George McPhee prepares Las Vegas for NHL hockey (Puck Daddy Q&A)

In the coming weeks George McPhee will be busy in his work life and his personal life.

The Las Vegas NHL team general manager will drop his two college kids off at their schools and help them move into their residences for the upcoming year. He then will do a walkthrough of the home he bought in Las Vegas.

He will also need to finish hiring his hockey ops staff, meet with them from Sept. 6-8 to go over plans for the upcoming season and tie up any other loose ends with the organization.

“It’s basically getting up at 5:30 a.m. or 6 a.m. Doing two or three hours of work, texts, emails. Don’t make many calls at that hour or at those hours. Get a quick workout in, then right back at it probably pretty consistently until 9:30 p.m. or 10 p.m. at night,” McPhee said of his current daily routine.

Despite the long hours, McPhee said he has greatly enjoyed this part of the process. It’s a way he can make his mark on the team early on in its history. It’s certainly a different situation than his previous spot – the Washington Capitals where the 58-year-old McPhee was GM from 1997 until he was fired in 2014. In his first year with Washington, the Capitals made the Stanley Cup Final.

“We’re trying to assemble a staff and the number of hours and phone calls and interviews that go into vetting potential candidates is extraordinary,” McPhee said. “If you want to get talented, experienced people and quality people it takes a lot of work and better to put all the work in now to find really good people than having to put in work years from now to release somebody that’s not working out.”

We spoke with McPhee via phone about the organization’s next step in its preparation for the 2017-18 season, some of his hires, what it’s likes being a general manager who can’t make a trade, and trying to figure out a job title for Murray Craven.

Q: So what are your plans the rest of the summer? Are you in Las Vegas currently?

(McPhee): This week I’m dropping my two college kids off at their colleges and helping them move in and then head out to Las Vegas next week.

Dropping kids off at college? Sounds tough.

It’s cake in comparison to putting an expansion team together.

When are you expecting to move to Las Vegas full-time?

We are doing a walkthrough of our new home on September first or second. We made an offer and it was accepted, subject to our ability for a walkthrough. There’s a lot that can be done online and with virtual tours of homes. I’ve been around looking at different areas and different homes. We think we finally have one and we’ll know next weekend.

I’m in Bethesda this weekend and then after taking the kids to the colleges, we’ll head out to Las Vegas and hopefully have our house and move out as soon as it’s ready. I’ll be out there anyway. I’m staying once I go out and my wife will go back and forth.

How is your schedule breaking down for next season? When can you finally put a scouting plan in place?

Well, I’m going to do as much scouting as I can. We’re having our meetings in Las Vegas on Sept. 6, 7, 8 – organizational meetings. We’re bringing in both the pro and amateur staffs and all of our directors and just go over the things you have to go over when you’re getting your organization organized. And then at that point we will discuss schedules and additional meeting times in the future and scouting schedules.

Are you planning on going to the NHL’s general managers meetings or Board of Governors meeting?

I actually haven’t given that much thought. I would assume we’re invited henceforth, but we’ll have to check on that.

How have you prepared yourself for this process? Have you picked the brains of guys who have been successful GMs of expansion teams – like David Poile with the Nashville Predators for example?

I’ve been on the other side of it for a number of years. I have had a couple of discussions with David Poile. I’ve had some discussions with Doug Risebrough on how he did it in Minnesota and Doug is probably a gentleman we’re going to follow up with and actually have him on the to-do list to see if he can join us in Las Vegas and talk to us for a day or two about his experience.

What have they specifically told you about this process?

To them it was a lot of fun and so far for us, as busy as we’ve been, it’s been a lot of fun. You keep working and working and working and when you land someone who will really bring a lot of value to your organization, it’s a great feeling that you’ve added another real good piece. We feel like we’re getting that every two or three days, we’re adding another really good piece. We are enjoying the process and really excited right now and looking forward to our meetings in September when we can walk in the room and our whole staff will be there.

I’d imagine there’s a fair amount of salesmanship with this franchise and always being available to pitch the franchise be it to fans, players or sponsors. Are you ready and prepared for that responsibility?

Sure. Those questions were asked of me in the interview process and of course we’re going to be available to do that. I think we did a tremendous job in Washington of turning that market into an outstanding hockey market. When we first went to Washington, they had 2,900 season tickets and maybe half the games were on television. There just wasn’t a lot of interest. If you look at that franchise now and sold out eight straight years now, it’s a tremendous team on the ice and a lot of interest in the community. Seeing what we have in Las Vegas with the tremendous, tremendous T-Mobile Arena right on the strip, a great state of the art practice facility being built 15 minutes away in the Summerlin suburbs, great areas for players to live, easy to get around. Easy to get to the airports, great weather, no state tax for employees in the state – it’s pretty easy to sell something you really believe in and we really believe with all these things we already have in place that if we do our jobs we can win and we’re very close to having completed our scouting staff. We should have that done in a week or so and then we’ll work on clubhouse staff and a few other things and then we start working on our fanbase and meeting with them and doing whatever it takes to have people embrace the team and feel a part of it and really want to support this team for a number of years.

What’s it like being a GM who can’t make a trade right now?

It’s probably a relief because we don’t have time to do that right now. We’re trying to assemble a staff and the number of hours and phone calls and interviews that go into vetting potential candidates is extraordinary. If you want to get talented, experienced people and quality people it takes a lot of work and better to put all the work in now to find really good people than having to put in work years from now to release somebody that’s not working out.

We’re doing a lot of work to add that elite kind of talent to our organization and we’re getting closer to the finish line in this phase of our operation and in early September we’ll get together and discuss how we’re going to scout and what our methodologies are going to be and how we’re going to conduct ourselves as an organization and map out what we stand for and then we get working. The time to talk to other managers about players and potential transactions, that will come soon enough. Next spring will be on us in a hurry.

What do you think of working with Murray Craven? Sort of a blast from your past when you were with the Vancouver Canucks?

Well, I remember picking Murray up at the airport when we traded for him. It was about a 20 minute drive to the arena and I remember thinking as we got out of the car that ‘this is a real, quality individual and a real character guy.’ He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s a very humble, down-to-earth guy. Very smart guy, knows a lot about the game, knows a lot about the new advances in the game whether it be in nutrition or strength training or facilities. He’s had a relationship with Bill Foley for a number of years. He’s actually been into his own businesses in building development. So he’s really the perfect guy right now to help us build our practice facility. It’s his baby right now and he’s working on that. He’s building up the locker rooms at T-Mobile Arena and he’s going to be very instrumental in helping us secure an American Hockey League franchise and work with our East Coast league team as well and develop those relationships and look after those teams.

You guys finally gave him an official title of senior vice president. What was it like trying to come up with a title for him because he seems to do pretty much everything?

Yeah, we both had a kick out of that. We just wanted to make sure the title was respectful for what he was bringing to the table, and gave him the clout he needed when dealing with people in our business and outside of our business like some of the people who are going to be constructing our facility.

You have a few hires you worked with in Washington. Is it a familiarity thing with some of them?

We’ve only hired two people from Washington. We’ve hired people from other organizations. There will be several organizations that we hire from and I don’t know if there’s a real pattern to it and sometimes it doesn’t happen in the order you’d like things to happen in. We’re just being very aggressive and very comprehensive in our recruiting efforts. When things happen, they happen and we’re going after the best human talent we can find and so far it’s going well.

You hired Kelly McCrimmon from the Brandon Wheat Kings to be your assistant general manager. What do you think about Kelly and how you guys can work together?

I like every single thing about him. He’s a proven hockey man.

He knows the game really well. He’s done everything in the game – coached, scouted, managed, owned. He just has a great way about him as a human being. Very thoughtful, smart, deep thinker, first-class all the way in the way that he treats people. He has been very, very helpful in attracting talent to our organization and it hasn’t taken us very long at all – a matter of days I believe – to really connect and enjoy working with each other. I think the results are already there. We’re getting some terrific people to join us.

People seem to rave about the culture he created in Brandon. Was that a thought when you hired him – that he could bring something similar to Las Vegas?

Of course, of course. What an organization stands for, how they conduct themselves is really important to all of us and we want to have a first-class organization that treats the players right and our players treat our fans right and are good in the community and basically we do everything the right way. Kelly has demonstrated he can do that and certainly brings an experience to a new situation and I hope we can replicate it.

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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper

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