The AHL team was Chris MacFarland’s baby. Late one season, holding a sizable lead in the standings as the playoffs neared, he kept marching into work laser-focused, as though the general manager was lacing up skates to play.
“He’d come in and be like, ‘Big game tonight. We gotta have this one,'” then-colleague Josh Flynn said.
Flynn was dumbfounded by it.
“I think we’re getting in…” he would tell MacFarland. “He says, ‘Oh no, this can happen and this can happen. We’ve gotta focus.’”
MacFarland doesn’t let games or seasons go easily. He has a near-encyclopedic memory of players he has evaluated and teams he has administered throughout his career, from the 2007-08 Syracuse Crunch to the Colorado Avalanche’s historic nadir in 2016-17. Both of those seasons were crucial junctures in his ascent to becoming general manager of the Avalanche, albeit for opposite reasons.
Syracuse was “my first soiree into managing and the day-to-day,” MacFarland, 52, recalled from his Ball Arena office, where he’s getting comfortable in his first season as an NHL GM.
Shortly after Scott Howson took over as Columbus Blue Jackets GM in the summer of 2007, he had to decide whether to keep MacFarland, who had worked for the organization since 1999. Word of mouth from coach Ken Hitchcock and others convinced Howson to do more than retain him: MacFarland was promoted and placed in charge of the AHL affiliate, Syracuse at the time and later the Springfield Falcons.
He assembled a roster for the first time and learned how to balance dueling interests: AHL owners and presidents “want to have good teams,” he said. “They want to sell tickets. And you’ve also got to balance the development interests of your (NHL) prospects there.”
MacFarland still calls that first season “a terror team.” He can recite names from the roster. But he laments it as the one that got away. Syracuse won 15 consecutive games to end the regular season, then lost in the second round of the Calder Cup playoffs. MacFarland thought they didn’t have enough of a contingency plan for an injured goalie; he’s always remembered that.
“Chris really took that hard,” Howson said. “He was really proud of that team. We still talk about that team all the time now, how it should have won and didn’t.”
MacFarland still commiserates about the 48-point Avalanche season, too, specifically the injuries to Erik Johnson and Semyon Varlamov that helped capsize that 2016-17 season. It was MacFarland’s second year as an assistant GM in Colorado, and the Avs had the worst NHL record since 1999-2000. “I don’t think that team was a 48-point type team,” MacFarland said. “But it became that. So I guess that is what we were.”
Yet it oddly presented him with an opportunity to use his experience to benefit his new team. During and after the 2016-17 slog, MacFarland found himself entrenched in a project that reminded him of one of his most formative challenges in Columbus. Franchise centerpiece Matt Duchene had requested a trade.
Hours in the video room
Duchene was the Avalanche’s No. 3 overall draft pick in 2009. He surpassed 400 career points during that failed season. When he asked then-GM Joe Sakic to trade him, MacFarland’s job was to help maximize the return.
He already had experience with this exact pickle as an instrumental voice in the 2012 Rick Nash blockbuster trade between the Blue Jackets and Rangers. By the time MacFarland had arrived in Colorado in May 2015, taking the same assistant general manager job he previously held in Columbus since 2008, he had a reputation as a salary cap whiz with pro scouting and AHL experience. He had stayed through multiple Columbus regime changes but felt ready for a bigger role.
“When Colorado called, while it seemed like a lateral move, for me it was a chance to really put what I thought were my strengths and have a bigger impact on the organization,” MacFarland said. “I think that’s what drove it.”
Among his first priorities was adding a robust analytics department. Sakic was open to it, so they started to build a staff that is now influential in the organization’s decision-making.
Sakic and MacFarland collaborated on player contracts. MacFarland tracked all 32 teams’ cap management. He specialized in CBA matters and arbitration. And he ran the Avalanche’s pro scouting.
The Duchene situation called for that scouting expertise. And it brought back memories.
“You had two very good players that were drafted by this team, that were asking out because they just didn’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” MacFarland said. “I think that’s the common thread.”
Nash was the Blue Jackets’ No. 1 overall pick in 2002. Like Duchene, he was a prolific scorer the franchise built around for years. In January 2012, Columbus had the worst record in the league when Nash asked Howson to be traded. The request became public a month later. MacFarland and Flynn had been hard at work.
By then, they were good friends and seamless partners as co-assistant general managers. They worked on contract negotiations together. “He was the guy on the phone for most of them,” Flynn said. “I was doing all the background research. He’d be on the phone and I’d be sitting there passing notes across the table: ‘Talk about this, talk about that.’ And he’d get off (the phone) and we’d talk about what just went down.”
Flynn used to walk into MacFarland’s office, where they would “bounce silly trade ideas off each other” for hours. Then they would go downstairs to the video room to watch their potential trade targets. Then back upstairs to Howson’s office, if the pitch was worth bringing to him. Otherwise, they went to MacFarland’s office for more brainstorming. “A lot of them would go nowhere,” Flynn said, “and then some of them would turn into something.” It was fun.
The Nash trade was the most demanding test and most enduring example of their routine. Nash had a no-trade clause and supplied Howson with a list of destinations he would agree to be dealt to. Whenever a team reached out, MacFarland and Flynn shut themselves in the video room and selected the players they liked.
“One team would tell us names they would put in a deal, and we would spend a couple days in there just watching the players, talking about the players,” Flynn said, “saying, ‘We like this guy but it doesn’t fit because of X, Y and Z. What about this guy?'”
MacFarland’s philosophy was to assemble first from the middle of the ice, which had long been an organizational weak spot. He wanted young players with intriguing ceilings. “We all felt that if you can build your team up the middle – defense, goaltending and centers – you can always get wingers,” Howson said. “But those two-way centers that you don’t have to hide and you can play against anybody: those are really valuable.”
MacFarland learned that he could be picky. Teams weren’t meeting the Blue Jackets’ high asking price as the trade deadline neared. It can be tempting to rush a deal before the deadline just to get it done, but Howson’s staff advised against it. “Chris was very much a part of that, saying, ‘We’ve got to wait. We’ve got to wait,’” Howson recalled. So he did. Nash stayed into the offseason.
Applying what he learned
The market expanded, but the Rangers remained the most aggressively interested. They finally reached an agreement in July 2012 that satisfied what Columbus — and MacFarland — valued: centers Brandon Dubinsky and Artem Anisimov, plus prospect Tim Erixon and a first-round pick. Erixon didn’t pan out, but Dubinsky was part of four playoff teams in Columbus. Anisimov eventually became Brandon Saad in another trade.
Columbus executives had also been weighing the locker room impact of waiting: “Do you want to do this deal, or do you want to wait and then go through training camp and maybe Rick shows up, maybe he doesn’t,” Howson said. “Maybe he’s unhappy, and it’s a distraction.”
Kathy Willens, The Associated Press
Colorado Avalanche center Matt Duchene (9) skates away as members of the New York Islanders celebrate a goal by Scott Mayfield during the first period of a game in New York, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017. Duchene left the game in the the first period after he was traded to the Ottawa Senators as part of a three-way deal.As the 2017-18 season started, MacFarland and Sakic had practiced the same patience with Duchene. But now it was unfolding as a distraction. Nearly a year had passed since his trade request. Similarly to the Nash saga, MacFarland spent months studying video of players around the NHL for one sole purpose.
“For us at the time and for the Blue Jackets at the time, it was, ‘OK, we’ve got to maximize on this. What do we want to maximize?’” MacFarland said. “Do we do a 1-for-1 trade — does that push the needle for us to build? Or do we want to get as many good pieces as possible? … There were a lot of permutations to each deal.”
This time, once again, he helped a rebuilding team determine that a large quantity of pieces was the best route.
When Duchene was pulled from a November game in New York, arguably the most crucial trade of the Sakic era was finalized. Colorado added defenseman Sam Girard, the first-round pick that became Bo Byram, Andrew Hammond, Shane Bowers and two other draft picks from Ottawa and Nashville in a hybrid deal that sent Duchene to the Senators.
“When he finally owns the restaurant”
MacFarland doesn’t need to lament the way that trade turned out. Or the ones Colorado pulled off at last season’s deadline en route to winning the Stanley Cup. Coach Jared Bednar — whom MacFarland once hired to Springfield’s AHL coaching staff — was asked recently for his confidence level in the front office.
“High. It’s high,” he said, laughing. “Why wouldn’t it be? If you look at the guys we’ve added over the last couple of years. All of the players that we’ve brought in … my whole tenure here.”
The beginning of Bednar’s tenure was the 48-point season.
So while MacFarland sits at the top of the hockey world now, he was already intimately involved in the moves that built a Stanley Cup champion during those first seven years as Sakic’s right-hand man. In some ways, he is the opposite of his predecessor and current boss. Sakic is “hockey royalty,” a 20-year face of the franchise who hoisted its first Stanley Cup in 1996. MacFarland has a law degree from Pace University in New York, where he played his highest level of hockey.
In a league where executives often played in the NHL — 21 of 32 current GMs had a pro career — MacFarland slowly cultivated trust in his scouting ability to climb the ladder.
“He did this the hard way,” said Brad Larsen, Columbus’ current coach who also worked with MacFarland in AHL-Springfield. “I like the comparison of a guy who finally owns a restaurant but wasn’t just rich and inherited it. Maybe he started as a busboy. Then he moved up to work in the kitchen, or he was a host. And then he was a manager. And then when he finally owns the restaurant, he knows what it’s like to be in all those positions.”
MacFarland attributes his ascent to “going to a lot of games and grinding.”
Hitchcock remembers him as a voracious seeker of knowledge, always firing off questions over coffee to discuss team priorities. He also said MacFarland scouted three amateur games in the same day once, though MacFarland isn’t so sure that’s how it happened.
Either way, it’s clear to former colleagues watching the Avalanche from afar: “A lot of what they’ve done,” Flynn said, “it’s been clear to me knowing him that he’s had his fingerprints on a lot of it.”
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