11. The John Ferguson Jr. Era

John Ferguson Jr. is sitting at his son’s lacrosse practice inside a quiet Boston arena. His phone is to his ear as he tells stories of his life in hockey, and of the people and moments that shaped it. When he arrives at his four-and-a-half seasons as general manager of the Leafs, he can’t help but lament.

“We should have rebuilt,” he says. “And ultimately it became self-evident that that’s what had to happen. It just took longer to get there.”

Though he doesn’t say as much, it’s clear that the way he is perceived in Toronto still wears on him more than 13 years after his dismissal. But when the conversation pivots to the four Leafs drafts he oversaw, his tone shifts. In place of attempts to set the record straight, and stories about the politics of the gig or missed opportunities, he speaks of discoveries, of philosophy, and of success stories.

“Future NHL games are being won and lost on today’s scouting battlefields,” he says, reciting a mantra he admits all his colleagues have heard over the years. “For me, scouting xenophobes make desirable opponents because they leave gaps in their coverage, if not consciously then subconsciously. Those who keep a broader perspective can make hay.”

The draft and everything that comes with it—its process, its research, its recruiting, its theory, its analytics, its player evaluation, and ultimately its study—is where Ferguson Jr.’s roots are. The most pivotal moments of Ferguson Jr.’s career have happened on draft weekend. Job interviews. A hotel elevator conversation. The selections and trades that he made himself or had a hand in for six different NHL clubs. Though his time in Toronto took on a life and reputation of its own, his track record leading the Leafs through the 2004–07 drafts stands the test of time.

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Ferguson Jr. was born on July 7, 1967, in Montreal, the summer before his father, John Ferguson Sr., began his pursuit of his third of five Stanley Cups with the Canadiens. Though Ferguson Sr. was a two-time All-Star and runner-up for the Calder Trophy, he was known more as superstar Jean Beliveau’s protector and racked up more than 100 penalty minutes in each of his eight seasons in the NHL, all in Montreal.

After retiring from his playing career in 1971, Ferguson Sr. served as an assistant coach with Team Canada for its 1972 Summit Series victory over the Soviet Union. In the four decades that followed, he was a head coach and general manager of the Rangers and Jets (a team he oversaw in the WHA through its merger into the NHL), director of player personnel for the Senators, and scout and special assistant to the general manager with the Sharks, a role he filled while battling prostate cancer until his passing in 2007.

So Ferguson Jr. grew up in the sport, bouncing from city to city with his dad; mom, Joan; and three siblings, Chris, Catherine, and Joanne, before settling in Winnipeg for his junior high and high school years.

As Ferguson Jr. tried to carve out his own path as a hockey player, he fielded the same question over and over.

“What’s it like having a father who played and then later on became a manager?”

His answer was always the same.

“To be honest, I’ve never had any other father so I’m not sure what the differences are.”

For a long time, Ferguson Jr. struggled to find an identity that wasn’t tied to his dad’s. They shared everything. A love for hockey. A love for horse racing. A love for lacrosse. It wasn’t lost on him, either, how lucky he was to grow up around some of the best hockey players of the 1970s and 1980s. In Winnipeg, he developed his father’s passion for player evaluation on frequent trips south to watch the University of North Dakota. He sat and listened as his dad made some of the WHA’s and NHL’s first inroads into Europe, recruiting players like Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson, and Thomas Steen to North America. That upbringing shaped the way he eventually approached his jobs in hockey. When his dad gave him life lessons, he listened, admiring him for his work ethic and attention to detail.

For a long time, though, Ferguson Sr. cast a long shadow. The name “John Ferguson Jr.” came with immediate recognition. To one person, he was the son of one of the toughest players to ever play. To the next, he was the son of the boss of the Jets. And for all that his dad gave him, those comparisons also made him squeamish.

“I tried to make my hockey résumé unassailable from those who might criticize for nepotism. I tried to make my path bulletproof,” Ferguson said. “I tried to look out for myself, to clean up my own messes, and that lesson of establishing your own independence was instilled in me as much by my mother as my father.”

Even when the time came for his own draft day in June 1985, shortly after he’d finished his tier-two junior career and shortly before he was set to arrive at Providence College for his freshman year, the father-son ties tightened when the Canadiens used their final pick of the 1985 draft to select Ferguson Jr. 247th overall.

At Providence, Ferguson Jr. struggled on the ice, turning his focus off it into a pursuit of a degree in business administration. As a freshman and sophomore, he wasn’t a regular in the Friars lineup. But he excelled in the classroom, becoming an Academic All-American and later graduating magna cum laude. Coincidentally, his time in the Schneider Arena press box as a healthy scratch early on also helped him forge relationships with the people who’d become two of his biggest mentors in the sport—Brian Burke and Lou Lamoriello. Burke, a Providence grad himself, took his first job in the NHL as director of hockey operations for the Vancouver Canucks in the 1987–88 season, when Ferguson Jr. was a junior with the Friars. But before that, Burke worked at a law firm in Boston and as an agent, did some NCAA recruiting, and provided colour analysis for Providence College’s broadcasts. While at Providence, Ferguson Jr. also ran into Burke at Boston’s Logan International Airport one Christmas while they both waited for a flight to Minneapolis, where Ferguson Jr. had to catch a connecting flight to Winnipeg. Ferguson Jr. developed a relationship with Lamoriello because he was Providence College’s director of player personnel for his first two years at the program (after more than a decade as the Friars’ head coach before Ferguson Jr.’s arrival). Lamoriello took his first NHL gig during Ferguson Jr.’s sophomore season at Providence when the New Jersey Devils hired him as team president.

Though Ferguson Jr. debated following in Burke’s and Lamoriello’s footsteps by pursuing law school when he graduated (the latter actually advised him to do just that instead of pursuing a playing career), even taking the LSAT, a strong senior year with the Friars was enough for him to pursue pro hockey and earn a contract with the Canadiens’ farm team.

At the end of Ferguson Jr.’s second of four seasons in the AHL (three with the Canadiens organization and one with the Senators’ affiliate in New Haven), Burke was in Vancouver and reached out when he was looking to hire an intern for the Canucks’ office.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m still trying to be a player,’” Ferguson Jr. remembered, chuckling to himself about the interaction. “So that was an indication of his assessment of where he thought I might be going or not going as a pro.”

In his final year of pro hockey in New Haven, Ferguson Jr. eventually sat down with Don MacAdam, the team’s head coach, for a frank discussion about whether he should pursue law school or another contract.

“If you stop playing now, you’ll be done for a long time,” MacAdam told him.

Ferguson Jr., recognizing the reality of that, tried to keep his options open, applying for law schools throughout the rest of the season before spending the summer training in Amherstburg, Ontario, with fellow journeyman Warren Rychel in case he got another contract.

When the right one never came, Ferguson Jr. moved back to Boston to attend Suffolk University Law School, immersing himself so much in his education that he didn’t have time to regret leaving his playing career behind.

While in law school for three years, Ferguson Jr. then got his first opportunities on the other side of the sport, working part-time as a scout for the Senators, where Ferguson Sr. was the team’s director of player personnel, and interning at the NHL’s offices.

He also reached out to several teams about managerial roles, but there were no fits. After passing the bar exam in Massachusetts and graduating from law school, he then interviewed with several agencies, including hockey giant Newport, which had represented him during his playing career. He chose Lawton Sport and Financial, run by former first overall NHL draft pick Brian Lawton out of Minneapolis, because it was a boutique agency that didn’t have anyone on the East Coast and he wanted to negotiate contracts immediately (instead of recruiting Midget-aged players in the role that was offered to him with Newport). Under Lawton, Ferguson Jr. sat in living rooms with top prospects like Hal Gill.

“It gave me perspective of the players, and the clients, and their parents. It pushed me into areas that I was not altogether that comfortable with. It’s sink or swim. You’ve got to get out there and live up to the sales job,” Ferguson Jr. said.

After a year as an agent, some of those people he’d reached out to after he graduated began to circle back. Ferguson Jr., knowing that if he stayed as an agent for much longer that it might be a decade before he got out of that world if his client base grew, took the interviews. Those opportunities really began to come to a head at the 1997 NHL draft, which was held on June 21 of that year in Pittsburgh. Two weeks before the draft, the St. Louis Blues had hired Larry Pleau as their new general manager and Pleau reached out to Ferguson Jr. because he already had his résumé. Dave Taylor, who’d taken over as Kings general manager that April, reached out for the same reasons. A couple of weeks after the draft, Ken Holland, who’d just been named general manager of the Red Wings, also called him about an opportunity after spending a day discussing the team’s future with Scotty Bowman. But it was Ferguson Jr.’s 7 am meeting on the Sunday after the draft with Pleau that stuck with him. Later that day, when he ran into Lamoriello in the hotel elevator, he asked his mentor’s advice.

“‘Lou, I’ve got an opportunity on the management side and I’ve met with two teams. What do you think?” Ferguson Jr. said.

Lamoriello deadpanned him.

“Get out of that ass-kissing business as soon as you can,” he answered with his typical succinctness as he stepped out of the elevator without looking back.

Ferguson Jr. took his advice and agreed to take the Blues job a few days after the draft. When Holland called him about the Red Wings gig, he had to decline.

Ferguson Jr., then 30, joined the Blues as assistant general manager. Pleau became an even bigger mentor than Lamoriello and Burke had, second only to his dad, placing a lot on his plate (including director of hockey operations for the Blues and president and general manager of the Worcester IceCats, their AHL franchise).

After six seasons with the Blues, that opportunity turned into another at another draft, this time in 2003 in Nashville.

Leading into the weekend, Pat Quinn, who then held both the Leafs’ general manager and head coach roles, reached out to Pleau to see if he could interview Ferguson Jr. in his search for his own replacement as general manager. Ferguson Jr., who’d already had one interview for a general manager opportunity with the Sharks, interviewed with the Leafs across several stages, first over the phone and then twice in Toronto with Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment president and CEO Richard Peddie.

After sorting out the paperwork and delaying the announcement due to scheduling conflicts with Peddie, Quinn, and the Raptors, Ferguson Jr. was officially introduced as the Leafs’ 12th general manager on August 29, 2003, at the age of 36, just a week before the team flew to Sweden for their training camp.

He took over an aging Leafs team that featured stars like Mats Sundin, Joe Nieuwendyk, Gary Roberts, Owen Nolan, Alexander Mogilny, and Ed Belfour, with a payroll of more than $62 million (sixth highest in the league at the time) and high expectations.

“It was an exciting period of time and without question I felt ready to do what needed to be done,” Ferguson Jr. said.

With the NHL and NHLPA’s collective bargaining agreement set to expire, he approached that first season intent on contending. Though nobody on the team or league side expected there to be a full-season work stoppage the following year, or the institution of a hard salary cap, the Leafs allocated a percentage of their earnings to his budget, which was indicative of their willingness to contend and in line with the cut of revenue the league’s other best teams were likely to spend—or at least not all that far behind the Red Wings and the Rangers, who were spending closer to $80 million on their payrolls.

Ferguson Jr. felt that his budget and his directive were reasonable and sensible, given that the Leafs were at the tail end of a contending window.

“We had a pretty good sense of what our club was made of. I did feel that there should be a couple of years to push it and get it done before the aging process was going to take over. And frankly, thereafter I had hoped and planned to enter more of a rebuild,” Ferguson Jr. said.

In advance of the 2004 trade deadline, the Leafs were neck-and-neck in a race for the top of the Eastern Conference standings, and Ferguson committed to upgrading the roster.

In late February, he began an aggressive pursuit of a top defenceman, engaging in frequent discussions with Rangers general manager Glen Sather, who was selling future Hall of Famer Brian Leetch, and Capitals general manager George McPhee, who was shopping All-Star Sergei Gonchar, the league’s highest-scoring defenceman that season.

“George was literally going day-to-day saying, ‘I’m going to trade that guy tomorrow, how about this guy?’ And he had them all lined up. And I was in on Gonchar extensively,” Ferguson Jr. said.

Because Leetch had a year remaining on his contract and Gonchar was a pending free agent, Ferguson Jr. made the deal with Sather, trading a 2004 first-round pick (which became Kris Chucko, who played just two NHL games), a 2005 second-round pick (which became Michael Sauer, who played 98 games across parts of three NHL seasons), and prospects Maxim Kondratiev and Jarkko Immonen to the Rangers for Leetch. That same day, March 3, Gonchar was dealt to the Bruins for a first and a second and Shaone Morrisonn. (Gonchar later signed with the Penguins as a free agent.) A week later, on deadline day, Ferguson Jr. then dealt a fourth-round pick in the 2005 draft to the Carolina Hurricanes for their longtime captain and one of the league’s all-time leading scorers, 40-year-old Ron Francis, who registered 10 points in 12 games for the Leafs down the stretch before retiring after their playoff run.

The Leafs finished that season with a then franchise record 45 wins and 103 points, three points back of the Lightning (who went on to win the Stanley Cup) for first in the East. They defeated the Senators in seven games in the conference quarterfinals before falling to the Flyers in six games in the conference semifinals.

When the 2004 draft, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, arrived, Ferguson Jr. was without his first- and second rounders (the first was his own doing, the second was dealt for defenceman Glen Wesley the season before he was hired). Still, through his experience scouting for the Senators for three years and helping to run the Blues’ draft board for six more, Ferguson Jr.’s first draft with the Leafs was really his 10th. The Leafs didn’t make their first selection, Justin Pogge, until 90th overall. The result was Ferguson Jr.’s worst draft as Leafs general manager, with only Pogge and 187th overall pick Robbie Earl emerging to play NHL games among the Leafs’ seven picks in Rounds 3–9.

He never got the second year out of Leetch that he’d spent his 2004 and 2005 draft capital to acquire, either, because the final year of Leetch’s contract was lost by the looming 2004–05 lockout.

Though the lockout dramatically changed the Leafs’ trajectory, nudging them into a decade-long struggle, it also gave Ferguson Jr. a full year to focus on one thing: the NHL draft. The Leafs launched into an “extensive” amateur scouting process. After a full year of travelling the hockey world to scout the 2005 draft, the draft was then pushed back from its planned June 25 date to July 30, and moved from the Senators’ arena, the Corel Centre, to Ottawa’s Westin Hotel. The draft itself underwent a format overhaul, too. Its length was reduced from nine rounds to seven rounds, and it was closed to the public for the first time since 1980, with only NHL Central Scouting’s 20 highest-ranked prospects attending in person. Because no season was played, the draft lottery was also revamped and turned into a spectacle that became known as the Crosby sweepstakes. Under the new collective bargaining agreement, each of the league’s 30 teams were given weighted lottery odds according to a combination of their playoff performances and their first overall picks from the previous three seasons. Three lottery balls were awarded to teams with no playoff appearances and no first overall picks from 2002 to ’04. Two lottery balls were assigned to teams with one playoff appearance or one first overall pick in that timespan. All other teams received one lottery ball. After each team was drawn and the first-round order was complete, a snake draft was established so that the team that picked first in the first round picked last in the second round—and so on. The Leafs received one of the 48 total balls assigned, giving them a 2.1 percent chance at first overall. They landed the 21st overall selection.

Though Ferguson was still without his second- and fourth-round picks, the Leafs’ 2005 class was a success, producing four NHL players—including two of the draft’s home runs—with their six selections.

They picked their first of those home runs in the first round, selecting goaltender Tuukka Rask.

“Tuukka was a starter as an underage with Ilves’ under-18 team and had a real big year that year, but his actual draft year, if you went solely by it, some teams wouldn’t have taken him in the first round, for whatever reason,” Ferguson Jr. said. “I still believe there is a sentiment to this day that says, ‘Is that a solid use of a first-round pick? Are you going to realize the benefits of it?’ I don’t subscribe to that theory. There’s no question that if you can identify that player, acquire the player with a first-round pick, and then be committed to developing that player, you can realize some real big returns. Carey Price. Roberto Luongo. If you really look at the number of first-round starters, it’s probably more than people would think anecdotally. And Tuukka we were very aware of. We saw the talent level and felt without question that he was the pick at 21.”

The Leafs’ second home run came much later, when they selected defenceman Anton Stralman (who went on to become one of the draft’s best defencemen) in the seventh round.

“You cannot maximize the entire value of your draft if you take players earlier than they need to be taken. That does inherently mean you’re going to assume some level of risk that that player that you want may not be available when you think he needs to be taken. But if you continue to take players quote-unquote earlier than they would otherwise need to be chosen, you’re minimizing the ceiling of your entire draft,” Ferguson explained of his approach to late-round choices. “Stralman’s a prime example of attempting to extract value deep in the draft.”

Into August, though, as the Leafs prepared to exit the lockout for the 2005–06 season, their roster wasn’t anything like the one that pursued a Stanley Cup before the stoppage. Belfour was 40 and all of Nieuwendyk, Roberts, Mogilny, and Nolan were gone—but their expectations didn’t adjust accordingly.

“The word rebuild was non-grata. It wasn’t going to be used internally or externally. I think that that was a mistake,” Ferguson Jr. said. “And I remember George McPhee saying about the challenges and unknown of entering a rebuild, ‘The problem is when you start going south in the standings, you don’t know where the bottom is, and that’s very challenging.’ So I don’t say it without appreciating the risks and the realities at some attempts at a rebuild on the fly.”

After sputtering to a slow start, the Leafs got hot late in the season, finishing 9–1–2 in their final 12 games to finish two points shy of the playoffs, missing the postseason for the first time since 1998. A week later, Quinn and assistant coach Rick Ley were relieved of their duties. A couple of weeks after that, Marlies head coach Paul Maurice was named as Quinn’s replacement. And a month later the 2006 NHL draft was held on June 24 in Vancovuer.

On Day 1 of the draft, Ferguson Jr. traded Rask, who’d just won the 2006 World Juniors’ top goaltender award leading Finland to a bronze medal, to the Boston Bruins for Andrew Raycroft, who, before the lockout, won the Calder Trophy when he posted a .926 save percentage across 57 games, and four years before that had won the CHL’s goaltender of the year award. The trade went on to overshadow the draft, living in infamy as Raycroft bounced from team to team in the years that followed before departing for Europe in 2012 at the age of 32, while Rask became a perennial Vezina Trophy contender as one of the league’s best goalies.

“We’d have been far better off not making the trade for Raycroft. And Raycroft was a good goaltender. But without question the returns on that trade were shorter term. And credit to Tuukka and the team that acquired him, that committed to developing him the right way behind Tim Thomas,” Ferguson Jr. said. “Would he have pushed through no matter where he was? I think he would have. But I don’t think anybody can argue with the development of Tuukka Rask with Boston.”

Out of the shadow of the Rask–Raycroft trade, the 2006 draft became one of the Leafs’ best ever, producing six NHL players and more than 2,600 NHL games played with just seven picks (the most games played by a Leafs draft class since 1987, when they hit on six of 12 picks).

Maybe their least successful pick of the 2006 class—at least relative to the slot—was their first, Jiri Tlusty, at 13th overall, and even then, though future star Claude Giroux was taken nine picks later, five of the players picked between Tlusty and Giroux never became full-time NHL players while Tlusty played 450 games for four teams.

In the second round, the Leafs picked Nikolay Kulemin, who went on to have a 30-goal season for the team. After trading their third-round pick (which became forward Tony Lagerstrom, who never played in the NHL) to the Blackhawks for two fourth-round picks, the Leafs used those two picks to draft goaltender James Reimer and defenceman Korbinian Holzer.

Reimer, who was a backup in the WHL with the Red Deer Rebels in his draft year, proved to be a find—and someone Ferguson Jr. credits Leafs goalie scout Mike Palmaeteer for identifying.

“Reimer projected to be a starter the very next year, which he became and which we factored into what we considered to be another good bet on an upside goaltender who possessed what I like to call prototypical No. 1 starting goaltender size. And if he’s not a slam-dunk No. 1 to this day, he has certainly been as good as any tandem goaltender to this day, and that represents value in the draft,” Ferguson Jr. said.

Two rounds later, after moving two seventh-round picks (both of which also never played NHL games) to the Coyotes to move up into the sixth round, the Leafs selected forward Viktor Stalberg, who later played one season in Toronto before he was dealt to Chicago to acquire forward Kris Versteeg.

Later in the sixth round, with their final pick of the draft, the Leafs also selected Leo Komarov, who, after years spent in Finland and Russia, played five seasons for the Leafs, including three as an assistant captain.

“We did know when we drafted Komarov that what we were projecting to get was going to be a hard-nosed, two-way bottom-six forward with the ability to agitate and make plays offensively. He was not a prototypical size, strength, upside draft pick. But when you consider that he was a sixth rounder, we felt very comfortable with that risk-reward assessment at that selection,” Ferguson Jr. said. “Without question, his additional time in Europe allowed him to grow, he became a captain, and he matured physically and mentally as a person and a professional before he came over.”

The following season, though, played out much like the previous one had. The Leafs, intent on clawing their way to a playoff spot, came up just short, famously missing the playoffs by one point on the last game of the season when the Islanders defeated the Devils in a shootout to secure the final spot.

Ferguson Jr. then made another significant move on the opening day of the draft, this time in Columbus in 2007, trading the team’s 2007 first-rounder (the 13th overall pick, which became NHLer Lars Eller), 2007 second-rounder (which became journeyman Aaron Palushaj), and 2009 fourth-rounder (which became NHLer Craig Smith) to the Sharks in exchange for goaltender Vesa Toskala and winger Mark Bell. Without his first- and second-rounders for the second time as general manager, Ferguson Jr. did well with what he’d left himself, selecting three NHL players in Rounds 3–7 and finding another late-round gem in seventh-round pick Carl Gunnarsson.

“I remember having conversations with our guys from Europe and guys that cross over to Europe, whether it’s Thommie Bergman or Dave Morrison, and in that instance with Gunnarsson, that was the same draft as [Frazer] McLaren, the big kid from Winnipeg that San Jose took in the seventh round, and we liked him and I probably should have taken one of them a round earlier because I wanted both but we thought that McLaren might get through and we were going to invite him to camp, so we took Gunnarsson. But we were certainly not complaining about who we took,” Ferguson Jr. said.

Again, though, the picks didn’t become the story when Ferguson Jr.’s big draft trade didn’t work out. In August of that off-season, Bell pleaded no contest to drunk driving causing injury and hit and run, two charges which stemmed from an accident he caused when he rear-ended a pick-up truck at a stop sign while going an estimated 100 kilometres an hour on Labor Day weekend 2006. The league also suspended him for the first 15 games of the following season with the Leafs and he was placed on waivers by the team a year later. When Toskala struggled in his first season as a starter, the Leafs finally cratered out, going from fringe playoff team to the bottom of the standings.

And by Christmas, Ferguson Jr. began to see the writing on the wall and wonder if changes were imminent. He was fired on January 22, with the Leafs sitting 19–22–8 and 14th in the Eastern Conference, and replaced by former Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher.

His time with the Leafs remains the one period of his career filled with the most regrets.

“In training camp that year, there was a media availability with Paul Maurice and myself, and Paul felt and expressed that it should be a playoff team or there should be changes. And I think that was an honest expression of the perception, which became reality. I’m not sure it needed to be expressed publicly prior to the season but I do think it’s probably what he’d heard from the board, and he was merely stating what he felt was our reality as a club. We were all connected in that respect. Whether or not that was a fair assessment by those above us really doesn’t matter because that’s what it was,” Ferguson Jr. said.

In the years that followed Ferguson Jr.’s dismissal, he took upper management positions with the Sharks, Bruins, and Coyotes. He helped successfully retool on the fly and extend contending windows with each of the first two and hopes to help the third through a complete rebuild.

He wishes he’d been able—and allowed—to do in Toronto what he’s now trying to do in Arizona: start over. But he wasn’t, and the Leafs continued to trade picks and young assets to push for the playoffs in the years that followed his termination under his successors, including his old mentor Burke and another of Burke’s mentees, Dave Nonis.

“Without question, there was more in place than many let on at the time, but that does require time and sometimes you’ve got to be able to keep your job to see things through. In that instance, I was not able to do that. It was a challenging time handling the different agendas, pressures, and expectations,” Ferguson Jr said. “We as an organization missed an opportunity to proactively embrace a true reset, if not a rebuild, that ultimately became unavoidable.”

To this day, though Ferguson Jr. has many regrets, he’s proud of what he was able to accomplish in Toronto, winning the team’s last playoff series for more than a decade and guiding the franchise through an unprecedented lockout and into the salary cap era.

He’s most proud of his record at the draft, though.

While the Leafs made just three of their eight picks in the first two rounds of the four drafts he oversaw, some of which was his own doing and some of which wasn’t, 15 of the 26 picks Ferguson Jr. did make—an impressive 58 percent—played in NHL games.