Wyshynski: Ned Colletti’s baseball lessons for hockey scouting
From Greg Wyshynski at ESPN.com on October 16, 2019:
Ned Colletti might be the only person in professional sports history to have traded for Manny Ramirez and scouted the Columbus Blue Jackets’ power play.
Managerial cross-pollination between professional leagues is rare. While general managers and coaches trade notes and use each other for advice, the actual hiring of an executive from one sport to work in another just doesn’t happen. Which is why the San Jose Sharks hiring Colletti, a longtime Major League Baseball executive who served as GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2005 to 2014, made ripples through the industry.
“I must have gotten 30 phone calls,” said Sharks general manager Doug Wilson, who formally added Colletti to his staff in September. “But he knows the game. I kid him that he’s a hockey guy that’s masqueraded as a baseball guy all these years.”
Colletti, who grew up a fan of hockey and worked as an NHL beat writer in the 1980s, wasn’t yearning for a job in the sport while working in MLB. “But I remained interested in it,” he told ESPN. “When the GM thing ended in [Los Angeles], it opened my eyes. How do I want to spend the rest of my days?”
Read the full article here: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/27855731/ned-colletti-baseball-lessons-nhl-scouting
Originally published: October 16, 2019. Last Updated: October 16, 2019.