When a Pittsburgh June dissolves into July and the never-ending hockey talk crescendos urgently on the matter of whom the Penguins can afford to keep and whom they can’t, it’s always funny how the chatter never gets around to the guy they can least afford to lose.
David Morehouse.
Starring in the roles of consultant, ace political operative, arena builder, president, CEO, and now multiple Stanley Cup winner since he first joined the hockey club 11 years ago, the guy who once spent endless summers elbowing through game after game of pick-up basketball on the asphalt courts of Beechview probably has never appeared so ripe for new challenges.
There probably isn’t a sports franchise or an ascendant politician or a graduate school left in America that couldn’t use Morehouse’s insight, and they’re all going to be disappointed.
“I wouldn’t know how to operate any other way than I have under this ownership,” Morehouse said Wedneday over a Starbucks. “They’re as committed to winning as any ownership I’ve seen in sports, except maybe with the Pittsburgh Steelers. It’s unique. No one knows the game as well as Mario Lemieux, a Hockey Hall of Famer, and Ron Burkle is arguably a hall of fame business person. Oftentimes, they’ll cross over. Burkle will ask a hockey question from 10,000 feet that’s a good hockey question that we’ll act on.
“I remember all the way back to when we were considering acquiring Marian Hossa [in 2008]. We were sitting there, [then-CEO] Ken Sawyer, [former GM] Ray Shero, Burkle, me and Mario, and the rest of our board. We were going over the budget at the All-Star break. I reported that we were going to have $5 million more than we had budgeted. We’d had more success that year than the previous year. And Burkle asked if we should go into the free-agent market with it, and Sawyer said that we weren’t budgeted to go [up against] the [salary] cap yet, that we were going to wait until we got into a new arena.
“Burkle said, ‘Do we have a shot [at the Stanley Cup]?’ He asked Ray Shero, and Shero said, ‘Yeah, we have a shot but we just never planned on going that high [in total salary] yet and Ken Sawyer said, ‘We have a five-year plan.’ And Burkle said, ‘The Soviet Union had five-year plans. It didn’t work very well for them. The question is, ‘Do you think we have a shot?’ Shero said yes, then Burkle asked me, and I said, ‘Well, if I’m gonna pick when we’re going to go to the cap, I’d like to pick this year because if people think we’re good enough to win the Cup, I can use it to sell the new arena.’ So Burkle made the decision to go to the cap, we went out and got Hossa, some other players including Pascal Dupuis, and we made it to the final. If we hadn’t gone to the final, they’d have been paying people out of their pockets. We were still at Mellon Arena. We didn’t have the revenue, but they’ve never said to us, before or since, ‘You’ve got to squeeze money out of this or you’ve got to squeeze money out of that.’ So I wouldn’t know how to operate any other way.”
Fortunately for the CEO, for the city, the region, and for all of the franchise’s frothing fans, the uncertainty associated with a potential sale of the club appears to have all but evaporated in the foreseeable term. The fact that Morehouse isn’t actively examining his next career move is probably as good an indicator as any that Lemieux and Burkle remain willing and able retain the Penguins.
That’s my own conclusion, because it has to be, as awaiting comment from Lemieux or Burkle on this or anything else has gotten too foolish for words. Lemieux got through an entire championship playoff run amid swarms of international media without ever being seated at a microphone, and compared to Burkle, he’s Anderson Cooper.
They’re not saying anything, but barring a blizzard of cash not currently brewing in anyone’s meteorological computer model, I don’t think the club is changing hands any time soon.
No one should be happier than the players, whom ownership treats the way Lemieux always expected to be treated, like royalty. Ownership routinely puts expectant fathers on private jets to get home to witness the birth of their children. General Manager Jimmy Rutherford and Dupuis rode a private jet to the NHL Awards ceremony last week in Las Vegas. The Penguins are one of only two teams in the league who have their own doctor accompany them on road trips. They have their own chef who works at the Lemieux Sports Complex, where they have their own performance and training center, their own MRI-capable medical facilities, and they can leave practice with a takeout platter of healthy lunches.
It’s a lot better than dealing day-to-day with an all-hat-no-cattle owner without a lick of hockey sense, and, boy, they’re out there.
“They don’t like publicity; they just want to manage the team and win,” Morehouse said. “They very much pride themselves on not interfering. They’re perfect for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s never had flamboyant ownership. Every once in a while, Mario will have an opinion, maybe on a power-play setup, and they’ll listen to him. All of these teams have some guy, president of hockey operations — we don’t need that guy; we have Mario. We still have E.J. [Johnston]. He comes down from the press box with a napkin drawing after every game, with different ideas, and Mario looks at them and decides whether to take them to the coaches.
“Look at the hockey people they’ve put around this team — Billy Guerin, Mark Recchi, Rick Tocchet; they put people who know how to win around a team that seemed to have forgotten how to win.”
Nothing about the Stanley Cup champions would benefit from upheaval right now, and the best news might be that the CEO is sitting tight.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: June 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
