MANALAPAN, Fla. -- Barry Trotz walked into the NHL general managers meetings for the last time Wednesday with a newfound respect for the GM job and no regrets about his decision to retire.
The 63-year-old announced Feb. 2 he would retire as Nashville Predators GM, but he would continue to hold the role until his successor was identified, assist in the selection process and stay as an adviser until his contract expired at the end of next season.
Trotz said the Predators have cast a "wide net” in their GM search and will meet next week to reduce the number of candidates.
"I will say that there's been a lot of interest in it,” Trotz said. "(Chairman and owner) Bill Haslam and our ownership group are getting that number down, and then once that number is down to a reasonable interview number, then I will be part of the interviews and part of the process on the selection with ownership.”
Nashville (30-28-9), which was last in the NHL on Dec. 1 (8-13-4), trails the Seattle Kraken by two points for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Western Conference.
Trotz was hired as GM on Feb. 27, 2023, and officially replaced David Poile on July 1 of that year. It was the first time he'd been a GM after 23 seasons as an NHL coach with the Predators, Washington Capitals and New York Islanders. He ranks fifth in League history in games (1,812) and wins (914) among coaches, and he won the Stanley Cup with the Capitals in 2018.
He said coaching was the next best thing to being a player. He loved the adrenaline and the crashes that came from wins and losses. That job is up close, day to day. But being a GM has been different, more distant, more long term.
"You still have a passion, and the wins and losses are there, but it's just from a larger picture,” Trotz said. "In coaching, you're always thinking about the next game, the next shift, all those types of things; as a general manager, you've got to think two, three, four years out. You need a lot of patience.”
The demands have been different too.
"The biggest thing with coaching is, you can get away from the game for six, eight weeks sometimes in the summer, and you can turn it off and recharge,” he said. "In this job, you never get to recharge, because it's an almost a 365-day job. It demands a lot, and I have a lot of respect for this position.”
Each year at the meetings, the GMs discuss nuances of the game and make rule-change recommendations. From the outside -- as fans, media, even coaches -- people have lots of ideas and opinions. Trotz got a different view of the GMs, whom he called "the keepers of the game.”
"We just want to make sure that the game is in a really good place and the processes are correct so that you can make the best decisions, be it everything from goals that are scored to discipline, which seems to be a topic lately,” he said. "I just have a lot of respect for all those general managers in there. Obviously, after being on the other side as a coach, you get to see the whole process a lot more. I have a lot more respect for all the time and the effort and how passionate everybody is about the state of our game and where our game's going. …
"There's things that you say, 'Oh, I would do this.' And then you come here, and then they start talking about the things that have happened in the past, unintended consequences for maybe going in that certain direction. Nothing is done with these gentlemen in the League without a lot of thought and research. Sometimes it seems to the regular fan that, 'Well, we should do this. We should do that.' It's easy to sit back and be an armchair quarterback until you're really into the meat of everything here.”
Trotz said he is at peace with his impending retirement. After the Predators played the Pittsburgh Penguins at the NHL Global Series in Stockholm on Nov. 14 and 16, they had time off. Trotz made a quick trip to Spain to see his daughter, her husband and their daughter. They celebrated his granddaughter's fifth birthday.
"I was only there for 36 hours,” he said. "It was wonderful. And then on my way back, it hit me that it was the first birthday I'd been to. She's 5. And so, I think that was, to me, where that really pushed me over the edge a little bit to say, 'You know, it's time.' This game has been wonderful for me. I love it. I always will. It's always going to be part of me. But I also realize that there's people in my inner circle that are very important to me, and I want to be a part of their lives.”
