When you sit in a front office chair, it’s your job to manage your player assets with a cold, calculating eye. Skill attributes. Performance value. Analytics. Salary cap impact.



The great thing and, in some ways, the biggest challenge about the sports business is the assets you are managing are human beings. As much as you try to boil down a player into a set of metrics, like a financial portfolio, there is also real intangible value that a player brings to both a locker room and an organization.



Ignore this value (as the analytics community tends to do) and you risk planting a locker room cancer in your midst. Overvalue it (as general managers and coaches tend to do) and you’re likely taking a ride on the bad contract train to salary cap hell.



One thing I learned to appreciate more than anything else in my own NHL management career was the value of personal relationships. Most players fell into the professional respect category. Hang around long...