The Penguins apparently are not finished with their offseason shake-up.
After a busy two months that saw Jim Rutherford say goodbye to a few more Stanley Cup winners while shuffling the supporting cast and Mike Sullivan’s coaching staff, the general manager has turned his attention to the front office.
The Penguins announced Monday that assistant general manager Jason Karmanos, who had been with the organization since 2014, has been fired.
“We would like to thank Jason Karmanos for his contributions to the organization over the past six years,” Rutherford stated in a press release, which was only three paragraphs long. “I have been evaluating our hockey operations department, and this is the first part of the process to reorganize our group.”
The second part was adding Trevor Daley, a popular player while twice winning the Stanley Cup with the Penguins, as a hockey operations adviser.
The firing of Karmanos was the more surprising and significant change.
After working together for 15 years in Carolina, Rutherford brought Karmanos with him to Pittsburgh after Rutherford left the Hurricanes in 2014. Karmanos is the son of former principal Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos, who helped Rutherford embark on his Hall-of-Fame career four decades ago.
Jason Karmanos initially served under Rutherford as Pittsburgh’s vice president of hockey operations his first three years. He was named assistant general manager after helping the Penguins win back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017.
When Bill Guerin left last offseason to lead the Minnesota Wild organization, Karmanos took on more duties as Rutherford’s right-hand man. A little over a year later, Karmanos has surprisingly been “relieved of his duties.”
In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rutherford called the change “difficult.” He declined to say whether the decision was purely hockey related.
Asked about the timing of the dismissal, Rutherford replied, “I’m in the middle of reorganizing the hockey operations. I felt this was the right time.”
The team announced that director of hockey research Sam Ventura will assume Karmanos’ duties in Pittsburgh on an interim basis. The Swissvale native and graduate of Woodland Hills High School and Carnegie Mellon co-founded the hockey analytics website war-on-ice.com prior to joining the Penguins.
Erik Heasley, manager of hockey operations, will be interim general manager of the team’s American Hockey League affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
“Sam Ventura and Erik Heasley do a very good job,” Rutherford said. “If this goes a while before I hire someone else, I’m very comfortable they can handle the extra duties they have now. I’ll wait until I have everybody in place. But they’re both capable of doing more.”
The Penguins may still have multiple roles to fill in Rutherford’s reshuffled hockey operations department. The club never replaced two former assistant GMs in Guerin and Jason Botterill. Two months ago, when there were no signs that Karmanos could be let go, Rutherford said he could look to add another executive.
Now Karmanos is gone, too, leaving the Penguins with no assistants to their general manager with the 2020-21 season possibly two months away.
“I’m working on something now. I’ve been working on it for a while,” Rutherford said. “I have some ideas. I’ll continue to work on it. I’d like to put it in place sooner than later. Sometimes things take a little bit of time. It will be in place in time for us to have to start making decisions we make prior to camp and things like that.”
The first addition to the new-look front office was their former defenseman.
In a new role announced two hours after Karmanos’ firing, Daley will be based in Pittsburgh and report directly to Rutherford, assisting in player evaluations at the NHL and AHL levels, as well as acting as an “eye in the sky” for the coaching staff.
Daley, 37, called it a career as a player after skating for the Detroit Red Wings last season. The defenseman played for four NHL clubs after breaking into the league in 2007. He was with the Penguins from 2015 to 2017, one of Rutherford’s many savvy trade acquisitions during that period.
“When Trevor played here, he was a good player for the Penguins,” Rutherford said. “He was on the Cup teams. He was a quiet leader with really good character and was really well-liked. When he left here, I told a few people, I said, ‘I’m going to hire that guy someday. I think he would be good on the management side.’”
Rutherford said that when he heard Daley planned to retire as a player, he reached out to his agent to gauge his interest in joining the front office. Rutherford said that Daley, in addition to assisting with scouting, will be there to serve as a sounding board for players who don’t want to vent to the coach or the GM.
“I think he has a lot to offer,” Rutherford said. “I like having that guy that it wasn’t long ago that they played. Because they can pick up some things and they have some ideas that we don’t, sitting way up high watching the games and the practices. They just have some good input that helps us a lot in our decisions.”
We’ll see who else Rutherford adds to his brain trust in the coming weeks.
Matt Vensel: mvensel@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mattvensel
First Published: October 26, 2020, 4:38 p.m.
Updated: October 26, 2020, 6:27 p.m.
