When The Euge finally passed on to The Great Owner’s Box [in the Sky / Deep Beneath the Earth] (delete as appropriate) in the spring of 2022, I opened up a blank post on WordPress and was shocked to discover I had nothing to say about it. Having spent almost 20 years with The Euge as the owner, and having spent 10 of those years periodically blogging and podcasting about The Euge, the simple truth of the matter was that I had left it all out there on the field, and conjuring some thoughtful idea to mark the end of his tenure as owner felt like reheating three month old lasagna. Certainly the manner of The Euge’s departure was not joyous, and even now, I have very little to add to the collected thoughts of professional and amateur Thought Havers who have eulogized him, unless I were forced to, in which case I would say that the relationship between Sens fans and the late Sens owner was that “He loved us in his way.”, which I’ve learned is something WASPs say about their complicated late fathers when they are too circumspect to simply call him an asshole.
Following The Euge’s passing and my subsequent lack of willingness to mark the occasion, I even went so far as to declare, as Cuddy from The Wire once did, that “The Game ain’t in me no more.”. Given that I have not had a single original Sens-related thought outside of the occasional game recap or dalliance in the podcasting space with James, I had no reason until today to suspect otherwise.
However, when I awoke early this morning in Shanghai (where I am attending a special symposium on the application of Xi Jinping Thought to Hockey Analytics and Salary Cap Management), logged into my VPN, and instantly saw the flood of tweets and messages informing me that Pierre Dorion was no longer the GM of the Ottawa Senators due to his role in (ALLEGEDLY) straight-up lying about the status of Evgeny Dadonov’s no-trade clause, I felt the old Energy begin to flow back into my fingers.
And why not? Dorion’s is an almost Shakespearean tale about a figure whose fall is completely out of proportion to what one might charitably call his rise. I will leave a detailed accounting and assessment of Dorion’s actions throughout his tenure as Senators GM to others, but suffice it to say that no other figure in Senators history has ever been more a Land of Contrasts. Dorion presided over the most successful season since 2007, and also the least successful seasons since 2007. The 2020 draft which he oversaw will go down in Senators history as their most successful draft which happened at the most pivotal time, whereas many, or even most, other drafts throughout his tenure will be remembered as something between forgettable and disastrous. For every prospect he signed long-term at a team friendly value, there was a Matt Murray contract that required cap retention and other sweeteners to trade away. For every Mathieu Joseph trade, there was a Alexandre Burrows trade; for every Giroux, a Dadonov. The coaches Ottawa has hired have never been truly awful without ever being good. If one were to take a top-down view from orbit upon the Erik Karlsson trade, you could conclude that this trade worked out exceptionally well and might even be considered Dorion’s Magnum Opus, since it brought Ottawa its two top line centres of the future in Tim Stützle and Josh Norris. It will certainly be the part of the rebuild that analysts will rightly point to as its crux, should the rebuild ever be considered “successful”. However, even ignoring the truly insane amount of luck and wholly unpredictable events that were implicated in the Senators landing the 3rd overall pick in 2020, to say nothing of the luck inherent in having the two best players in the draft fall to them at 3rd and 5th overall, The Karlsson Trade also has a Yang to its Yin in the form of the Mark Stone Trade, a trade whose return even the most staunch Erik Brannstrom Appreciator would have to concede does not constitute “fair value” for a player who played on the first line of a Stanley Cup winning team last year, and had 24 points in 22 playoff games.
So by way of analysis and assessment, I would have to conclude that Pierre Dorion was somewhat easy to peg as an archetype: A Two Result GM. He went into every transaction swinging as hard as he could at every pitch, and while he struck out far more times than most of us could bear, it cannot be denied that he still hit his share of homers, or at at least he hit enough homers to stop himself from being fired. When Thought Havers question, “How did this Dorion keep his job for 8 years anyway?”, this is a major part of the answer. Up until he made a mistake which called his professionalism and credibility as a member of The Old Boys Club into question, whether by accident or intention or both, he had simply produced enough good moves to stop himself from being the Next Guy Fired. After all, the team had always been on the trajectory that was intended under Dorion: up, then down, and then up again, even if the up part of the journey never seemed to go as fast or as far as any of us would like. Even now, should the Senators achieve success in the next few seasons, whether unparalleled or otherwise, it is all but certain that Pierre Dorion’s fingerprints will be all over that team. Like his predecessor and mentor, Bryan Murray, experienced in Anaheim, Pierre Dorion’s fate is likely to be that of a team architect who never gets to taste the champagne of victory his team earns. The Summer of Pierre will go on without Pierre, at least for a few more seasons, and at the end of the day, that’s both the most complimentary and damning thing one can say about his tenure as GM: at this moment, November 2nd 2023, the Ottawa Senators, top to bottom, are Pierre Dorion’s team.
However, though his departure may seem sudden, and thought it’s likely he was never going to be kept long by a new owner who seemed to have a list of “his guys” he was interested in bringing in, the proximate cause of Dorion’s dismissal, (ALLEGEDLY) lying about Evgeny Dadonov’s no-trade clause in a call to Vegas Golden Knights GM Kelly McCrimmon, belies a deeper issue with Dorion, one which doomed him from the start, and one which no number of Summers of Dorion could overcome in the long term.
When he first came to power, Dorion was seen as the cheapest possible internal replacement for Bryan Murray, but had Bryan Murray not died too soon and rather kept his position as a buffer between Eugene Melnyk and the rest of the Senators organization, Dorion might have had a real chance to develop what otherwise latent GM skill exists within him. Unfortunately for Dorion (and frankly the rest of us), without Bryan Murray’s ability (borne of being too-old-for-this-shit) to tell The Euge to go fuck himself whenever ownership came up with some particularly heinous idea, Dorion’s only option to stay in his role long-term was to acquiesce to The Euge at every available opportunity. In this way, with time, Dorion came into his own as a Hatchet Man for Eugene Melnyk personally. Whatever flaws he had, his most redeeming quality in the eyes of the former owner was that he would cut whatever corner was ordered to be cut, and he would do it without hesitation and without consideration for how much shit he’d have to eat in public while pulling it off. This was so obvious to everyone that Sens Fans began to develop (pseudo-ironically, at least my case,) a kind of Head Canon or Fan Fiction version of Dorion, a Shadow Dorion, whose every bad move was made at the behest of an increasingly financially illiquid owner, and whose few but noticeable good moves were proof of some sort of otherwise shackled intellect. Did Pierre Dorion really believe that trading Erik Karlsson and Mark Stone was the best way to “unparalleled success”? It was impossible to tell, because Eugene Melnyk made him do it.
This, in-and-of itself, was not Dorion’s fatal flaw; the world is full of Yes Men, and it will continue to be so. However, it is now painfully clear that although Dorion maintained the support of his greatest ally in the owner’s box, he did so while neglecting, and possibly actively poisoning, most or all other personal and professional relationships he had, both within the team and within the NHL more generally.
I am not as well-connected within the NHL as some, I do not possess as direct line to “The Streets”, and the next big scoop I break will be my first, but I still hear things from people who know them because when you’re an agreeable white guy who likes to drink a few beers and knows how to keep his mouth shut, people in and around hockey will just tell you shit. So with that in mind, I will tell you that I have never heard of any executive being as widely disliked around the league as Pierre Dorion. I could not to this day tell you a single ally he has. This is no small feat. Other hockey executives have been far more derelict than Pierre Dorion in their responsibilities to their players and the league, and yet there never seems to be a shortage of reporters or Hockey Men willing to tell anyone who will listen what a great guy Stan Bowman is, despite the fact he helped cover for a team therapist who sexually assaulted players and went on to sexually assault others, or how Mike Babcock really truly has learned his lesson this time, regardless of how many players he’s decided to psychologically torment in the past. Even on the Coming in Hot Podcast, Shawn Simpson (who I love to listen to) went to the mat for his boy Peter Chiarelli as “a smart guy” and good hockey executive, despite the fact that Chiarelli’s last move in Edmonton was signing Mikko Koskinen to the Oilers as their long-term Goalie of the Future, and now Mikko Koskinen’s career has taken him to places so obscure that he’s been forced to change his legal name to “Mikko Koskinen DB”.
In pegging his survival to Eugene Melnyk, Dorion apparently failed to collect any other friends or allies, and this is what doomed him. Do you really think a well-liked or well-connected GM would ever find his team penalized and himself fired over a matter so trivial as fibbing to a colleague? It’s sports! Grow up! Why didn’t Las Vegas do their own research anyway? How many players in NHL history have been traded away to unsuspecting teams without nary a mention of their cocaine habit or long-term injury woes? How many General Managers in history have lied directly to the face of their counterpart with the phrase “We’re really going to miss him around here.”? Even now, I believe (without any proof whatsoever, mind you) that a GM more adept in navigating personal relationships could have smoothed this whole thing over with Kelly McCrimmon by simply buying the first round of drinks at the draft, saying “Hey, sorry for fucking you on the Dadonov thing. I was just so excited to find someone who would take him off my hands that I got ahead of myself.”, and then prostrating themselves before Dadonov’s agent and anyone else who needed to be convinced that Vegas was blameless in the whole affair. After all, subsequent events have shown this entire business to be the very definition of a victimless crime. Jack Eichel still played for Vegas, Dadonov eventually got traded to Montreal, and the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup. The fact that McCrimmon and associates still felt the need to go back over and over again to ensure that Pierre Dorion ate every ounce of shit they could force Gary Bettman to muster over what some would characterize as “light gamesmanship” is, frankly, Loser Behaviour, but more than anything, it’s proof that Dorion had no one in his corner in the end. Can you imagine Lou Lamoriello ever suffering consequences for anything? Lou Lamouriello would screw you on a NTC disclosure just because he didn’t like your beard. And then he’d get away with it because Lou Lamoriello has friends. Or at least he would if he was capable of human emotion. What Lou Lamoriello really has is allies. When push came to shove, Dorion, now merely a lonely Renfield in want of a Dracula, stood no chance.
Ultimately, though unshackled financially, Dorion’s attempt to consolidate his own power by firing any threats to it, real or perceived, meant that when the time came for someone to face the music, there was no one else left to dance. Furthermore, while Hockey Men will clearly forgive someone for shitting in his own nest, they don’t look kindly on those who shit in theirs. Thus, with no internal fall guy to take the blame, no Hockey Men stood up for Dorion, no one defended his reputation, and no reporters mourned his fate. He had no one left to blame, he stood alone, and fell alone. He leaves behind a pair of average-sized shoes to fill.
Welcome To Your Karlsson Years 