Ray Shero will always be a prominent figure for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The news of Ray Shero’s sudden passing on Wednesday sent shockwaves throughout the NHL, and immediately produced a lot of thoughts from me.
Some personal. Some relating to the Pittsburgh Penguins themselves.
On a personal level, I started writing full-time around the 2008 NHL season. My main gig was with the old AOL FanHouse and it had afforded me the opportunity to get credentialed to some Penguins games and really get moving in the profession. Shortly after the Penguins won the 2009 Stanley Cup, I took a shot in the dark and reached out to the Penguins asking if I could get a phone interview with Shero. I didn’t expect a response, and certainly not a positive one. The Penguins have always been notoriously tough on interview requests, and at that point I was an even bigger nobody that I am now. I was literally just a dude from an upstart sports blog asking to speak to the Stanley Cup winning general manager.
They said yes.
About a week later Shero called, told him I wouldn’t take too much of his time, and laid out the things I wanted to talk about it. The interview itself ended up taking about an hour. Then he talked for like an additional hour after that just bullshitting about hockey and the team.
Because pretty much everything from FanHouse was scrubbed from the Internet I figured those articles were permantly gone. But some folks on social media on Wednesday found them in the archives of the Internet. While it is absolutely horrifying to look back on things you wrote 15 years ago and see what your style looked like then, I am going to share them anyway because this was my first huge interview score and I remain proud of them.
The second part on the Bill Guerin trade was always one of my favorites.
Before every Penguins season after that, right up until Shero was no longer the general manager of the Penguins, we would always have a preseason interview, and it was always tremendous. He was not quite as candid and forthcoming as, say, Jim Rutherford would be, but he could get pretty close sometimes.
As for the Penguins thoughts, even though Shero’s tenure with the team fizzled out at the end, you can not take away what he accomplished here, how significant his time as GM was, and how much he helped change the Penguins franchise for the better.
When he was hired by the Penguins prior to the 2006-07 season it was a very chaotic time period. There was obvious hope with the arrivals of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury. That trio helped put the franchise back on the map from a hockey standpoint, and it was not hard to start dreaming about what the future could look like.
As exciting as things were on the ice, there was uncertainty following the franchise around off the ice as nobody really knew how much longer they would remain in Pittsburgh.
It was not going to be an easy situation to navigate.
From an operations standpoint, as good as the young core was, there were still some very big flaws left over from the end of the Craig Patrick era. Things needed updated. Modernized. They needed more of a direction and a plan.
Shero helped implement that, and was the right GM to help bring a young core together and perfectly complement it.
Which brings me to what I still believe was not only the most significant move of his tenure, but also one of the most significant moves in the history of the Pittsburgh Penguins franchise.
The Marian Hossa trade.
I know Hossa only spent a handful of games here.
I know they did not win the Stanley Cup, and they ended up beating him the next season when he signed with Detroit.
I understand a lot of Penguins fans held an extended grude with Hossa, and some probably still do.
But this was the trade. This was the moment.
That was when Penguins fans should have known that this team meant business on the ice and was going to do everything in its power to try and win. After four really ugly years with the long-term future of the franchise in doubt, they were suddenly the buyers of the biggest trade deadline piece on the market. That was when you knew it was okay to believe in the team and fully buy in to what they were doing and what was ahead.
What’s crazy about that trade now looking back on it, is that it was not a universally agreed upon move at the time. There was some pushback against it. There was some concern that the Penguins, a young-up-and-coming team, was giving up too many young assets. There was a concern that it was going to disrupt the chemistry the team was building. There was some discussion as to whether or not it was the right time to go all in.
But Shero recognized something very important — every season that you have Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in the prime of their careers is the right time to go all in.
The future is now, and next year is this year. So go for it when you can.
Even though the Penguins did not win the Cup that particular season, I will still argue about the importance of that postseason run with Hossa. It helped the city and the fan base recapture its love of the Penguins. It helped a young team get some serious and much-needed experience, while also providing them with the blue print they needed to actually beat Detroit the following season.
It is still, do this day, one of the most impactful trades in the history of the franchise (and that does not even get into the fact that Pascal Dupuis was a “throw-in” with that trade and his presence alone made it all worth it).
He did not always push the right buttons, and things did not always work out as planned in the second half of his tenure, but there was no denying where he stood with the team every season — they were contenders, and they were going to act like it. Hossa. Guerin. Jarome Iginla. It was great. It was exciting. It produced the first of three Stanley Cups in the Crosby-Malkin era. For all of that he always deserves a special place with the franchise.