Less than two weeks after Jim Rutherford surprisingly resigned from his post as general manager, the Penguins dramatically reshaped their front office on Tuesday with a pair of hires.
Ron Hextall, a fiery former goalie and a member of the Philadelphia Flyers Hall of Fame, fills the vacant general manager position. Meanwhile, in a somewhat surprising move, Brian Burke, was also hired in a newly created position as president of hockey operations.
“We have two of the greatest minds in hockey,” Penguins president and CEO David Morehouse said. “Two of the most respected people of hockey. It carries on a tradition of the Penguins that goes back to when we had Badger Bob [Johnson] and Scotty Bowman and Jim Rutherford onto today with Brian Burke and Ron Hextall.”
The Penguins didn’t necessarily set out to make two separate hires. During the GM search, Morehouse said that the club was tapping into Burke’s extensive knowledge of the candidates. After the team zeroed in on Hextall for the GM job, Mario Lemieux ultimately decided to bring Burke and his 31 years of front-office experience into the fold in a full-time capacity.
In their new roles, Hextall will oversee the Penguins’ day-to-day hockey operations, reporting to Burke as his primary advisor.
“Burke and I are going to be a team,” Hextall said. “We’re going to work together. We’re going to work hard.”
Hextall, 56, planted his hockey roots in Pittsburgh during the early 1970s when his dad, Bryan, was playing for the Penguins. During his introductory press conference on Tuesday, Hextall reminisced about how Rutherford, a Penguins goalie at the time, handed down his goalie mask and skates.
“He was my biggest idol when I was a child,” Hextall said.
While Hextall began playing hockey in Pittsburgh, he’s most well-known for his place on the other side of the in-state rivalry. He played 11 of his 13 NHL seasons in net for the Philadelphia Flyers, changing the position with his puck handling while racking up penalties minutes and numerous suspensions with his explosive on-ice personality.
It’s ironic, in some ways, that a player whose fingerprints have been all over one side of the Flyers-Penguins rivalry will now take a leading role in reshaping things from the other side of the state.
“If you’d have told me two years ago I’d be sitting here as the general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins, I would have started laughing,” Hextall said. “But here we are. I’m very excited about it. We will not get out-worked. We will come up with a plan and every day we will try to make the Pittsburgh Penguins a better hockey club.”
After Hextall hung up his skates, the Flyers again played a leading role in the second stage of his hockey life. He started out as a scout for Philadelphia in 1999. After a successful stint as assistant general manager with the Los Angeles Kings from 2006 to 2013 that culminated with the 2012 Stanley Cup, Hextall returned to the Flyers as the general manager from 2014 to 2018.
The analysis of that tenure has changed over time. The Flyers made the playoffs twice in Hextall’s four seasons as GM, but they failed to advance out of the first round. The club eventually grew impatient with Hextall’s rebuilding approach and fired him. Yet the club is currently enjoying the benefits of Hextall’s build, with several promising, young players on the NHL roster and one of the league’s better prospect pools.
“Since I was young, you always learn from your mistakes, whether you’re a player or a scout or a manager,” Hextall said. “I’ve looked back on everything and certainly there’s things I would change. Of course.”
Hextall reportedly signed a four-year agreement with the Penguins that begins now, with a fifth-year option in 2024-25. He acknowledged on Tuesday that he brings a reputation as a builder because of his time in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. However, he insisted that he’s “not a one-trick pony.”
Still, given Hextall's track record, it will be interesting to see what kind of approach he and Burke take to a club that’s approaching an inflection point in the organization’s history.
Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang have hosted three Stanley Cup parades. But those core pieces are also entering the back stretch of their careers. Meanwhile, efforts to maximize the window have left the Penguins with one of the thinnest prospect pipelines in the NHL and almost no draft capital in 2021. The club has also already traded away picks in the first, third, fourth and sixth rounds of the 2021 draft.
Asked whether the Penguins will remain in win-now mode or begin to shift an eye on the future, neither Burke nor Hextall necessarily committed to one set path.
“Our job is to analyze as we go along. I can’t tell you what’s coming our way,” Hextall said. “We’ll keep an eye on the future and try to grab assets here and there. But we’ve also got to put the best team [on the ice]. You have players in Crosby and Malkin and Letang. We want to be as good as we can be with three of the top players in the world.”
Mike DeFabo: mdefabo@post-gazette.com and Twitter @MikeDeFabo
First Published: February 9, 2021, 5:32 p.m.
