A few notes on the Whalers chapter of “Burke’s Law”
I’ve been working away at the next steps for this page mostly in the background for the last few days, but had to take a step back to fire off some quick thoughts on a chapter of Brian Burke’s new book, Burke’s Law.
For the uninitiated: since the late 1980s, Brian Burke served as an assistant or head general manager to several NHL clubs, including a single-year stint with the Whalers in 1992–93, as well as a senior executive to the league itself. “Burkie” is known for for blunt talk and exactly zero fear when it comes to openly expressing his opinions.
Burke’s tenure in Hartford was as controversial as it was short. He inherited a team in virtual freefall thanks to legendarily bad trades and scatterbrained management. Much of what he did to change the team’s brand and character enraged Hartford fans, but most will at least begrudgingly agree that Burke made a good-faith effort to right the ship.
The aptly-titled “You’re Going to Kill Richard” dives into the mismanagement that plagued the Whalers under Richard Gordon, who owned the team while Burke served as GM. Burke is careful (as always) to couch Gordon as a “nice guy,” but pulls no punches when it comes to eviscerating Gordon’s tenure owning the Hartford Whalers.
I’d really like to see Burke’s memo detailing all that needed to be repaired for the Whalers.
Burke remembers writing a “four or five page memo” to Gordon in the summer of 1993 explaining all that needed to be done to put the team back on track for survival and eventual success.
The memo contains some predictable refrains: “get the hockey people out of your office and stop interfering with player and personnel decisions.” Burke also advises Gordon to move his daughter to another hockey club. Gordon’s daughter was well-known in the front office for having strong opinions on the direction of the team and repeatedly advising her father to fire front office staff over dinner.
None of these recommendations seem surprising, but I have a hard time believing they’d fill four to five pages. I don’t know if this memo’s ever leaked or if Burke even still keeps a copy, but I’d love to see what else he was telling Whalers ownership in the summer of 1993.
Love him or hate him, Burke went on to draft the Sedins (he will never let you forget this) and win a Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007. We left town.
I wish management listened to him (at least when it comes to the on-ice product) a bit more.
Burke fended off some wild trade ideas Gordon fielded from random fans.
Throughout “You’re Going to Kill Richard,” Burke notes that Gordon was the sort of manager who listened to the last person he spoke with, no matter who it was. He relays stories of demands to trade for Ray Bourque or various other players that came to Burke from random fans on the street via Gordon. One trade was the brainchild of a downstairs shoe-shiner.
The pair had vastly different ideas of what it means to be in touch with fans. For Gordon, it meant that any fan off of the street with an opinion lucky enough to find him deserved to be heard every bit as much as the scouting department. For Burke, it meant that the numberless thousands who fork over their hard-earned cash to attend hockey games — be they parents taking their kids out for a first NHL experience, young professional friends out for a night, or two high-rollers closing a business deal — deserve to see a quality product, and that often means making decisions that will anger individuals.
That brings me to Burke’s views on Hartford’s fanbase…
The Whalers had more than “a hard core of about 8,000 fans” in the stands every night.
Burke unintentionally reinforces one of the worst misunderstandings of the causes of the Hartford Whalers’ failures with two comments on the fanbase. He refers to the Whalers’ market as traditionally “Boston Bruins territory” and says that the Whalers had “a hard core of about 8,000 fans” in the seats every night and wouldn’t get any more fans unless they won.
These comments are problematic.
We need to eliminate the lie that the Hartford Whalers left because of poor fan attendance from the consciousness of every NHL fan. Greed, corruption, poor results, mismanagement, and a rush to relocate as many NHL teams in the American South as possible all played a far greater role than the number of seats that were full every night.
As for “Boston Bruins territory,” well, the Whalers-Bruins rivalry was one of the fiercest of the old Adams division. There’s a case to be made that a Whalers-Bruins rivalry actually helps both teams, and I look forward to making it in future blog posts. For now, I just wish Burke hadn’t gone there.
I understand that Burke was trying to make the case that Hartford was a small market located close to another dealing with a bout of fan anger when he took over the club. I just wish he’d said something like “11,000 diehards” instead, since that’s very much the situation the Whalers were dealing with and it’s very much the situation plenty of NHL teams deal with today.
Burke avoids the worst decisions he made as GM.
You won’t hear anything about the decision to eliminate the “Brass Bonanza” as the team’s goal song or any of Burke’s other lamentable choices, here.
It’s funny, because I think this reveals an aspect of Burke’s personality that’s both a great strength and a great weakness: stubbornness. Burke took away the Bonanza because the “players complained” about it. Okay. The fans loved it. We couldn’t have updated it? Played it some of the time? Something?
Burke had an all-or-nothing tendency that probably closed him off to some of these kinds of options, and it’s unfortunate. His strength was in building good teams on the ice. I still wish he’d stayed out of our jerseys and our fight song.
And still…
Burke clearly believes Hartford fans deserved better than the club’s ownership gave them.
While speaking about Gordon’s daughter’s role with the team, Burke notes that she often urged Gordon to fire the Whalers’ sales and marketing staff. I was too young to know if there were indeed any troubles there, but Burke’s reaction suggests that the Whalers had much bigger problems than the advertising department could solve.
The story of Burke’s wild trip in ‘92-’93 with the Whalers is shot through with themes that would be familiar to so many of us: the boss’s kid exercising too much influence, the hopes that quick fixes and slick marketing campaigns will paper over incompetence, the frustration at attempting (and often failing) to manage up, and the pain in leaving too soon.
Still, I left the chapter thinking, as Burke said, that Richard Gordon was “just the wrong man to be running a professional sports franchise in that city at that time.”
That’s a lot different from saying that NHL hockey could never work in Hartford again.
