Did Dale Tallon Deserve the Can?
GM deserves blame, but not all of it
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Dave Tallon and Scotty Bowman. Two entered, one remains.
Dale Tallon's fate seems weirdly preordained. Last October, after the Hawks fired Denis Savard, Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune said the Hawks would be wasting time if they didn't fire Tallon too, that they should "finish the job." Last night, after a resurgent season, they did.
But why? The most obvious reason is the one most everyone has cited: Tallon's legendary qualifying offers fumble this offseason that cost the Blackhawks more money than any fax machine possibly could. And that was a blunder. But it's not like Tallon's the only person in the Hawks front office responsible for mailing stuff. he has assistants do these things, right? There are junior front office members who handle the stamp-and-lick operations, no?
There are other reasons why Tallon may have been fired. The two most notable have to do with Cristobal Huet and Brian Campbell's huge free agent contracts, both of which have constituted overpayment for barely-above-average talent. Those two figures, along with the Marian Hossa signing this offseason, will make retaining the Hawks' young stars very difficult next year. (And at least Hossa is a good player.) Tallon is to blame for that trouble.
But there are other people in the Hawks' front office, and if blame falls on one guy, it has to fall on them, too. That means Scotty Bowman and his son, Stan, as well as John McDonough. There's plenty of blame to go around. Laying it all at the feet of Tallon -- without giving him 100 percent of the credit for the team's current resurgence -- defines unfair.
Eamonn Brennan is a Chicago-based writer, editor and blogger. You can also read him at Yahoo! Sports, Mouthpiece Sports Blog, and Inside The Hall, or at his personal site, eamonnbrennan.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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Posted Tuesday, Jul 14, 2009 - 3:45 PM CST
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