IRVINE — Ned Colletti and Ron Hextall had a running joke.
Colletti, while general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, would frequently show up to the Staples Center press room before Kings hockey games. Sometimes for dinner he would sit with Hextall, the assistant general manager of the Kings from 2006-13. But just as often, Colletti would end up at a different table chatting with an executive, coach or scout from another organization.
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If the Sharks were in town, he’d track down Doug Wilson. If the Flames were visiting, he’d chew the fat with Calgary general manager Brian Burke. Ray Shero, the current Devils general manager who served in that same role with the Penguins, was also a friend.
But there were many others.
“Hexy would always see me with all these people and say, it must be good to be you — every year one of your buddies wins the Cup,” Colletti recounted last weekend while the Sharks were taking part in a rookie tournament with five other NHL teams.
When Colletti, the 65-year-old longtime major-league baseball executive, was officially hired by the Sharks as a professional scout on Sept. 6, Hextall couldn’t resist sending him a quick jab via text message.
“I told him now he has to burn the 30 other jerseys he has,” Hextall said with a chuckle.
Hextall, who served as the general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers from 2014-18, was hardly the only one to reach out to Colletti, an unconventional hire by the Sharks if there ever was one. Colletti made his name as the Dodgers’ GM from 2006-14 and served as the assistant general manager of the Giants from 1996-2005.
Colletti figured he got at least 400 messages from friends and colleagues after the Sharks announcement, including “a lot of NHL people.”
“I think for Ned, his love and passion for the game of hockey runs extremely deep, so that’s going to help him a lot,” Hextall said. “He’s been to a lot of hockey games over the years, he loves talking hockey, he loves talking to hockey people. So he’s a knowledgeable guy when it comes to hockey.
“The one thing about Ned is he’ll work extremely hard and he will love what he’s doing. He loves to be out there in the trenches, and I think it’s going to be a good hire because he’s an extremely sharp guy, but he’s also a guy that listens, and asks a lot of questions and wants to learn. So he’s going to be a sponge around there. It’s an out-of-the-box hire, obviously, but I find it fascinating. It’s going to be interesting, but I believe Ned will be successful.”
While he’s earned his living in baseball, Colletti is considered a hockey guy by many of the people he has developed relationships with over the years.
Colletti’s first job in sports came as a writer covering the Flyers for the now-defunct Philadelphia Journal. He started just before the 1980-81 season, and one of his first experiences with an NHL player came at a little, four-story hotel in Portland, Maine, where the Flyers held their training camp.
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“Got on the elevator to go to the rink one of my first days, the new guy in town, and (Flyers captain) Bobby Clarke was getting on the elevator and he introduced himself and knew who I was. Pretty impressive,” Colletti said.
Al Morganti, who covered the Flyers for the Philadelphia Inquirer back then and is still a media fixture in the city, was impressed by Colletti right from the start. The Flyers were still a tough group at the time, just a few years removed from their days as the two-time Stanley Cup-winning Broad Street Bullies of 1974 and ’75, a persona they still embraced at the time.
“(Colletti) came into Philly with some pretty tough characters on the team — Behn Wilson, Paul Holmgren, Ken Linseman — and stood his ground from Day 1,” Morganti said. “Really respected the sport and players, but not nervous about going eyeball to eyeball with guys like Wilson. I always thought I could hear his eyes roll when a player or coach was giving him a line of bull. One of my favorite people on the planet for work ethic, sense of humor and intensity. … Despite the baseball stuff, I always thought of Ned as a hockey guy.”
Colletti said: “It was a great beat, I loved it. I thought it was maybe the best job I’d ever have.”
It didn’t last long, though. The newspaper folded just a year and a half later, and Colletti, with a wife and new son, was suddenly unemployed. Meanwhile, his 49-year-old father was dying of lung cancer back in Chicago, where Colletti grew up as a kid in a family that struggled to make ends meet in a gritty part of town.
Fortunately, the Cubs were hiring, with one opening in their media relations department and another in publications. Rather than take a significant pay cut from making about $19,000 at the Journal to $13,000 for one of the two Cubs jobs, Colletti convinced general manager Dallas Green he could do both for $15,000.
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“So I saved them salary, made a couple extra thousand to try and get out of the financial spot I was in because of the newspaper closing and everything,” he said. “But that’s how I started in baseball.”
Colletti and Doug Wilson were concurrently in Chicago, Wilson as an elite defenseman for the Blackhawks, but they didn’t really get to know each other well until Colletti went to the Giants, where he was tasked with negotiating contracts. Wilson, of course, joined the Sharks organization as its first captain in 1991 and has essentially been around ever since, including as the general manager since 2003.
Colletti started attending Sharks games more frequently around 2000, becoming familiar with then-Sharks GM Dean Lombardi. But he got to know Wilson, then serving as the Sharks director of pro development, better.
“We had the connection of Chicago, some of the same friends, restaurants, people. Just made a habit of going down whenever I had a free moment and sitting and talking with him and Ronny Wilson, who was the coach there that I got to know pretty well,” Colletti said. “You just sit and talk. Probably since about 2000 that I’ve had a conversational-type friendship with Doug. There’s a handful of GMs in the NHL, either currently still there or in different spots now, that I’ve spent a lot of time with.”
One of those former GMs is Burke, who was in that role with the Anaheim Ducks from 2005-08. Burke and Colletti quickly developed what is still a deep friendship, often meeting in the early hours of the morning near Colletti’s home in Manhattan Beach to bounce ideas off of one another about being the lead executive of a professional sports team.
When Colletti was struggling with a decision about a manager’s future, for instance, one of the first people he wanted to talk it out with was Burke.
“I was going through a tough manager time and he said, ‘I’ll meet you at 5 o’clock,’” Colletti recalled. “We met at 5 o’clock in the morning at Manhattan Beach. We walked the Strand for an hour and a half and went and had breakfast. Did the same thing if he was in a tight spot down here (with the Ducks).”
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Burke recalled that moment, too.
“I was going through my checklist with Ned, and I said here’s what I expect from my coach. This is what you can reasonably expect from a manager, which is the same job as a head coach in the NHL,” Burke said. “So I went through my checklist — here are the things that if he’s doing these things well then he’s doing his job. Usually if there’s a problem with your manager or your coach, there are telltale signs of that. … So I went through all that with Ned, and he’d thought of it all. None of it was news to him. But it’s helpful when someone in the business goes through it with you.”
Colletti has always watched plenty of hockey. Helpfully, the NHL and major-league baseball seasons don’t have much overlap.
“I’m passionate about it. I watch so many hockey games,” he said. “I start at 4 o’clock and I’ll watch a Metro (division) game, and then I’ll tape another Metro game, and then I’ll watch a 7 o’clock game, and then at 10 o’clock, I’ll go back and watch the Metro game that I taped.
“And I watch. I watch people. I’m an observer of people and how people perform, how people think, how people sacrifice, how people are selfish sometimes. Building teams is something that I’ve done for a long time, and something that I’m passionate about and curious about.”
Officially, Colletti will scout most of the Metropolitan Division for the Sharks, and there will even be a few road trips involved where he’ll go east in between attending games in Los Angeles and Anaheim. He actually did a bit of scouting for the Sharks last season on a trial basis before they agreed to the official role this offseason.
“As we got to the end of the season and a little bit thereafter we started having more concrete conversations,” Colletti said. “Talked to (scouting director Doug Wilson Jr.) a lot and (assistant general manager Joe Will) a lot, and this is what we ended up with. It didn’t really take any convincing. I just love the sport and I love the complexity of the entire dynamic of trying to figure out how to win.”
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It’s not just NHL players that Colletti will focus on, either, as he’ll be tasked with keeping a close eye on the AHL, too. That’s something else that Colletti enjoys, as he’s attended the World Junior Championships at least half a dozen times.
Longtime Sharks executive Tim Burke has also gotten to know Colletti over the years, often running into him at the World Juniors and other places. Burke has some baseball experience himself, serving as an assistant coach for the Princeton Tigers in 1985. There are enough similarities to what they’ve experienced in the past in each of their two primary sports that the conversations can be valuable.
“There’s a lot of things we bounce off of him about building teams, developing, how long it takes, what’s important in developing,” Burke said. “Some of the best home run hitters in baseball have 10 home runs in the minors. So how do you look at goalie stats in the minors or in junior and then they become great goalies? And then hockey guys that don’t score a lot at a certain level, and at the next level, they do. There’s a lot of little things that cross over.”
Hextall said: “I was always fascinated with baseball in terms of their area scouts and whatnot, and I used to talk to Ned about it. You learn a lot from each sport, and I know Ned will learn things coming into hockey, but he’ll also bring a wealth of knowledge. We tend to be a little bit stuck in our ways sometimes in hockey.”
Colletti can plainly offer more than just his services as a scout, including being a sounding board for just about any situation that Wilson or other members of the Sharks front office might want to run by him.
Wilson said: “He’s followed hockey, he’s got a brilliant mind — you don’t become a general manager on a major-league baseball team without having a great mind. I like the fact that he’s always had passion for our game, he has questions, and we try to be very open minded to hear those types of questions. … . I look at him as a sports guy. In this business, you want minds that can ask questions. You can’t be afraid to look at things differently.”
Brian Burke said: “Are those (baseball and hockey) skills transferable? On a guy that’s smart enough, the answer is yes. But Ned’s already got hockey acumen.”
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He’ll get to put that acumen to good use now.
“Not everybody gets these opportunities. I’m honored to have it,” Colletti said. “There may be things I can help with, there may be a conversation with Pete (DeBoer) and the coaching staff … whatever it is, I’ve seen a lot of different things.
“Some of it is similar, because it’s professional athletics at the highest level. Any way I can help them, I’ll use my experience to do it.”
(Photo: Jordan Strauss/Invision for Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation/AP Images)