My goodness, the jabbermouths on sports talk radio would blow out their collective aortas. The pallbearers who carry notepads and whose words appear in india ink in our daily newspapers would mess themselves.
But the above words were spoken by Red Wings GM Ken Holland, so all is well. Such is the wide berth you're given if your resume has a lot of lines that begin with the word "Won."
Won three Stanley Cups.
Won several Presidents' Trophies.
Won more games than I lost.
That last one is enough to get some consideration in this town.
Holland is one of two front office types in Detroit who has a Midas touch. The other is the Pistons' Joe Dumars, who's as close to a deity right now as anyone who's had the keys to the executive washroom.
So Kenny Holland can say the above things - words spoken to me over a telephone a couple months ago - and there won't be folks waiting in the Joe Louis Arena parking lot, a vat of tar and a bag full of feathers in tow.
Matt Millen, on the other hand, has no such luxury.
Millen (top) doesn't have the wide berth of Holland, and with no surprise
But that's what happens when your team's won/lost record is 21-59 under your charge. Holland's teams post almost the 180 degree opposite marks in any given season. At this writing, the Red Wings sit at 56-15-8. That kind of winning percentage will buy you an awful lot of "mulligans" - even though Holland maintains he has but one of those.
You can also get away with incompetence if your followers are few and far between.
The Pistons, in the mid-1960's, once had a coach named Paul Seymour, a brushed-cut, ex-military man who'd been an NBA head coach elsewhere prior to coming to Detroit as an assistant. After the on-schedule axing of the head coach - something Seymour certainly expected when he took the assistant's job - he had the bright idea of trading forward Dave DeBusschere.
DeBusschere was as Detroit as General Motors. He grew up on the city's east side, attended high school in town, and played college ball at the University of Detroit, before becoming a Piston. He even coached the team for a couple years - still the youngest man to coach an NBA team. And yet Paul Seymour saw it fit to trade him - to the New York Knicks. Those in the know suspected that Seymour traded DeBusschere due to jealousy and fear of being overshadowed by the local star.
"I was expecting some backlash when I traded DeBusschere," Seymour said smugly. "But all I got were three letters.
"The Pistons never won anything with him, so what's the big deal?"
You can utter such nonsense, when your games are being attended by fewer people than the latest big sale at Wal-Mart. The Pistons could have mailed maps to Cobo Arena to the entire metropolitan area, along with a free ticket, and they'd still struggle to get 3,000 fannies into the seats in those days.
If a crap trade is made in a city and nobody cares, does it make a sound?
But Matt Millen doesn't work in a city that's apathetic about its football team. That's evident when Ford Field is sold out for a stinking exhibition game in August - at regular season prices to boot. It's also evident when the denizens are riled into protesting its own team at the behest of a local radio station, convinced to wear the opposing team's colors and to stage a "Millen Man March" outside the stadium, as happened last December with the Bengals in town.
The forest is definitely not empty here, so nothing can be done or said, or inferred, without it making a sonic boom.
After three days of mini-camps in Allen Park, Millen gushed over the new head coach, Rod Marinelli, and his staff. He compared the head guy to Paul Brown, and said after only two days that you could see the competence and leadership skills of the new coaches Marinelli hired.
"We're finally getting it," Millen said.
I'd say after five seasons and 80 games and three head coaches, perhaps you'd better be further along than "We're finally getting it," but that's just me.
But Millen can say those things, because those are perceived to be words of the pathetically clueless. They aren't words of arrogance or of defiance. Yet if he were to talk as Ken Holland talked - maintaining that he wouldn't change much or that, hey, you win some, you lose some - then the rumbling would begin.
These are unusual times. I can't remember ever having two general managers in Detroit who enjoyed such a Teflon® coating, while the other two were under such fire. The Tigers' Dave Dombrowski is feeling the heat after four brutal seasons. His era here is even being compared to Millen's ineptitude with the Lions. Dombrowski works in quicksand, apparently.
Of course, this jazz of having two Goofuses and two Gallants in town makes for great times for bloggers, sportswriters, columnists, radio voices, and other such riff-raff. If everyone was a Gallant, it'd be boring. What fun would it be to always write and talk about unmitigated success? On the other hand, there isn't enough time in a day to have four Goofuses. We had that, by the way - in the 1970's - and I don't think we're ready for that again, even 30+ years later.
For the record, Holland gave the answers in the first paragraph to questions about not making any moves on trade deadline day in 2004, bringing goalie Dominik Hasek out of retirement in 2003, and about any moves he's made that he'd like to "have back" - just like goalies and the shots that go behind them. And Holland was a netminder in his playing days, so it's an apt analogy.
He was comfortable and confident as he spoke about some of the past's hiccups. The seat is cool when the winning pours out of the spout like water.
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