Joined: Jun. 2015
Posts: 1,729
Likes: 288
Hawksfan88, a general manager's first and foremost responsibility should be to manage the salary cap. None other than Neil Smith, former GM of the '94 Cup winning NYR, proclaims this as gospel truth. Bowman has done an incredibly poor job in that respect for the past several years. 2015-16 has to go down as an utter fail. It is as if he doesn't even recognize there is a salary cap, IMO. He did inherit a mess and the Toews/Kane bonuses for winning the Cup added to the resulting purge of '10. I give him a partial pass although he did screw up with Hjalmarsson that summer. Learning on the job. Still learning on the job apparently because he continues to make similar annual mistakes seven years later. No pass anymore. Unfortunately, the long term damage is nearly impossible to correct. I will say, he probably isn't as bad as I make him out to be but if the rose colored glasses are taken off, Stan Bowman truly is an example of how not to manage salaries -- hit, term and clause. Troy Murray might make a better GM but all of this will continue to cloud what could have otherwise been until about the middle of the next decade and he will be too old and worn out by then.
Again, his name is on the Cup three times despite his entire body of work. If he was a faster learner, the Blackhawks really would have been a dynasty.