Remembering Gerry Meehan

By Budd Bailey

The date was October 6, 1986, a Monday morning. I was reporting for my first day at work in the public relations department of the Buffalo Sabres. I thought I was simply walking through the side door at Memorial Auditorium, but in reality, I was walking through the gates of hockey hell.

I’ve been thinking about that day and the ones that followed since I heard about the death of former Sabres’ executive Gerry Meehan on Saturday. I discovered I was arriving just in time for one of the most turbulent periods in the team’s history – and probably the worst. Meehan was the person who turned that situation around.

The Sabres’ organization had been in a bit of shock that summer. They went 37-37-6 in 1985-86, but it wasn’t good enough to finish in the top four of the five-team Adams Division. That meant they had missed the playoffs for the first time since 1974.  General manager Scotty Bowman had hired and fired Jim Schoenfeld during the course of the ‘85-‘86 season, and it didn’t help. The team played exactly .500 hockey under both men.

On my very first day at work, the NHL staged its annual waiver draft, and the Sabres were busy. Maybe too busy. They acquired Clark Gillies and Wilf Paiement, two veterans past their prime, and lost Pat Hughes and Mal Davis. A day later, veteran Ric Seiling was traded to Detroit for the proverbial future considerations. The churning felt like desperation.

Everyone’s fears for the season to come started to come to life when the Sabres started 0-3-2. When the team finally won a game on October 18, Channel 2 put on a crawl that began with “The Sabres Win!” – as if it were the most unexpected of events. That was the only victory in a 1-7-2 October. The team actually won its first three games in November, but no one was fooled that a turnaround was in order. The day after the third win, Bowman stepped down as coach to concentrate on the general manager’s job; Craig Ramsay became the head coach.

It didn’t help. The Sabres immediately went on an 0-6-1 run, and the tension in the front office almost could be felt in the hallways of Memorial Auditorium. On November 24, the PR department was called into the office of team vice president’s Bob Pickel. “I have news for you that no one knows about,” he said, and we braced for details of Bowman’s departure. But we were wrong. “Gil Perreault is retiring,” Pickel said. Whoa. What would the team do without its captain, its cornerstone of the past 16-plus years?

The team finished November at 5-15-3, and it felt like the only goal left for the team was to “earn” the first overall draft choice. Then came another thunderbolt. December 2 featured a home game against Minnesota. I bumped into communications director Paul Wieland in the Aud’s stairwell that morning when he told me Bowman had just been fired. It took me a moment to comprehend it. Then again, that was nothing compared to what former Sabre goalie Don Edwards was thinking. At the moment Bowman was fired, Edwards was sitting in the team’s reception area, waiting for an appointment with Bowman for a job as a goaltending coach. Someone quietly explained the situation to Edwards, who no doubt went home shaking his head. 

A few years later, when I was researching a book on Sabres’ history for the team’s 20^th anniversary, Seymour Knox III gave me his personal scrapbook of the team’s activities. Unexpectedly, I found a letter that Bowman had sent Knox shortly after his departure. Scotty – who had said in public about the firing “I never saw it coming” (he was about the only one) – raged in the letter about the injustice of it all, since his plan of putting Ramsay behind the bench didn’t have time to develop. But the problems were deeper than that. More to the point, Ken Dryden later wrote about Bowman’s situation, “For the first time in his career, he seemed out of answers.” Exactly right.

Meehan was promoted from assistant general manager to acting general manager immediately. The enormity of the task ahead must have been a little overwhelming. The team was in last place overall, with few good pieces and not much hope for great improvement. The entire organization was exhausted.

And things got worse at first, if that was possible. On December 13, the Sabres played a game in Quebec. They barely showed up. It was 4-0 before 10 minutes had elapsed, and ended up 7-0. It wasn’t that close. The team was 5-20-5 at that point. The traveling party took a bus back to the Quebec airport. Upon arrival, Meehan sternly ordered everyone off the bus except the players. Everyone – including me. Meehan read the riot act to the team. When it was done, I overheard Ramsay say to Meehan in the terminal, “Well said.”

After splitting four games, the Sabres discovered that the front office changes weren’t over. On December 22, Meehan was named the permanent general manager, and he hired Ted Sator – the former Rangers’ head coach – to the same job with the Sabres. Ramsay moved over to another job in the hockey department.

I hadn’t dealt with Gerry much in my first few months on the job, but we had more contact once he became general manager. Meehan was friendly and not intimidating, in contrast to his predecessor. The change of pace was welcomed around the office, which had lost some of its family atmosphere during Bowman’s era. (To be fair, Scotty eventually learned how to say hello after he said good-bye.)

At that point, Meehan did exactly what was needed to do: nothing. He let everything calm down. There was only one trade during the rest of the season, as Meehan brought in two solid pros in Mark Napier and Larry Playfair. The Sabres actually played pretty well through April, relatively speaking. After the Quebec disaster, the team’s record was 23-24-4 – almost .500. But the overall record was 28-44-8, which conveniently was good for last place in the overall standings. That meant the team had the top draft choice in the summer of 1987, and it used it on future Hall of Famer Pierre Turgeon.

Slowly but surely, Meehan put the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again. It took Turgeon a year to figure out the NHL, but he became a top-notch player after that. Meehan wasn’t afraid of acting decisively. When he figured out that Tom Barrasso and Daren Puppa could not co-exist as the Sabres’ goaltenders (they simply hated each other), he traded Barrasso to Pittsburgh for Doug Bodger and Darrin Shannon. When Sator started to lose the attention of the team, Meehan replaced him with Rick Dudley.

What’s more, it was pretty obvious that not only was Meehan a nice man, but that he was smart and decisive. I learned that first hand, mostly because of the type of questions he asked me. Gerry knew I liked fiddling around with stats – making me something of a one-man analytics department in those primitive days.

One time I figured out what the average “peak” of point production was in the NHL. It was around 25 years old – younger than I would have thought, but good information to know. Gerry appreciated the effort. Meehan once asked me to figure out if making the All-Rookie team was an indicator of future success in the NHL. It was relevant because Ray Sheppard had made the All-Rookie team in 1988, and the agent for the forward probably was arguing that the winger was headed for stardom and wanted to be paid now. Unfortunately for Meehan’s budget, there did seem to be a correlation between All-Rookie status and future success – even if Sheppard had a rather bumpy career.

By the fall of 1989, many of the pieces were in place. The Sabres finished with 98 points that season – third in the entire NHL and only three behind the league leader, Calgary. Considering where the Sabres had been a little more than three years earlier. It was a remarkable transformation, and Meehan deserved much of the credit.

He never received enough praise for that, and the main reason was that the team couldn’t figure out a way to win in the playoffs. Buffalo went a decade between a win in the first round of the postseason, advancing in 1983 and then again in 1993. That was in spite of the fact that Meehan brought in such players as Hall of Famers Alexander Mogilny, Dale Hawerchuk, Dominik Hasek and Pat LaFontaine. The goal was to create excitement about hockey in the Buffalo area in order to create support for a new arena, and Meehan did that.

By that time, John Muckler had arrived on the scene, with the idea that he’d become general manager. But the playoff issues probably kept Meehan from advancing to his dream job – president of the Sabres. The team changed direction in the front office, and Meehan quietly left the organization.

He emphasized legal work for the rest of his career, often with hockey connections. Gerry did some teaching at the UB law school late in his life. He had told me a while ago that he wanted me to come talk to the students about some of the issues concerning sports and the law. That would have been a great deal of fun; I’m sorry it won’t happen now.

Meehan was an original Sabre, and had some of his best moments as a player here. He told me once that he could relax in those early days because there was no need to look for up-and-coming young players who might take his job. There weren’t any. That’s a benefit of playing on an expansion team. He loved seeing his old teammates, and worked hard to start an alumni group for the Sabres.

I’ll remember him for all of that on a professional level, but mostly I’ll remember the job he did in bringing stability and smarts to the Sabres when they needed both qualities badly. Maybe he’ll be rewarded by the team some day with inclusion into the Sabres’ Hall of Fame – even if it’s a little late for him to appreciate the gesture now.

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