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Sakic snubbed in vote for top GM

September 9, 2020, 5:14 PM ET [10 Comments]
Rick Sadowski
Colorado Avalanche Blogger •Avalanche Insider • RSSArchiveCONTACT
As the late, great Rodney Dangerfield said so many times: “I get no respect, I tell ya, no respect at all!”

The same could be said for Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic.

He isn’t among the three finalists announced on Wednesday for the Jim Gregory General Manager of the Year Award.

The finalists are Tampa Bay’s Julien BriseBois, the New York Islanders’ Lou Lamoriello and Dallas’ Jim Nill.

Nothing against those gentlemen, but the award is supposed to be based on the regular season.



Yet the voters -- NHL general managers and a panel of league executives and print and broadcast media -- cast their votes after the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Coincidentally (or not), the Lightning, Islanders and Stars are all playing in the conference finals.

I don’t get it.

The Avalanche and Tampa Bay each finished with 92 regular-season points, but Colorado had 10 more points than Dallas and 12 more than New York, largely due to the fact that Sakic’s transactions before and during the season were instrumental in the team’s ability to overcome 223 man games to injuries.

Sakic added Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Andre Burakovsky, Joonas Donskoi, Nazem Kadri, Vladislav Namestnikov and Valeri Nichushkin, all of whom made significant contributions in the regular season when the Avalanche prevailed without Mikko Rantanen (28 games), Matt Calvert (19), Gabriel Landeskog (16), Cale Makar (13) and Erik Johnson (11), among others.

The winner will be announced Saturday.

The award, which was first presented in 2009-10, was renamed in 2019-20 in honor of Gregory, the 2007 Hockey Hall of Fame inductee who served as Toronto Maple Leafs GM and a league executive for four decades before he passed away on Oct. 30, 2019.



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