Ex-Canucks GM Jack Gordon, the man who traded Cam Neely, has died

[Elias Pettersson]

Ex-Canucks GM Jack Gordon, the man who traded Cam Neely, has died (msn.com)

 

Jack Gordon always wore the blame for the Cam Neely trade.

 

As the years have passed, the story has become a little more nuanced. There were pressures from within the Vancouver Canucks to trade their unproven star. There was possibly an opportunistic move by former Boston Bruins GM Harry Sinden as well.

 

But whatever the truth of the story, one thing has always been clear: Jack Gordon, a hockey lifer who spent 30 years as a coach and manager after a solid playing career, was a decent human being.

 

Gordon, general manager of the Vancouver Canucks from 1985 until 1987, died last month in Minnesota at the age of 94.

 

Over the phone from Minneapolis, Gordon’s son John said his dad had lived a good long life. Even after leaving the Canucks organization Jack and his wife Joyce, who were married in 1950, had remained in the Vancouver area until 2014, when they moved to the Minneapolis area, where their children, John and daughter Janice, were still living.

 

“They retired there in Vancouver. And then they outlived all his golf buddies,” John said. “In 2014 they decided to come to Minnesota. My sister lives here and I live here. I guess we were the only family left, everybody else in Canada was gone.”

 

His father had been having heart and circulation problems in recent years.

 

Gordon died June 27, after waking up in the middle of the night unable to move. Joyce called for an ambulance and he was taken to hospital. Gordon died there not long after arrival, his son said. The family hasn’t been told an official cause of death, he said.

 

Gordon leaves his wife and children, as well as two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

 

“Oh no, so sorry to hear that,” former Canucks goalie Cesare Maniago said after being told of Gordon’s death. Maniago finished his career in Vancouver, but knew Gordon well from his time playing in Minnesota, where Gordon had been both general manager and coach, and in New York, where Gordon had been assistant general manager while Maniago was trying to break into the league.

 

“He had a good life. You’re always sad to hear news like that, but that’s the first thing I ask, ‘how old were they?’ When you’re in your 90s you’ve had a full life,” Maniago said.

Pat Quinn replaced Gordon as general manager of the Canucks in 1987, though Gordon remained with the team for a season or two as a consultant before retiring — and Maniago recalled seeing his old friend, along with Joyce, often at the Vancouver Golf Club.

 

“Knowing him for quite a few years, a true gentleman. A good man who treated people right,” Maniago recalled.

 

In a game that is often filled with boisterous characters, Gordon, stood out in a different way: He was quiet and composed, picking his moments to say what he thought would be the right words.

 

“Not too outspoken at all,” Maniago said. “When you don’t open your mouth that often, sometimes people say that you should talk more. But I didn’t find that with Jack. He approached management and coaching with a calm demeanour.”

 

His son, who worked as an accountant before retiring in 2011, said his dad was a fantastic father.

 

“When I was younger, growing up, he’d take me to the rink. After practice he’d let me skate for a couple hours,” he said. “During the winter time he wasn’t home a lot, obviously, but in the summer time when I was young we’d go back to Winnipeg. It was great.”

 

Gordon was hired as Jake Milford’s assistant GM ahead of the 1980-81 season.

 

Gordon had first gotten to know Milford when the latter served as head coach of the New York Rangers’ farm team in Omaha in 1967-68 and Gordon was the Rangers’ assistant general manager.

 

“They were buds. They went way back,” John Gordon said.

 

Gordon’s coach and assistant general manager during his two years in charge in Vancouver was Tom Watt, who, at 87, is still on the Toronto Maple Leafs’ payroll as a pro scout.

Watt was hired as an assistant coach by the Canucks at the same time as Gordon was hired as assistant GM.

 

Watt left the Canucks to take the head-coach job in Winnipeg, working for John Ferguson, who Gordon had coached in Cleveland in the early 1960s.

 

Watt was let go by the Jets during the 1983-84 season. He returned to coach the University of Toronto in 1984-85 where he’d coached the Varsity Blues for 15 years before the Canucks brought him aboard in 1980. Then when Harry Neale was dismissed as GM after the season Gordon ended up as GM and he brought in Watt to coach.

 

“He was very easy to work for, low-key man. A big difference coming from Winnipeg, working with Fergie,” Watt said with a laugh.

 

The Canucks were in a difficult period. The run to the Stanley Cup Final in 1982 had proven to be a false dawn and playing in the Smythe Division, the opposition was unforgiving. The Calgary Flames were ever-improving and, of course, the Edmonton Oilers were the toast of hockey, winning four Stanley Cups in five years.

 

“We didn’t have a great team,” Watt admitted.

 

In 1984-85, GM Neale had returned to the bench early in the season after firing Bill LaForge. The team finished the season 25–46–9, dead last in the Smythe Division, 23 points out of a playoff spot. LaForge, despite his reputation as a hard taskmaster, won just four games in the first 20 games of the season before he was fired.

 

Unsurprisingly, attendance at the Pacific Coliseum was poor.

 

The owners of the team, the Griffiths family, knew to right the ship they needed to find a super boss. Gordon was merely the placeholder.

 

“I remember basically saying to Jack, ‘will you do this for us?'” Arthur Griffiths recalled. “We needed to find a long-term solution.”

 

Griffiths was still in his 20s then, but was learning the business under his father, Frank, who had bought the team in 1974, having first built a small media empire in Vancouver and across Western Canada.

 

“It was an almost impossible scenario,” Griffiths said. “We had to rebuild everything. We’d just invested in the arena, with the suites and restaurants. It was a tough place to be. We knew we needed to go external.”

 

They chased after big names like Scotty Bowman and Sam Pollock, but no one was interested in coming aboard.

 

Eventually longtime Vancouver hockey builder Coley Hall suggested Pat Quinn, who had been a very successful coach in Philadelphia and was coaching the Los Angeles Kings, to the owners. Gordon concurred on the idea. And the rest is history.

 

“He was a nice man. Oh my God. Just a classy gentleman,” Griffiths recalled of Gordon.

 

Gordon’s two years in charge are pretty much exclusively remembered for his worst deal, trading a young winger named Cam Neely and a draft pick — which became Glen Wesley, leading to a trade tree that still lives to this day — to the Boston Bruins for former all-star Barry Pederson.

 

As the story has long been told, it was Watt who had urged Gordon to trade Neely. Despite his team’s struggles, Watt had kept leaning on Stan Smyl and Tony Tanti as his primary scoring right-wingers, consigning Neely to a depth role, one where the veteran coach wanted the young winger to focus on fighting and hitting, not so much on scoring.

 

After Boston signed centre Thomas Gradin as a free agent away from the Canucks in June 1986, Watt urged Gordon to try to sign Pederson, who was a restricted free agent, in return. But signing Pederson wasn’t cheap and when Bruins GM Harry Sinden realized the Canucks were after Pederson, he offered a trade, with Neely and the first round pick going the other way.

 

Watt disputed the long-understood account, suggesting others, perhaps even Griffiths, had urged Gordon to flip Neely.

 

“That was done by the owner I think,” Watt claimed. “I found out about that on my way back east. I was in Winnipeg or something. I got a phone call. I had no idea we were considering trading Neely.”

 

Griffiths said he had never urged Gordon to move Neely. He wasn’t involved in hockey operations.

 

“I’d just negotiated the lease on the arena. My hockey exposure was pretty minor,” Griffiths said. “That said, when Jack came to me and said we have a chance to add Barry Pederson, who was so talented and also a local kid from Nanaimo, I certainly wasn’t opposed. But of course we didn’t know Pederson had had those health problems.”

 

Pederson had been an outstanding scorer for the Bruins, scoring 44 goals in his rookie season (1981-82), 46 in his second and eclipsing 100 points in his second and third seasons. But in the summer of 1984, a benign tumour was discovered in his shoulder that required surgery.

 

He needed a second surgery later that year to remove further growths, which required removing muscle as well. He was never quite the same player again.

 

While the Bruins thought they were adding a hustling type, perhaps an heir to Terry O’Reilly or Wayne Cashman, Neely proved to be so much more. And the ultimate irony was that his first centre was Gradin, a player he’d rarely skated with on the same line in Vancouver.

 

Neely, who turned 21 the very day he was traded, scored 36 goals on Gradin’s wing. Neely remains with the Bruins to this day, serving as team president. He’s considered one of their greatest players, scoring 50 or more goals for them three times.

 

Pederson would be a point per game player for the Canucks over his first two seasons in Vancouver, but began his talent began to decline by season three. He never matched the heights he’d hit before his illness.

 

Born and raised in Winnipeg in 1928, Gordon came up through the New York Rangers’ system. He played a season of senior hockey for the New York Rovers at age 18 in 1946-47, tallying 77 points in 54 games before turning pro with the New Haven Ramblers of the American Hockey League in 1947-48, picking up 35 points in 37 games.

 

“I understood, second hand, that as a player (Gordon) was a phenomenal player,” Griffiths said.

 

He made his NHL debut in 1949-50, playing 31 games in the second half of the season, though he only scored three goals.

 

But he did play in the 1950 Stanley Cup playoffs with the Rangers, who lost in seven games in the final to the Gordie Howe-less Red Wings. Mr. Hockey had been injured in the first game of the playoffs.

 

“They lost in Game 7 in overtime,” John Gordon said. “It was still a highlight of his career.”

 

Gordon would suit up just five more times in the NHL over the next two seasons.

 

Despite flaming out at the NHL level, he became a prolific scorer in the AHL with the Cleveland Barons, setting career highs in 1953-43, scoring 31 goals and adding 71 assists for 102 points, plus 18 more in nine playoff games, as he paced the Barons to the Calder Cup, their second straight AHL title.

 

By that point, he was the captain of the Barons, his son said.

 

In 1956-57 he was promoted to player-coach and immediately guided the Barons to another title.

 

By 1959, he was almost exclusively a coach, appearing in just eight games in 1959-60. He suited up in just five games the following season, then hung up his skates for good.

 

In 1962-63, he became the Barons’ GM and Fred Glover was named head coach. A year later the Barons won the Calder Cup again, the fourth time Cleveland would win the AHL championship with Gordon involved.

 

“He got Hockey News executive of the year the year they won the championship,” his son pointed out with pride. Current Hockey News editor-in-chief Ryan Kennedy confirmed the honour, noting the article announcing the award called him the “eager-beaver GM” of the Barons.

 

In 1965, he returned to the Rangers as assistant general manager, beginning a three-season stint working with an old friend.

 

“Emile Francis was the GM in New York. They’d been roommates in Cincinnati,” John Gordon said. “They were friends.”

 

They’d also been teammates for a couple seasons, along with Glover, in Cleveland.

 

Nick Mileti, a Cleveland sports impresario who would own the Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Cavaliers at various times as well, bought the Barons and the arena in 1968. He immediately pitched Gordon on a return.

 

“He wanted somebody to run everything,” John Gordon, who was in high school by then, said. “He must have made an offer to my dad he couldn’t refuse.”

 

The return to Ohio lasted just two years, though, as the Minnesota North Stars came calling in 1970. Bombastic North Stars GM Wren Blair hired the quiet Gordon as head coach.

 

“They had a good two or three years then,” his son said. His first season was rather uneven, as the North Stars went just 28-34-16, but they also made the second round of the playoffs.

 

In his second and third seasons coaching, the North Stars posted winning records, but never got out of the first round of the playoffs. After a poor start to the 1973-74 season, he was relieved as coach, replaced by Parker MacDonald, who had been coaching Minnesota’s primary farm team.

 

In a twist that wouldn’t happen today, Gordon was hired as the team’s new GM at the end of the season, replacing Blair, the man who had first hired, then fired him.

 

And after MacDonald decided not to continue as an NHL coach, Gordon was back behind the bench to start the 1974-75 season. The North Stars continued to struggle so he again ceded the coaching reins, this time for good, hiring Charlie Burns to take over for the rest of the season. He then hired Ted Harris ahead of the 1975-76 season.

 

Gordon would remain in his GM post until February 1978, when he was fired and Lou Nanne took over. He stayed with the North Stars as a scout until Milford came calling just over two years later.

 

“A couple times I asked him — you know nowadays they have four, five assistant coaches — I asked him how he did it all himself,” his son said. “He said he even had to do all the travel. He was always at the rink, I guess. I think it was a tougher job back then.”

 

John Gordon said his dad had been in good health until he hit his 90s, when nature started to slow him down.

 

“He was getting around really well actually, then about four years ago he started having circulation problems in his left leg and he had to have an operation where they did a vein bypass in his left leg and from that point on he had to use a walker,” he said. “He’d still get around OK. He was sharp, he’d read the paper cover to cover every single day. Last fall they discovered that he had a leak in one of his heart valves, he was getting fluid in his lungs. They put him on a lot of medication.

 

“He was starting to decline, he was getting weaker, it just culminated I guess. His heart, I’m sure, he was getting pretty weak. But even then he was still watching the playoffs,” he said.

 

pjohnston@postmedia.com

twitter.com/risingaction

[Fanuck]

For someone who accomplished so much in hockey,  it's unfortunate some only know him for one thing,  and one thing only. 

[NewbieCanuckFan]

23 minutes ago, Fanuck said:

For someone who accomplished so much in hockey,  it's unfortunate some only know him for one thing,  and one thing only. 

Most people might only think of Ron Delorme at his failures at amateur scouting.  Many won’t remember this guy literally (and actually) bled for the organization taking any and all heavyweights during his Canuck playing days.  Even if he was overmatched, he NEVER failed to answer the bell.  Never forget that.

[granpappy]

im not surprised watt is trying to fob the responsibility of the trade onto someone else. remember at the time, when he was active media wise, came across as a weasel. certainly at the time it was watt who had an ongoing personality conflict with neely. hilarious that he is on the laughers payroll as a scout 

[NewbieCanuckFan]

Not mentioned (if it was I missed it) but the drafting of Jim Sandlak I think gave management a false impression that it made Neely redundant,  especially after Sandlak’s dominate performance at the World Junior Tournament where he was also Team Canada’s Captain.  Unfortunately it was just a case of Sandlak playing against immature players (where he developed far faster physically):

 

Course when Sandlak played against fully grown men, he looked pretty ordinary.

[Ghostsof1915]

 

Still a stupid move.

[rawkdrummer]

A good person passes on and you put him down? 

OP needs to grow up!

[-AJ-]

Kind of feels distasteful by the writer at MSN to make him known only by one screw up.

[atillaMYhun]

RIP to this gentleman.  He was part of the Canucks family and history.

 

 

 

[Tiger-Hearted]

I never once felt any animosity towards Mr. Gordon over the Neely trade. This was entirely on Tom Watt's shoulders. Also, Barry Pederson had two 70+ point seasons with the Canucks. It was a trade that also gave back to the Canucks over the next few years:

In '90, Pederson w/Tony Tanti were traded to Pittsburgh for Andrew McBain and Dan Quinn. A year later, Quinn, along with Garth Butcher, were traded to St. Louis for Cliff Ronning, Geoff Courtnall, Sergio Momesso and Robert Dirk, which helped turned the Canucks into a winning team.

 

Getting Rich Sutter from Philadelphia for struggling young defenseman J.J. Daigneault was a good move as Sutter took some of the scoring and grinding load off of Smyl's back.

 

Drafting Dan Woodley 7th overall in '86 was 20/20 hindsight. Woodley was ranked 10th overall by The Hockey News Draft Preview and had a successful junior career with the Portland Winter Hawks. Too bad the Canucks didn't help Woodley work on his skating.

 

Anyway, Mr. Gordon had a good long life. May he RIP and heartfelt condolences to his family and his close connections in the hockey world.

[ShawnAntoski]

RIP

[IBatch]

RIP.....this guys greatest move might have been giving Pat Quin his blessing.   Going from coaching to the big job is no small thing.   Turned out amazing for us really.    Was tough to see all those 80's guys traded, but man did it set us up.  And the "I traded Neely" stuff is just silly...He's not the only GM out there to have made some lopsided trades and at least we had Pederson, and that trade tree as mentioned brought some guys in that to this day still reverberate with the fan base.   Neely with that crew who knows, a lot of things Quin did maybe change then.   Part of the Neely trade absolutely gave us the 94 run.   That's a fair exchange from where i'm standing.   And i'm sure the guy that traded Dryden isn't remembered for that.   Instead Orr, Espo, and that bevy of riches the big Bad Bruins legacy still has today as well (and that was the most lopsided trade in history, at least Stajonov played some games lol)...   Once context is added things aren't so bad at all. 

Edited July 19, 2022 by IBatch

[NewbieCanuckFan]

3 hours ago, IBatch said:

RIP.....this guys greatest move might have been giving Pat Quin his blessing.   Going from coaching to the big job is no small thing.   Turned out amazing for us really.    Was tough to see all those 80's guys traded, but man did it set us up.  And the "I traded Neely" stuff is just silly...He's not the only GM out there to have made some lopsided trades and at least we had Pederson, and that trade tree as mentioned brought some guys in that to this day still reverberate with the fan base.   Neely with that crew who knows, a lot of things Quin did maybe change then.   Part of the Neely trade absolutely gave us the 94 run.   That's a fair exchange from where i'm standing.   And i'm sure the guy that traded Dryden isn't remembered for that.   Instead Orr, Espo, and that bevy of riches the big Bad Bruins legacy still has today as well (and that was the most lopsided trade in history, at least Stajonov played some games lol)...   Once context is added things aren't so bad at all. 

That’s the thing though with your example (an lopsided trade the other way).  Might not always cancel out the negative impact but mitigates it.  Like in the case of Mike Keenan tenure here.  He ripped the heart of the team when he dealt Linden.  But the pieces he got helped firm the key cog in the WCE *AND* an asset to get the pick to draft both Sedins.  Also getting a pick to draft Jarku Ruutu was just icing on the cake.  But man did Keenan leave a path of destruction.  Verbally berated Gelinas all the time.  Think there was also the case of a Canucks D that he treated badly?  Ledyard?  Was the guy that dealt Gino (that likely played some role in Bure wanting out).

Edited July 19, 2022 by NewbieCanuckFan

[Baggins]

19 hours ago, NewbieCanuckFan said:

Not mentioned (if it was I missed it) but the drafting of Jim Sandlak I think gave management a false impression that it made Neely redundant,  especially after Sandlak’s dominate performance at the World Junior Tournament where he was also Team Canada’s Captain.  Unfortunately it was just a case of Sandlak playing against immature players (where he developed far faster physically):

Course when Sandlak played against fully grown men, he looked pretty ordinary.

It wasn't that at all. It was Neely was asking for more ice time and had Tanti and Smyl ahead of him on the right side. We traded Neely from the persective of RW depth to address a need at center. It initially looked like a very good trade for us with Pederson putting up 71 pts in 76 games that season, but went south pretty quickly after that. Pederson was 25 when we traded for him but injuries took a toll and cut his career short. 

[NewbieCanuckFan]

56 minutes ago, Baggins said:

It wasn't that at all. It was Neely was asking for more ice time and had Tanti and Smyl ahead of him on the right side. We traded Neely from the persective of RW depth to address a need at center. It initially looked like a very good trade for us with Pederson putting up 71 pts in 76 games that season, but went south pretty quickly after that. Pederson was 25 when we traded for him but injuries took a toll and cut his career short. 

Pederson from what I recall had a big chunk removed from his arm (can’t remember…was it cancerous?).  Also can’t remember whether he had the procedure before or after he got dealt to us.

[Baggins]

19 minutes ago, NewbieCanuckFan said:

Pederson from what I recall had a big chunk removed from his arm (can’t remember…was it cancerous?).  Also can’t remember whether he had the procedure before or after he got dealt to us.

He had a piece of his shoulder muscle removed because of a Tumor. He had three 70+ point seasons (two in Vancouver) after that surgery but other injuries took a toll on his game and his production slid after that..