Not long after the Flames acquired Brian MacLellan during the 1988-89 season, Calgary coach Terry Crisp motioned for the big winger to go over the boards during a game.
“I said, ‘hey, McLean, you’re up.’ And he didn’t move.” Crisp recalled recently.
A second time.
“Hey, McLean, you’re up.”
Nothing.
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After the third time, McLellan looked up from the Flames bench.
“He said, my name ain’t McLean,” Crisp said laughing at the memory. “I said, ‘whoever you are, get going.’ Brian just smiled and away he went.”
And go MacLellan and the Flames did.
They won the team’s first and only Stanley Cup that spring.
Although he lacked the star appeal of guys like Joe Nieuwendyk, Joel Otto and Lanny McDonald, MacLellan was an effective presence for the champs.
“He was a gentle giant,” Crisp recalled. “Just got the job done quietly and competently.”
There is a reason to remember this story now beyond the fact that it’s damn funny.
MacLellan is the GM of a Washington Capitals team that is now two wins away from a Stanley Cup.
He has steered the Capitals to this historic moment – it marks just the second time the franchise has been in the final and the first time it has won a game in the final series – in much the same manner that he played the game. Quiet, effective, under the radar.
So, how about that Stanley Cup ring? Where is it anyway?
MacLellan paused during a lengthy interview with The Athletic to consider where the memento might be.
“I think it’s at home in a drawer,” the native of Guelph, Ontario, said. “I don’t really wear it that much.”
He paused again.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever worn it to be honest with you,” the 59-year-old said.
That sounds about right.
In the pantheon of NHL GMs, a group which includes imposing Hall of Famers like Steve Yzerman, multiple Stanley Cup winners like Jim Rutherford and Stan Bowman, and iconic team-builders like David Poile, it would be hard to find a GM with a lower profile than MacLellan. When you juxtapose that against the fact his team remains one of the highest profile teams in the NHL, it has made for an interesting evolution for both MacLellan and his franchise.
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The fact of the matter is that MacLellan is unlike most of his colleagues in that, when he left the game as a player, having skated in 606 regular season games and won a Stanley Cup, he didn’t really envision a post-playing career in hockey.
Even before he was done playing, while he was with the Minnesota North Stars, MacLellan began taking summer courses en route to an MBA.
After his career ended with Detroit in 1992 MacLellan spent a year finishing up his studies.
“I wanted to be a stock analyst,” he said.
He was intrigued by the finance end of his MBA program and ended up working at an investment consulting firm in the Minnesota area helping institutions with their 401(k) investments.
He did that for five or six years and was getting ready to take the jump into real financial stability in the industry.
He was still connected to hockey in a peripheral way, playing with North Stars alumni on Sunday nights and pick-up hockey other times, but that was it.
Then his old pal George McPhee called and asked if he ever thought about getting back in the game.
MacLellan was interested, but he’d put in all that time with the investment end of things. So he started scouting part time, working at the office during the day and then scouting games at night in Minnesota.
He saw guys he knew from playing and slowly found himself more and more involved, ultimately taking a full-time job with the Capitals in spite of the uncertainty.
He was, after all, McPhee’s guy and, if McPhee someday wasn’t the guy in Washington, then what would happen to MacLellan?
Not to mention he took a pretty healthy pay cut to make the jump back into the fray.
Still, he was back in the game and that, as it turned out, was enough.
Much has been written about MacLellan’s relationship with McPhee, who is now the GM of Washington’s opponent in this Stanley Cup final.
Much of that discussion has focused on where things stand with the two longtime friends since MacLellan took over for McPhee when he was fired in the summer of 2014.
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The more important story, though, might be what MacLellan learned from McPhee and how that has put him in good stead to find success where there was none, or at least not the most meaningful kind, in Washington.
The two grew up in the university town of Guelph, Ontario, and played together from bantam-age through mutually successful careers at Bowling Green State University.
The two drove back and forth to the Ohio campus and, in the summers, both were counselors at a local hockey camp not far from Guelph.
They were even roommates at Bowling Green.
“He was in the bottom bunk,” MacLellan recalled.
“He was pretty studious. Pretty structured. Studied all the time. Used to have to force him to get him out.”
When MacLellan joined the Caps organization 16 years ago, it represented a different kind of education than he was used to in pursuing his MBA and in learning the ropes as an investor. He moved from being a pro scout to director of player personnel to assistant general manager.
“Well, certainly he’s paid his dues,” said former player, coach and longtime NHL talent evaluator Lorne Henning.
“We used to sit beside each other all the time (at games). We used to have a lot of laughs.”
Including the time Henning lost his scouting book – kind of like a scout’s Holy Grail – and MacLellan found it and suggested he’d have sold it for all the secrets it contained except he couldn’t read Henning’s handwriting.
Henning knew MacLellan as a player, as well, having coached him in Minnesota.
“Actually, I remember Mac. He’s very talented and I think one of those guys who had great hands for a big guy,” Henning said.
He recalled one night trying to shake up his lineup and he moved MacLellan, a forward, back to defense, which is the position he began playing back in the day.
They were playing a formidable Philadelphia team at the time and ended up winning the game. MacLellan’s willingness to accept the role was something that stayed with Henning all these years.
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“He was always very thoughtful and knew the game, obviously, and studied it,” Henning said.
Longtime NHLer and agent Neil Sheehy played against MacLellan for years. Playing the right side as a defenseman to MacLellan’s left wing, there were the occasional whacks and hacks but never fights because, as Sheehy put it, MacLellan was always looking for an advantage but he wouldn’t want Sheehy off the ice.
The year that MacLellan was studying for his MBA, he got a call from former teammate Collin Paterson, who was playing with Sheehy in Slovenia.
Late in the season, MacLellan joined the trio and finished the season there.
Sheehy admits there were times when MacLellan might have wondered what he was doing there, but they had a grand time and the two became fast friends as both returned to the Minnesota area after the season.
“He’s quiet, he doesn’t say a lot, but he’s got a lot on his mind,” Sheehy said. “He’s an analyst and he analyzes.”
He pointed to signing free agents Brooks Orpik and Matt Niskanen, whom Sheehy represents, to help change the culture in the Washington dressing room as part of that analytic thinking.
Along with the two players, MacLellan also brought in defensive coach Todd Reirden, who was so important in changing the defensive culture in Pittsburgh and has done the same in Washington.
MacLellan goes by the old motto, measure twice cut once, Sheehy noted.
“He understands that, as a hockey player, emotion helps you,” but the same does not hold true for a manager, Sheehy said of MacLellan.
Sheehy is a former Capital so he has a special place for the franchise and what would be their first-ever Cup win. But he’s got an even more emotional investment with his friend.
“I want to see Mac be successful,” Sheehy said. “But because we both know it’s a bottom line business, we know the job’s not over.”
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To help lighten the mood, Sheehy will send a simple text after the Capitals win, telling MacLellan he can relax now.
Sometimes there is silence, sometimes there’s a simple response of “Ha.”
Over time as MacLellan’s responsibilities grew within the organization, he was given a bird’s eye view of the job of being an NHL GM.
McPhee included MacLellan in all aspects of the business, and MacLellan soaked it up. He watched how McPhee handled trade talks with other GMS, how McPhee managed expectations from ownership, how he dealt with agents. MacLellan sat in on coaching interviews.
“I got a good education on pretty much everything,” MacLellan said.
When McPhee was fired after the Capitals missed the playoffs in the spring of 2014 – just the first time since 2007 – MacLellan interviewed for the vacant job.
MacLellan wasn’t optimistic he’d get the job given that he was a low-profile guy, but no one knew the history of the team better, and no one understood the backstory to all of the personnel and coaching decisions. How things happened. Why things happened.
Lo and behold, MacLellan got the job.
One of the first things he learned was that he really didn’t know much about what it was like to be an NHL GM, no matter how close he was to it beforehand.
He laughs as he recalls how he used to think that McPhee would get too emotionally caught up in the games, the day to day ups and downs of the season. MacLellan used to think, well, he just needs to get away from it for a bit, he’s too close to it.
Ha.
“Then you sit in that chair and it’s not too long before it’s happening to you and you’re going, ‘oh my god, that poor guy,’” MacLellan said. “It’s more intense than you can imagine or than I could have imagined sitting next to him.”
The same kinds of pressures that McPhee shouldered through the Alex Ovechkin era, which began when the prolific goal scorer entered the league in 2005-06, didn’t disappear when MacLellan took over; they simply took up a similar residence atop MacLellan.
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The new GM made moves that looked to get the Capitals over the playoff hump. He brought in proven playoff performer Justin Williams. He brought in gritty, talented winger T.J. Oshie and, at the 2017 trade deadline, added top defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk.
The results were the same. Regular season triumphs followed by playoff letdowns, including gut-punching losses to Pittsburgh in the second round in 2016 and 2017.
This year saw the Capitals undergo a dramatic transformation in terms of personnel and internal dynamic.
Coach Barry Trotz was not offered a contract extension as he entered the final year of his current deal even though some of his staff did.
“I think we kind of talked earlier in the year and we were going to let the year play out because of what was happening with everybody,” MacLellan said of Trotz.
Karl Alzner, Marcus Johansson, Shattenkirk, Williams, Nate Schmidt, all departed before the start of the season.
The team got younger and expectations declined, especially after a rocky start to the season.
“I think people were thinking, these guys will be lucky to make the playoffs,” MacLellan said.
“We were a non-conversation basically all year.”
The question became whether the guys in the room basically thought the same thing. Did they believe they had the guys they needed to compete?
After the rough start to the season, it was fair to say there was more than a little concern internally.
“I think the important thing for us was to get over what happened last year,” MacLellan said, referring to a seven-game series loss to Pittsburgh in the second round, which he described as “devastating.”
“I think everybody was worried.”
But a funny thing happened to MacLellan’s team. They reversed earlier trends of being really good through much of the regular season and then flat-lining come playoff time. This season they got better and better, ultimately winning another Metropolitan Division title before dispatching Columbus, Pittsburgh and heavily favored Tampa to ascend to the Stanley Cup final.
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Unlike a year ago when he went all in on Shattenkirk, MacLellan made a quiet add of Michal Kempny to bolster the blueline at this year’s trade deadline, and it allowed Trotz to reconfigure his defensive pairings.
In Game 2 of the final in Vegas, it was Kempny’s delightful cross-ice pass that set up a critical goal by Lars Eller, another MacLellan add of two summers ago, which tied the game 1-1 late in the first period.
The team has met a series of dips in the road and challenges on and off the ice that in the past might have derailed the group. Instead, they have grown stronger and stronger regardless of the challenge.
“As we’ve evolved, we’ve handled those difficult situations better than we have in the past,” MacLellan said.
Is there a sense of vindication at how all this has played out?
Not really.
“Vindicated? I’m not sure that’s the word,” MacLellan said. “I feel good about what’s happened this year and how it’s evolved and how everything’s ended up from where we started.”
Now all we need to do is figure out how it ends.