Peter Karmanos Jr., and Jim Rutherford have a long history, perhaps as long as you could reasonably expect an owner and general manager to have. They worked together for 19 years with Karmanos owning the Hartford Whalers/Carolina Hurricanes and Rutherford coming on as GM for the franchise in 1994-95 and staying in that role until last summer.
So when Karmanos took the opportunity to take a few potshots at Rutherford, who is now the Pittsburgh Penguins general manager, it definitely came as a surprise. The Canes owner, still fuming a bit from the necessary buyout of Alexander Semin’s contract which was signed during the Rutherford administration, had a few burns for his former employee and minority owner.
More from the Raleigh News & Observer:
“I ultimately take responsibility for everything,” Karmanos said.
Rutherford, now the Penguins GM, made perhaps the biggest NHL splash Wednesday, completing a trade that brought Toronto Maple Leafs forward Phil Kessel to Pittsburgh. That also earned a mention from Karmanos, who quipped, “I do not have to take responsibility for Pittsburgh signing Kessel.
“Pittsburgh has no first-round picks anymore,” he added. “They traded their first-round pick from the year before, they traded their first-round pick for this year and now they've traded their first-round pick for next year. But they have Kessel, who may score as many goals as Alex Semin did.”
It’s pretty rare to see an executive or owner of any team coming out and being so critical at all, much less to criticize a specific deal. On top of that, the critique seems pretty off-base (except for Pittsburgh’s prospect system emptying out; that is happening).
Karmanos is probably the only person in the world that thinks Kessel will only score six goals, which is the total Semin put up on his massive contract last season. Semin is owed 2.33 million for the next six years as part of his buyout.
There seems to be more than a little bad blood here, but there had been rumors of dysfunction within the organization before Rutherford ended up getting replaced by former star Ron Francis as the lead on hockey operation. Interestingly enough, when Rutherford left, he took Karmanos’ son Jason with him to be part of the front-office staff in Pittsburgh as vice president of hockey operations.
The Carolina owner, who is seeking a partner to potentially take over the team at some point, also had some harsh words for Semin himself who vastly underperformed his $7 million-a-year deal last season and is now a free agent.
“We didn't buy him out to save cap space or anything like that. We bought him out because he was a distraction, he wasn't going to perform and we wanted to get on to building a team that could win.”
You can’t blame Karmanos for being angry about having to pay a guy two-thirds of his salary to play for other teams and get nothing else in return. But that didn’t end the personal barbs towards Rutherford.
As Dave Molinari of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, Karmanos also went on to praise Francis while slamming Rutherford at the same time.
“[Francis is] far more astute on the financial end of the game,” Karmanos said. “Jim liked to talk about the fact that we’re a ‘budget team.’ I’m not sure what that ever meant. Every team has a budget. That means we had a budget until Jim needed a player, then I’d say, ‘OK,’ and we had a different budget.”
Neither Rutherford nor anyone within the Penguins organization will respond to Karmanos’ criticism.
You just don’t often hear something like that coming out of a high-ranking official with a team, but there’s obviously something deeply personal going on here.
By the way, Karmanos was just elected for induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2015. That should be a fun speech.
