Ferreira’s Skill Is Seeing Big Picture in a Puzzle

This is Jack Ferreira’s turn to play it again.

What he started with the San Jose Sharks will have to be finished with the Mighty Ducks. But he’ll have to start over from scratch, and scratch starts with the NHL expansion draft Thursday in Quebec City, Canada.

He has been over the charts, lists and files on every player who might be exposed to the draft again and again.

He has watched, as always, the front-office tactics in other professional sports, keeping an eye cast for any idea he can apply to hockey--and just about every twitch by the NFL executive whose team-building he so admires, the Chargers’ Bobby Beathard.

Now there is only the final tinkering, and listening to the final offers from general managers anxious about losing valuable players.

Thursday is the day Ferreira (pronounced Fur-RARE-uh), 49, has been preparing for since the day the two expansion franchises were announced. He didn’t have a general manager’s job then, but he knew he wanted to draft a team in June. He’ll be the expansion expert in Quebec City.

“I think the biggest thing is, don’t get carried away,” said Ferreira, who was general manager of the Minnesota North Stars for two years before joining the Sharks. “You know the type of team you eventually want. You’re not going to get it done the first year, so the most important thing is to choose carefully from whatever is made available to us. You formulate your strategy once you see what’s on the board. You don’t try to create. I can say I want big wingers, but there may not be big wingers on the board. You can’t take a 6-1, 180-pound guy and make him a big winger.”

In San Jose, Ferreira went through the tedious process of putting together the Sharks’ first team in 1991.

The team had an unexpectedly competitive first season, and Ferreira was busy making plans for the next year when he was fired unceremoniously in a front-office power play. This is his Act 2.

“I knew I could do the job,” Ferreira said. “I wanted to get back at it.”

The months that followed the firing were anxious ones, and word of two new teams lifted Ferreira’s hopes, as well as his worries.

“I hoped I wouldn’t be tainted,” said Ferreira, who interviewed with Florida and Anaheim. “It entered my mind.”

Instead, the reputation Ferreira had built over a lifetime in hockey--from his days as Boston University goaltender whose NCAA record of eight shutouts in a season still stands to his 20-odd years in the professional game--won out over the questions raised by a surprising firing. Ferreira’s associates praise him as one of the best in the business at gauging talent--especially ferreting out overlooked free agents--and appreciate him for his thoroughness and his loyalty to the people he works with. They remember the players he has found and they recognize the good judgment he showed when he made the best hire of his career, choosing Pierre Page--now general manager and coach of the Quebec Nordiques--to coach the North Stars in 1988.

“It was appalling to anybody in the hockey world, what happened in San Jose,” said David Poile, general manager of the Washington Capitals. “It made absolutely no sense at all.”

Though Ferreira and the Sharks’ higher-ups still decline to discuss what happened, the San Jose Mercury News has reported the theory that Ferreira had a falling out with Chuck Grillo, the Sharks’ director of player personnel, over the major league hockey development camp Grillo operates in Minnesota. The Mercury News wrote that some players believe Grillo and Ferreira clashed over the number of Sharks players Grillo was sending to his own camp--steering Sharks’ money into his pocket. Supposedly, the conflict went to Sharks President Art Savage, and Ferreira was the odd man out.

“San Jose was just too short,” Ferreira said. “I just don’t feel there was anything I there I’m ashamed of. I have no regret. We were as competitive a first-year team as there was in the league. We won 17 games and (17) by one goal or something.”

The Sharks were troubled by injuries in their second season and tumbled to 71 losses. Ferreira says his plan had been to add some free-agent veterans over the summer after the first season, but that is all behind him. Now he swims with Ducks instead of Sharks.

His challenge is to build another organization, and one of his goals is to get to enjoy the fruit of his labors.

There has been a lot of success in Ferreira’s wake during his career, but he has never been there to bathe in the reflected glory.

He was a scout in Calgary from 1980-86, and advocated the signing of Joel Otto as a free agent out of Bemidji (Minn.) State in 1984 and the selection of Joe Nieuwendyk in the second round in 1985.

The Flames won the Stanley Cup in 1989, after Ferreira had gone on to the New York Rangers as director of player development and then become general manager of the North Stars.

With the Rangers, Ferreira was involved in only two drafts, but he is given some credit for the 1988 third-round selection of Tony Amonte, who had 69 points as a rookie in 1992, when the Rangers finished first in the Patrick Division.

And over his two years as GM of the North Stars, Ferreira took a team that hadn’t reached the playoffs and helped them get there. He left to join the Sharks in 1990, and the team he had a hand in building reached the Stanley Cup final in 1991, though his successor, Bob Clarke, put on the finishing touches.

Just last week, though, Ferreira learned he will be getting a Stanley Cup ring--from the Montreal Canadiens. He was the team’s director of pro scouting the past season before joining the Ducks.

“(Canadiens GM) Serge Savard called me and told me they’re giving me a Stanley Cup ring,” Ferreira said. “He said, ‘You were with us the whole year, you contributed, you deserve it.’ ”

For clues as to how Ferreira will assemble his second expansion team, there are few better sources than George Kingston, who coached the Sharks during their first two seasons before being fired after the backsliding second season.

“I think our first year was a respectable first year, and the credit to Jack is that he was the architect of that,” Kingston said. “What he was looking for was a blend of experience and particularly--he was absolutely adamant--very high quality role models. Players like Doug Wilson, Kelly Kisio, Paul Fenton (now a Ducks scout). All those players came in to provide a nucleus of quality, experienced role models. Then he would integrate whoever was ready. Jack is not one who wants to rush young players.”

Kingston also praises Ferreira as an excellent judge of overlooked potential, singling out Shark players such as Jeff Odgers, a minor league free agent who emerged as a solid contributor this season.

“Probably two years ago, you’d say, well, who is he?” Kingston said. “Now he’s one of the most important people here.”

The idea of expansion implies newness. Not much will be new for Ferreira.

“What you will not see in Jack Ferreira is someone ill-prepared, especially in terms of contingencies,” Kingston said. “If another team drafts so-and-so, he’ll have backups of two, three or four other people immediately. His decision-making tends to be crisp because the strategy has been so well considered.

“Jack respects us as coaches and he also respects his scouts. He’ll push them as he pushes coaches, but the bottom line is he respects that they have spent more time scouting than he has.

“He’ll listen, consult, you’ll have an opportunity for input, an opportunity to be counseled, and he’ll make a decision.”

And in a few more days, there will be names to put on the jerseys.