In the five-part series, “What to Expect When You’re Expanding,” executives who helmed year one NHL expansion franchises in Atlanta, Anaheim, Nashville, Minnesota and Columbus share their stories from those early seasons—in part to show Vegas Golden Knights GM George McPhee just how good he and his team have it.
If you missed them, find part one—on Cliff Fletcher’s Atlanta Flames—here, part two—on the Sharks and Ducks—here, and part three—on David Poile and the Predators—here.
Doug Risebrough had a wealth of NHL experience when he landed the Minnesota Wild’s GM post in the fall of 1999, but the job presented challenges he’d never faced before. “As a player in Montreal and Calgary, in the front office with the Flames and then with the Oilers, I felt such a strength in traditions in the organizations,” he says. “In Minnesota, there wasn’t anything like it. We had to build a tradition.”
Risebrough had a few clear-cut management strategies before taking the Wild job but before his team played a game he wanted a winning atmosphere and attitude in the front office. The team didn’t have history, so he went out and hired history.
The originals on the staff could compare their Stanley Cup rings—scout Guy Lapointe, coach Jacques Lemaire and assistant coach Mario Tremblay had diamond-encrusted CHs that matched Risebrough’s from his playing days with the Canadiens. Lemaire also had one from his stint behind the bench in New Jersey. Head scout Tom Thompson had a Cup ring from his scouting stint with the Flames. Assistant coach Mike Ramsay had a gold medal from the U.S. win at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. Scout Terry Simpson had coached Prince Albert to the 1985 Memorial Cup.
“I joked with the guys that I didn’t build a tradition—I stole one,” Risebrough says.
Beyond that, when he assembled his scouting staff, he wanted hockey men whose backgrounds weren’t necessarily like other veterans in the biz. “The biggest twist I did that was unusual, I hired a lot of ex-coaches that weren’t necessarily going to be scouts the rest of their careers,” Risebrough says. “I thought that they were winners, I thought they understood the game, I thought they could rationalize what specific roles were going to be needed to make teams successful—either it was penalty killing, defensive forwards, the point on the powerplay. We were looking for the best players, but also the best players who fit best.”
Risebrough turned a lot of the presumptions about team building inside out. The conventional wisdom would have a GM of an expansion team out on the road to see as many games as he could to identify players who’d be draft targets. Risebrough says other motivations loomed as large. “One of the reasons I was on the road so much was that I wanted to get to know the staff and for them to get to know me and, more specifically, what I was looking for,” he says. “When you pull hockey people together, they have their own ideas. I was confident my staff knew what they were talking about. I felt it was important that they knew what I was talking about, what I felt was important. I’d listen to them but at the end of the day they had to understand what I was trying to do. And some guys you’re more eye-to-eye than others.”
Risebrough had an image of the team that he wanted to put out on the ice in the inaugural season. He understood the nature of the talent that was going to be made available in the expansion draft and he understood the Wild’s market. “You can try to find scoring, high-end skill, but that’s just not going to be there,” he says. “What you might find is skating. I wanted a team that was built on skating and speed. People in Minnesota know hockey. I figured that on a night when we were struggling to score and things weren’t going that well, they’d appreciate the team running around, maybe breaking up an icing.”
Even before the Las Vegas franchise came up with a team nickname this fall, hockey pundits floated lists of NHL players likely to be left off protected lists at the end of the season. Based on his experience in Minnesota, Risebrough doesn’t put too much stock in them. As he remembers it, the Wild’s original mock protected lists didn’t match the lists submitted by the established teams in the spring. What they found at the end of the day was that players’ stock rose and dropped over the course of the season more than they originally suspected.
Originally, when drawing up his organizational chart, Risebrough had hoped that Lemaire would have more input into scouting and the draft selections. Lemaire begged off but with an explanation that proved to be dead right. “Jacques came in two or three months before draft,” Risebrough says. “He told me that he wanted to leave scouting to the scouts. ‘My job is to coach, and if you’re comfortable with your staff and the players, I’ll be happy.’ I realized later on that he was right. He didn’t want to have [pre-conceptions] about what a player was like. He didn’t want input on a player he might see once or twice when one of our scouts would have watched the same player all season.”
Rather than players who had established themselves as marginal NHLers, those on the bottom third of NHL rosters, the Wild targeted players Risebrough describes as “minor-league guys, borderline NHL guys, who hadn’t been given a chance by the clubs who owned them.”
The Wild had all kinds of players who fit the profile. A prime example: Defenceman Filip Kuba had come over from the Czech Republic and managed to get into only 18 NHL games in his first four years in the Florida organization. Kuba wound up as a top-four defenceman in more than 350 games over the next five seasons in Minnesota. Another: Winger Antti Laaksonen was mired in the Boston organization coming up on his 27th birthday. He wound up missing only five games over the Wild’s first four seasons.
Clearly, though, the player nearest and dearest to Risebrough’s heart was forward Jim Dowd. Dowd had waited his turn in New Jersey’s organization. In the springs of ’94 and ’95, he played in 30 playoff games for the Devils and landed a Cup ring in the latter. Yet in the regular seasons leading up to those playoffs, Dowd played in a total of 25 NHL games, spending the rest of the year with the AHL affiliate in Albany. Thereafter he’d bounced around organizations—Vancouver, the Islanders, Calgary and Edmonton—and divided time between the NHL, the AHL and the long-gone IHL.
“Jim Dowd was a no-fear guy,” Risebrough says. “I didn’t know him coming in but he had no fear about the circumstances going to an expansion team. His mindset, he was just going to show he’s a better player than people gave him credit for. He told me, ‘We’ll be good.’ I said, ‘Really? Have you looked around?’”
The day of the expansion draft is a blur to Risebrough. He made a deal with Dallas to land a starting goalie in Manny Fernandez who’d go 19-17-4 in Season One. The actual calling of names was a purely antic time.
“Between us and Columbus, it was two teams picking every three minutes with two five-minute timeouts,” Risebrough says. “You were on the clock and picks were made bang-bang. Both teams really have to be organized. You potentially had [GMs] calling you while you were on or off the clock, but they were concerned with protecting players who were exposed. At the end of the day, we didn’t celebrate or really even think about how we had done. We had the entry draft next and we just moved straight to meetings about that.”
With the third pick in the entry draft, Risebrough landed a player who’d be a cornerstone for the Wild: forward Marian Gaborik. “We didn’t get scoring in the expansion draft,” Risebrough says. “We could defend and had speed. Rick DiPietro, the goalie, went No. 1 to the Islanders, and Atlanta was picking. It was down to Dany Heatley or Marian, and Gabby was really the player we wanted. [Heatley] wasn’t going to fit the skating component that I was looking for. We would have taken [Heatley] if Atlanta took Gabby. It worked out for us.”
Of all the personnel moves that Risebrough made, the hiring of Jacques Lemaire proved to be the biggest key to the Wild’s early successes. Media and the fans presumed that the GM had tapped an old friend as a coach as much on a personal basis as a professional one. Risebrough says that’s a misread. “It wasn’t two old teammates getting together,” he says. “People thought we were close in Montreal but he was older and had a family. He was the best two-way player I ever saw and I came to really appreciate him as player, but [hiring Lemaire] was based more on when we got together. It wasn’t that he said ‘I’m interested in the job.’ He said, ‘I’m interested in how you think you’re going to pull it off.’ No one knew the extent that he’d be an advantage, but as the year unfolded that became clear.’”
The Wild didn’t shock the world in their first two seasons: 68 points in 2000-01, 73 the following year. In 2002-03 season, though, the team broke through with a quantum leap to 93 points. If it had ended with a playoff spot and a quick elimination, it would have rated as an unqualified success. And facing the Colorado Avalanche, a team with a couple of Cups and a host of Hockey Hall of Famers, Risebrough didn’t suspect that best laid in the offing.
“Before the first game against Colorado, I watched us practice and the guys couldn’t make a 10-foot pass the whole time,” he says. “They just kicked it around the ice. I met with Jacques and said, ‘What the hell? These guys are so nervous.’”
Minnesota’s corps of players who had never been given a chance before were back in the familiar position of no one giving them a chance, this time against an established NHL powerhouse. Yet they managed to not only to knock off Colorado in the opening round, but to do so in style. The Wild roared back from a three-games-to-one deficit, winning Games 6 and 7 on overtime goals by Richard Park and Andrew Brunette, respectively. Brunette’s goal turned out to be the last puck that beat Patrick Roy—he announced his retirement that summer.
The Western Conference Semifinals followed a similar script: The Wild fell behind Vancouver three games to one and roared back with three straight wins. Anaheim swept the Wild in the Conference Finals but it was still a run that was hard for Risebrough to even imagine in those early days.
“I remember a reporter talking to Jacques and saying, ‘You’re used to winning so what’s it going to be like coming here and losing?’” Risebrough says. “Jacques said to him, ‘We’re not going to lose as much as you think. I’m going to coach players and make them better.’ And Jacques did. Even when they were better than I expected, they got better than that.”