Jim Rutherford wasn’t sure in 1983 what his future would hold after he ended a playing career in which he won 151 games between the pipes for four NHL franchises, including a brief run in Pittsburgh, and earned a footnote in hockey history by being one of the first NHL goalies to don a decorated mask.
Rutherford, then 34, just hoped he wouldn’t have to let go of hockey.
“I continued to love the game as I did when I started playing as a kid,” Rutherford told the Post-Gazette last week, lounging in the team hotel in New York. “I wanted to be part of the game. But I never really thought about what position.”
He would find his calling within a couple of years, setting in motion a career as a general manager that will culminate with him being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame on Monday. Well, put more accurately, the calling found him.
Rutherford had ties to Detroit after three stints with the Red Wings, who drafted the scrappy, 5-foot-8 goalie with the 10th overall pick in 1969. He played one final game for the Wings before happily accepting a gig coaching up goalies within the Compuware youth hockey program in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Mich.
“I got a call from Mark Craig, who ran the program. He said, ‘We’d like you to run a goalie school for a week. Hopefully we can get 20 goalies,’ ” Rutherford recalled. “We ended up getting 40 goalies. It ended up being very successful.”
A week later, Peter Karmanos, one of the founders of the Compuware software company and a hockey lover who owned the program, hired Rutherford to teach youth players full time. Things happened pretty quickly after that. Karmanos bought an Ontario Hockey League team. And he asked Rutherford to be his GM.
In the early stages of building the floundering Windsor Spitfires into the OHL’s top team, Rutherford would realize, “Yeah, this is what I want to do.”
During those four formative seasons running the Spitfires, Rutherford learned the importance of a strong support system, straight talk and defining a clear vision of what a winning hockey team should look like. Those lessons would serve him well as he won a Stanley Cup with Carolina and two more in Pittsburgh.
Need a little help here
Rutherford was put in charge of both hockey operations and the business side for the Spitfires, who were purchased in part because of Windsor’s proximity to Detroit. That OHL club was, as he put it, “a broken-down business.”
Perhaps the most important lesson? You have to hire the right people, something he would later do in Carolina and Pittsburgh. Jason Botterill, Bill Guerin and Ron Francis are three former assistants who now run NHL franchises.
“I ran the whole operation. I had to hire all the people and get it going,” he said. “We kept one of their employees, Terry McDonald, who was from Windsor. He knew everything there. He was assistant GM. He worked with me. He helped a lot on the business side. I took him to Hartford with me and to Carolina.”
Rutherford was also learning on the fly when it came to building a team.
“There’s a lot of [player] movement. It’s recruiting, scouting, drafting. All of those things,” he said of the OHL. “It’s a great place to learn prior to the NHL.”
He hired a scouting staff that identified players whom he should get a look at before the draft and tried to figure out whether they would play juniors or attend a U.S. college. His first draft as GM was held in Toronto. North York Centennial Arena was packed with kids waiting to get drafted and their parents.
“You’ve got to make sure these players are [reporting] if you draft them,” he said. “You draft a player, he comes down and shakes hands. We’re all happy.”
In the third round in 1984, Rutherford called the name of a defenseman from Sault Ste. Marie named Paul Maurice. The kid never walked down.
“He wasn’t there. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness. Here I am, drafting a player in my first draft and he’s going to a U.S. college,’ ” Rutherford said. “So I called him afterwards. And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I just didn’t bother coming.”
Rutherford also realized in Windsor that he should stay where he belongs.
In 1986-87, Rutherford decided he had to make a coaching change. But there was one problem. He didn’t have anybody else to put behind the bench.
“I ended doing something I’d never done other than hockey school,” he said.
Rutherford led the underdog Spitfires to the third round of the OHL playoffs. But he knew that for them to win the whole thing, someone else had to coach.
“What I learned from being behind the bench is that it is much different from sitting way up top, where you don’t have to make split-second decisions all the time,” he said. “That was a real learning experience for me that year.”
‘You can’t sugarcoat things’
Telling it like it is to players, coaches, management and media has gotten Rutherford into trouble over the past three-plus decades. But he believes honesty is the best policy when dealing with big personalities and fragile psyches.
“It’s an important trait because in our business things change all of the time. You have to have a trust factor with the people you work with and your players,” he said. “I learned that in my lifetime before I became an NHL player.”
That was taught by his parents, John and Dorothea, who are both deceased. They lived paycheck to paycheck while raising their children in Beeton, Ontario, a town about an hour north of Toronto, the home of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Rutherford was forced to put that trait to use when faced with a “really tough decision” in 1987-88, the year the Spitfires swept through the OHL playoffs.
OHL rules then permitted teams to carry only two players over the age of 20. Rutherford had to pick between Maurice and goalie Pat Jablonski, a St. Louis Blues draft pick and future NHL journeyman, after the Blues sent Jablonski back to juniors.
“We had a really good team,” he said. “But we really needed a goalie.”
He had great respect and fondness for Maurice, who was his captain. Maurice lost his right eye after a puck ramped up into his face during his first game.
“We were playing in this small youth rink, a preseason game. God, I can remember it as clear as if it was this morning, Paul laying out in the parking lot of that arena, waiting for an ambulance to come,” Rutherford said. “But he was so determined he decided he was going to play his junior career with one eye.”
Rutherford didn’t want to cut him. But what was best for the team was clear.
“That was really hard. But you can’t sugarcoat things because it doesn’t work,” he said. “You just have to say it the way it is. And I’ve always been that way.”
Karmanos and Rutherford asked Maurice to stick around as an assistant on Tom Webster’s staff. No hard feelings after that blunt but tactful chat with Rutherford, he accepted. They would twice work together again at the NHL level. Maurice, who was 28 when Rutherford hired him in Hartford, now coaches Winnipeg.
“Paul Maurice is clearly one of my best friends in my lifetime,” Rutherford said. “I had to cut him as a player. Had to let him go as a coach. Hired him back as a coach. Had to let him go again as a coach. He’s like I am. We’re just very direct. We just say it the way it is. And to this day we are very close friends.”
Balance, chemistry still key
Rutherford has been wheeling and dealing for decades. His father was a car salesman, and Rutherford has said he learned from him the value of a good deal. Rutherford’s trade acquisitions of Phil Kessel, Patric Hornqvist, Carl Hagelin and others helped the Penguins win back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017.
Rutherford said his very first trade as an executive was acquiring a left winger named Brian Martin who had just 25 goals in two-plus OHL seasons.
Martin would score 70 goals with 65 assists in his two years in Windsor.
Rutherford credited his scouts for identifying untapped potential, just like Kevin Stevens and others did this summer with rookie blue liner John Marino.
“The price wasn’t high, so it wasn’t a very risky trade. He wasn’t liked by his teammates in Belleville. We worked on him a little bit. He was only liked by half his [Windsor] teammates,” he said, chuckling. “But he was scoring goals.”
There is always a sliding scale based on production, of course, for what general managers are willing to stomach in the personality department. That surely had a little something to do with Kessel being shipped out of town in June.
“I learned early on that character is such an important thing,” said Rutherford, speaking generally. “For the most part in my career, the guys that we’ve had on our teams have really been good character guys. If I ever picked up a guy that maybe the character wasn’t there, I had to see enough to offset that.”
Schematically, the identities of Rutherford’s teams have changed based on the talent on hand and the landscape of the league. The back-to-back Cup teams, for example, had speed to burn and star power in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. But he said his best teams all had something in common — balance.
Rutherford, the OHL’s Executive of the Year in both 1987 and 1988, likes to talk about how his third-line left winger on the OHL champions his final season was Adam Graves. A few years later, Graves got 52 goals in an NHL season.
“All but one of the guys above him, Darrin Shannon, never played in the NHL. I learned that the way to structure a team is to have a balanced lineup,” he said, adding that all three of his Cup teams had “four lines that could play.”
The Spitfires lost the 1988 Memorial Cup final in a heartbreaker, blowing a late two-goal lead to the Medicine Hat Tigers of the Western Hockey League.
“At that point I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to go through this again. I want to go to the next level,’ ” Rutherford said. “But I was patient because I had great trust in Pete Karmanos. He was my mentor. He was a loyal guy. He was a guy that had big goals. He told me, ‘I’m going to get an NHL team and you’re part of it.’ ”
The rest is history. Karmanos bought the Whalers and later moved them to North Carolina, renaming them the Hurricanes. Rutherford, president of the team, drew on the experiences he learned on the business side with the Spitfires.
Under Rutherford’s watch, the Hurricanes gained a foothold in NASCAR country and hoisted the Stanley Cup in 2006. He arrived in Pittsburgh eight years later and won two more Cups, and the Hall of Fame “builder” is still building today.
Monday, Rutherford will be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame just down the road from his hometown. Now that the night is right around the corner, he’s excited for the event and eager to thank everyone who helped him get there.
You can be sure he will mention a number of old friends from Windsor.
Matt Vensel: mvensel@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mattvensel.
First Published: November 13, 2019, 3:52 p.m.
