Blackhawks’ GM finalists bring radically different backgrounds to franchise-altering decision

The Blackhawks will soon have a permanent general manager to initiate and shape their rebuild.

The team finished the interview phase of their GM search Thursday, announcing the advisory committee involved in the search had “concluded its evaluation” and “provided input to leadership” before “moving to the next step of the process.”

Just three finalists remain, per sources and numerous reports. They are current Hawks interim GM Kyle Davidson, Lightning director of hockey operations Mathieu Darche and Cubs assistant GM Jeff Greenberg.

The three other candidates the Hawks interviewed — Hurricanes assistant GM Eric Tulsky, former Bruins and Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli and former Canadiens assistant GM Scott Mellanby — are out of the running. Teresa Resch, the Toronto Raptors’ vice president of basketball operations who was also reportedly considered for the job, never received an official interview.

A final decision is expected within the next week or so, giving the permanent GM time to settle in and ramp up conversations ahead of the March 21 trade deadline. CEO Danny Wirtz has said the GM will report directly to him, with no intermediary hockey operations president — so as to concentrate authority and accountability for all decisions — and it seems clear the GM will instantly be made a very powerful man.

The three finalists each offer fascinatingly different backgrounds and perspectives, presenting the Hawks with three potentially divergent long-term paths from which to choose.

Greenberg, whose previous experience as a sports executive has been entirely in baseball, is the wild-card candidate who has rapidly risen up the Hawks’ leaderboard.

After short previous stints with the Pirates, Diamondbacks and MLB office, he joined the Cubs in 2012 and emerged as a high-ranking decision-maker there in 2018. He’s a respected and well-liked figure in Cubs circles.

He does have a few hockey connections — he played college club hockey at Penn, and his father, Chuck, was previously involved with the Penguins’ and Hurricanes’ ownership groups — but it’d be rather unprecedented for him to jump straight into the Hawks’ GM role.

It’s a possibility the Hawks are seriously considering, though. Greenberg made a great impression during his interviews, prompting the Hawks to discuss how they might be able to make it work, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported Thursday.

The Hawks and Cubs do have some close ties: ex-president John McDonough made a similar jump in 2007, current business president Jaime Faulkner’s husband Colin is a Cubs executive on the sales and marketing side and Cubs president Jed Hoyer was reportedly consulted during the December stage of the GM search.

If a fresh perspective is the Hawks’ greatest desire — and that would be on-brand for Faulkner — Greenberg would check that box in dark, bold ink.

Darche, as a former NHL player-turned executive, is the most conventional candidate of the three. He spent 12 years pro — playing in 250 NHL games (experiencing the most success with his hometown Canadiens), 552 AHL games and 52 German-league games — before retiring to a corporate job, then jumping back into hockey in 2019 as a Lightning executive.

The 45-year-old is a relatively well-known name in NHL circles — he also recently interviewed for the Canadiens’ and Canucks’ GM jobs — and he’d bring experience from arguably the league’s best-run front office.

The Hawks wouldn’t have to work hard to sell him to fans, either, since they already seem to like him: in a Twitter poll Friday asking fans which finalist they’d pick, Darche won with 55% of the vote.

Davidson, meanwhile, is the hybrid option on the experience-versus-freshness spectrum.

The Hawks have invested a lot of resources and time to groom him from an intern straight out of college in 2010 to an assistant GM by 2020 and an interim GM for the past four months. He, in turn, has developed familiarity and experience with many branches of the organization, from the salary cap — one of his biggest areas of expertise — to negotiations, analytics and scouting.

But Davidson would nonetheless bring a very different approach than his predecessor, Stan Bowman, did. And at 33, he’d also be the NHL’s youngest permanent GM.

He has laid low publicly this winter because of his interim status, but behind the scenes, he’s an open-minded yet bold thinker who made a point to mention in November he’s not “beholden to anything that’s happened in the past.” The Alex Nylander-for-Sam Lafferty trade in January helped prove that.

“My general approach is not necessarily [concentrated in] any one area, whether it be advanced statistics or old-school scouting methods,” he said in November. “My philosophy is to get the decision right.”

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