Murray Gets Off Disney’s Wild Ride

Just when it seemed the folks at Disney had gotten serious about this hockey thing, when they got a real general manager in Bryan Murray and let him build a team that reached the Stanley Cup finals -- and then let him pad the payroll the next season to remain competitive -- they’ve once again turned the Mighty Ducks into Disney’s California Misadventure.

By telling Murray they intend to begin squeezing every dollar until it cries “Uncle Walt,” they drove away the person who restored the respectability that had been stripped away during the Pierre Gauthier era.

Certainly, Bryan Murray had family concerns when he left the Ducks to take the Ottawa Senators’ coaching job. But if his bosses had left him alone, if he’d been told to make judicious payroll trims instead of massive cuts, he might still be in Anaheim.

But they didn’t and he didn’t. He’s gone, and Al Coates, the interim general manager, was left to pick up the broken stick and run with it a few weeks before the draft and three months before a likely labor war.

Anyone with even the faintest shred of hope that next season will begin as scheduled must interpret this as a clear sign that there won’t be hockey in October -- or November and December, and perhaps beyond.

Disney wants to sell the Ducks. It waited too long to find a buyer, past the point where the team was at the height of its popularity and was getting a cut of what was, for the NHL, a good national TV deal. Past the point where labor strife was something too distant to worry about.

And past the point when Disney Chairman Michael Eisner paid any attention to the team. Once he became enmeshed in running ABC and other ventures, he left the Ducks to their own devices. Which often were bad ones, under Gauthier and Pierre Page.

When Murray signed Sergei Fedorov to a five-year deal potentially worth $40 million and secured Jean-Sebastien Giguere for four years at $19.5 million, the joke was that Disney executives were so busy elsewhere, they didn’t know he’d done it.

Until Disney can find someone who likes losing money or likes the strategy Philip Anschutz used in buying the Kings as part of a larger development ploy, it’s stuck. That realization apparently set in only recently and brought down the hammer.

Given a chance to work for Eugene Melnyk, a deep-pocketed pharmaceutical magnate who rescued the Senators from bankruptcy, Murray grabbed the chance to be close to home and not have to deal with the uncertainty of whether his team will survive a lockout.

“Now my family understands I am really in the NHL,” he said at a news conference Tuesday in Ottawa. “When I was elsewhere, it didn’t seem to count quite as much.”

Ouch.

He meant that as a compliment to Canada more than an insult to Anaheim, but the point is valid. Hockey became an encumbrance to Disney. There was no synergy, just a drag on the bottom line.

This is not to defend wild spending, because throwing money at free agents hasn’t bought championships in the NHL (see: New York Rangers). This is about Murray, who kept the Ducks viable on the ice and was pointing them that way off the ice, becoming too frustrated by corporate double-speak and philosophical reverses to continue.

Three of this spring’s conference finalists -- San Jose, Calgary and Tampa Bay -- ranked 19th or lower in payroll. But no successful low-budget team has sustained either its low budget or its success. Winning leads to increased salary demands, which lead to contract disputes that fracture teams or raise payrolls. Murray spent wisely. All did not go well this season after the Ducks’ loss in the Stanley Cup finals last year, but it wasn’t because Murray allowed the team to stay static.

Disney’s venture into the NHL was heralded as a coup for a league that needed owners with marketing and business savvy. What does it say that Disney wants out and that Blockbuster mogul Wayne Huizenga, who joined up at the same time as Disney in 1993, long ago sold the Florida Panthers?

The Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning reportedly has lost $60 million the last five years. Owner Bill Davidson, who also owns the NBA’s Detroit Pistons, told the Detroit News in March he believes the NHL will lock out players.

“We bought [the Lightning] because the arena looked attractive and the hockey looked doable,” he said. “But frankly, since then, hockey has deteriorated much worse than we thought. The league is in very bad shape, very dire.”

It’s not far-fetched to say the post-lockout NHL might not have a team in Anaheim. Murray pulled the chute and made a soft landing before he could be pushed. His gain will be the Ducks’ loss for years to come.