San Jose Sharks - A look at Doug Wilson's record

Watching former Sharks skate around in the Stanley Cup finals makes me a little misty-eyed. Well, not really, there are a lot of things that get me down these days and after I spent game seven of the 2002 World Series curled up ina fetal position on the couch I realized I was maybe taking sports too personally.

But with hockey being the addicting and infectous sport that it is the Sharks are possibly the only professional sports team that engages me and gets me to thinking. One of the things that I am thinking is that a close examination of Doug Wilson's tenure as the teams General Manager is in order.

No, this is not going to be a "Wilson has to go" article. Truth is I am on the fence on his and am almost writing this article in the hopes of figuring out what I think. Because this is a long and complex issue I am going to present this article in three parts.

Also, I am still doing research on all of Wilson's moves (hey, it isn't easy to try and track down every single transaction a team makes and then try to analyze it) so, if I'm lucky the 2011 playoffs will have ended right as I finish this and will make my whole point moot.

Where to start? Wilson was hired to replace Dean Lombardi as GM in 2003, but Wilson had been with the team for a long time before then, coming to San Jose from the Blackhawks as a free agent during the Sharks inauguarl year. As the story goes WIlson was looking for a place where he could get in on the ground floor and he figured that the Sharks presented him with the best opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new organization and work his way up. Planning for his career after hockey, Wilson brought instant respect to the Sharks organization being a legitimate all-star and probable hall of famer.

The first time I head Wilson's named mentioned was in relation to the Sharks signing of defensman Gary Suter. Suter was a free agent in 1998 and a few days before the NHL free agent period began the Sharks gave Chicago (Suter's former team who apparently were going to be unable to sign him) a low draft pick in exchange for the D-man's rights. The move was not considered a trade and was not reported. What it did was give the Sharks the exclusive ability to negotiate with Suter before other teams drove up the price. It also helped the Sharks stress to Suter how much they wanted him, sell him on the team and the city and do it before anyone else had a chance to even talk with him. Suter signed with the Sharks and while Dean Lombardi gets a lot of the credit for this, apparently Doug Wilson, who was in charge of professional player development at the time was moving behind the scenes and helping pave the way not just for Suter, but for other payers like Vincent Damphouse and Mike Ricci.

Anyway, after that the NHL said they would no longer allow transactions of that sort. Lombardi was fired in 2003 and replaced by Wilson, whose contributions to the building of the roster made him an obvious choice. Dean Lombardi is now the GM in Los Angeles and will be mentioned in this article quite a bit, but here is my bit of foreshadowing; Lombardi, whi is having some success building a team in LA, will become Doug Wilson's undoing, at least if Patrick Marleau's real estate agent should be believed.

So, back to Wilson though, if you are scoring at home t he gets a +1 for his time on the team in the pro-development job. Not sure whether it was Wilson's or Lombardi's idea to trade for Suter's rights, but anytime the league steps in and commends you on your original thinking by making a rule so nobody else can do it, well, can't be all bad.

Next I jump to another bit of out-of-the-box thinking. This season I discovered that the NHL salary cap is figured daily. Wilson had a shuttle system going between San Jose and the minor league affiliate in Worcester. A small part of the shuttle was devoted to moving salaries off the NHL roster. So, using Jamie McGinn as an example, the young forward was sent back and forth to the minor league team a total of 13 times (maybe more, I lost count). in some cases McGinn was sent down on one day, only to be brought back up the next day (it happened three times in February). So, how many times did McGinn actually get on the "Worcester Shuttle". Not sure, but it wasn't 13 times. NHL rules apparently state that a player only not be with the team(not play in a game or practice) so you can bet that the three times in February where McGinn was sent down on one day and brought up the next he was probably just hanging out at Original Joe's having some veal parm and a beer.


What Wilson and the front office staff was doing was moving McGinn's salary off the books for a day or two. Not sure how much it saved the team, but No team in the NHL this season had a higher percentage of its salary cap go to its top five players than the Sharks, so all this movement must have helped keep at least a player or two in the bottom part of the cap structure. So, I give Wilson another +1 for creativity.

So part one ends and Wilson is now +2 on my scorecard. But these were easy, almost empty-netters and one maybe wasn't earned as he wasn't GM at the time.

Next, lets look at some trades.