp, played 81 games and never looked back.
“Imagine that,” Smith says.
Imagine a lot of things. Imagine if Smith had won the internal war with Pulford and Sutter. Would things have gone as well had Smith stayed on as GM, rather than Tallon? Would they have gone worse? Would the Blackhawks have gotten bad enough to draft Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane? Would they have taken other players, anyway? Would the 2010 Stanley Cup and a decade of dominance have even happened? It’s a butterfly effect with too many possibilities to track.
But as he watched his guys — Keith, Seabrook and Byfuglien — lift the Cup in 2010, then again in 2013 and 2015 alongside his other guy, Crawford, Smith didn’t feel angry. Didn’t feel wistful. Didn’t feel much of anything, beyond a bit of pride for himself and his players. It’s hockey, where “it is what it is” is more mantra than cliché.
After all, Smith’s a farmer now. He knows all about planting seeds in a garden, and wondering if you’ll ever get to see them grow.
“So how did I feel in 2010? I don’t know,” he says. “I had a couple Chicago Blackhawks employees call me up and congratulate me. I’m not going to tell you who, because the Blackhawks used to have a tendency to fire people if you stepped out of line. I don’t know how I felt. Life goes on. And you just realize that in pro sports, nothing’s very permanent.”
(Photo: Doug Pensinger / Getty Images/NHLI)
