Who would you rather have running your hockey team?
Pro Sports Executive A: Open-minded, well-connected, experienced, informed, tall, good-looking, local boy and former hockey player.
Pro Sports Executive B: Former hockey player, local boy, good-looking, tall, informed, experienced, well-connected and open-minded.
The theory is that most people will prefer Executive A even though the same descriptives were used for both options. Just as humans are prone to optical illusions, we’re also susceptible to errors in judgment and thinking.
In this instance, we prefer the first candidate because we were introduced to their positive attributes first. We end up anchoring our minds to trust the initial information we receive even if it might be contradicted later.
When news broke late last week that Brendan Shanahan would be hired as the Toronto Maple Leafs president, two diametrically opposed opinions emerged:
He’s an excellent option to lead the front office of the long-suffering Maple Leafs because he was a former player, raised locally with a strong connection to hockey’s old guard.
He’s a horrible option to lead the front office of the long-suffering Maple Leafs because he was a former player, raised locally with a strong connection to hockey’s old guard.
It’s amusing when two drastically different opinions are reached by individuals citing the exact same evidence. It’s even funnier in this case because both conclusions are wrong. Assuming that former players don’t make good team executives is just as problematic as assuming they do.
Whether put in a positive or negative light, our initial impression of Shanahan is what informs our current opinion of him, even in his recently announced role with Toronto. We remember him as a bruising power forward with technical goal scoring skill, and this origin story is impossible to escape when we project his ability to do other, largely unrelated work — even after more than four years as an executive in the league office.
Not helping us escape our cognitive bias is the fact that Shanahan represents the latest in what’s been seen as a hiring trend among NHL front offices looking to former players to become reincarnated saviors. Right before Shanahan, there was Trevor Linden taking over the Vancouver Canucks. Before that, it was the Colorado Avalanche giving Joe Sakic a shot at running their organization. Before Sakic, it was Steve Yzerman taking the general manager’s reigns in Tampa.
This is going to take some imagination, but let’s briefly pretend that NHL owners aren’t incompetent squanderers, hellbent on ruining their organizations with thoughtless hires.
Let’s consider that perhaps there’s more to being the president and/or general manager of a professional sports franchise than ensuring advanced analytics are influencing strategies on a game by game basis. Let’s acknowledge that maybe public perception is of some importance in deciding on a figurehead for an organization. Let’s contemplate the possibility that at least some due diligence was exercised by the incredibly successful business people who own and run their teams.
We often forget that professional sport is an industry dependent on 1) attracting a great many people willing to part with a comparatively little amount of money, 2) being popular enough to a great many people that television companies want to broadcast competitions and 3) being thought of well enough by a great many people that corporations want to associate their brands with individual teams.
Certainly, winning increases the likelihood for all these factors coming to fruition, but winning a championship is also incredibly rare. You want the best in terms of results, but you also have to prepare for the best not being achieved. Fans don’t necessarily want to hear this, but imagining a dynasty resulting from a front office hire isn’t just hopeful, it’s delusional.
This is where trend spotting former players as current executives is revealed to be meaningless. The only important trend to be found in recent hires is an owner or management group hiring whom they believe to be the best candidate. Sometimes, that’s a former player. Sometimes, it’s not.
Lumping them all together only forms a misleading pile of individuals. Each former player is his own person, a separate human not encapsulated by what we suppose them to be based on our own initial impression. Their decisions aren’t part of a collective hive mind formed through similarities in a previous occupation. They’ll each act differently in their role.
That’s why pointing out the successes and failures of previous players-turned-executives in an attempt to suss out Shanahan’s future is especially ludicrous. Sure, he could be a Brett Hull, but he could also be a Steve Yzerman. As a former NHLer, his past is relevant only in so much as it placed him in a position of notoriety in hockey circles.
What came after his playing career is far more pertinent even if it's largely ignored by a fan base still thinking of Shanahan the player, not Shanahan the team president.