Burnside: The Story of Don Waddell

RALEIGH, NC. - We could start with the fact that moments before we sit down with Carolina Hurricanes President & General Manager Don Waddell he's been interviewing candidates for the GM job of PNC Arena.

Or, we could start with the fact that since arriving as the team's president of business operations in 2014 Waddell has, barring travel, been in his office, usually at 5 a.m., every day but perhaps three. And two of those were Christmas Days.

Or, we could start with the fact that over the past three-plus years Waddell has had to lobby state politicians on the benefits of sports wagering and lobbying his owner to add this player or that player with equal dexterity.

But we will start with the porta-potties.

Because, well, why wouldn't we? And not to spoil it, but it all makes tie together quite nicely.

Those who knew Waddell back in the day say he was a heck of a player. The skilled defenseman played in just one NHL game, that for the Los Angeles Kings in 1980-81. But he would likely have been a part of the Miracle On Ice team in 1980, had he not suffered a knee injury shortly before those magical Olympics. He rolled up points like a madman at the minor pro level.

But Waddell knew he wanted something else apart from grinding it out in the minors. So he decided to step away from the game and he started a porta-potty business in Toledo.

Longtime NHL executive Ray Shero, who has known Waddell for almost four decades, still recalls the catchphrase on Waddell's business card at the time; 'porta-potties, outstanding in your field' or something along those lines.

The porta-potty business was thriving when, early in the 1987-88 season, Waddell got a call from his old pal Rick Dudley who was coaching the Flint Spirit of the International Hockey League.

Was Waddell interested in coming to a hockey game?

Waddell hemmed and hawed.

Finally Dudley confessed he wasn't asking Waddell to come as a fan. He needed a player.

"I said c'mon Rick I haven't skated for a year. For some reason I said yes, okay I'll come up," Waddell recalled.

"So I walked in the house and I said to my wife you want to go to a hockey game today? She goes where? I said Flint. She goes why? I said well I just committed to playing today."

That was a Sunday. Three days later Dudley still needed Waddell in the lineup but Waddell had his business to look after.

"Come Wednesday I'm out doing my toilet business. I show up in Fort Wayne at the arena in my rubber boots. I got my jeans on with my truck with the big tank on it. I drove that to the rink," Waddell recalled.

He parked near the team bus and you might imagine the reaction of his teammates when they headed home after the game.

"The boys were just dying, dying laughing," Waddell said. Waddell finished out the season as a player/coach. "He was wonderful at it," Dudley said."He did a great job for me. We had a tremendous year."

At the end of that season Dudley ended up with a job in New Haven and Waddell was offered the position of coach and GM in Flint.

"I was in way over my head," Waddell recalled. The team was terrible. "We went through 70-some players because you're always trying to find the quick fix," he said.

After Waddell's first season as coach and GM the team became affiliated with the New York Rangers and then the franchise was sold, heading to Fort Wayne after the original Komets team moved to Albany.

Waddell attended the IHL league meetings in Vancouver before the NHL draft to make sure the sale went through as planned. It did and Waddell was out of work - but only for a few hours. The next item on the league agenda was a new franchise in San Diego. One of the owners slipped Waddell a piece of paper during the meeting asking if he was free for lunch. By the end of the day he was the general manager of what would become a wildly successful San Diego Gulls franchise.

From port-a-potties to a managerial career approaching 40 years? Funny how these things work out, no? And what if he'd declined Dudley's offer of a spot on that Flint roster? Sure, Waddell has wondered at that, whether he'd have been afforded another opportunity or not.

As it turned out the port-a-potty industry lost a promising young entrepreneur and the hockey world got an executive for life.

"Did I know it was going to work out the way it did? Absolutely not," Waddell said.

Waddell got his first NHL GM job with the expansion Atlanta Thrashers who joined the NHL in 1999. When the Thrashers were sold and moved to Winnipeg in 2011 Waddell ended up doing some scouting for Shero when Shero was the GM of the Pittsburgh Penguins before getting a call from former Carolina owner Peter Karmanos about a role on the business side of the Hurricanes' operation in Raleigh.

By the time the Thrashers were coming to the end of their tenure in Atlanta, Waddell was looking after a large part of the business side of things at Philips Arena so the idea of taking on a similar role with the Hurricanes wasn't all that daunting.

"I enjoy the business side," Waddell said. "I enjoy trying to make things work and trying to figure things out. I've always enjoyed it. So when I came here it was very exciting and appealing to me to be able to do that."

So enthused was Waddell with his new role on the business side that he didn't pine for another hockey ops job at all. In fact, he had very little to do with former Hurricanes GM Ron Francis, who took over for longtime Hall of Famer Jim Rutherford in 2014.

"Never. Never. I didn't think it was going to happen and to be honest I didn't have that appetite," Waddell said. "I had enough challenges trying to figure out the business side. So obviously I had a good relationship with Ron. I had all the respect in the world for him."

And there was a kind of unwritten rule that the hockey team was Francis' domain. Waddell wasn't part of draft meetings or trade deadline discussions.

"I never went in the locker room. Being a GM, I know what it's like. It was something I respected what he was doing and respected how he operated," Waddell said.

When Tom Dundon bought the team in early 2018, though, things were about to change dramatically for the entire organization and for Waddell specifically.

One of the early critical moments centered around whether Waddell would have a job at all.

"I think Tom will tell you that when he first bought the team he said my days were numbered," Waddell recalled with a laugh. "He told me after a couple of months 'I almost fired you before you even worked for me.' So that was kind of interesting."

Dundon is matter of fact about those first weeks after he took over the team. Everyone should have been worried about their job, he said. If they weren't, they weren't paying attention.

But almost immediately Dundon came to rely on Waddell for counsel on the hockey side as he decided on a management structure for the Hurricanes. Francis left the organization in the summer of 2018 and while Dundon spoke to other people about the GM role the new owner always envisioned Waddell being a part of the hockey process regardless.

"I'm looking for people to do this together," Dundon said. "And I was already talking to him about all the hockey stuff anyway."

The conversation about whether Waddell would take on the GM role was a frequent one in those first months under Dundon's tenure, but became a reality on April 28, 2018 when the Hurricanes hit the jackpot at the draft lottery.

"Officially I took over the night we won the lottery for (Andrei) Svechnikov," Waddell recalled. "Because we were interviewing some people and Tom kept asking me 'Why don't you just do it? Why don't you just do it?' And I said no, I don't want to do it."

Waddell exited the lockdown room where all the GMs in the lottery were cloistered in Toronto and told Dundon they'd hit the jackpot moving from 11th to 2nd in the talent-laden 2018 draft meaning they were in line to draft the young Russian star.

"And he said, 'Alright no more debate, you're the GM.' I said alright," Waddell said with a laugh. "That's how it came down. It was a mutual decision I guess by both of us."

Waddell jumped back into being a full-time NHL GM after being out of that role for seven years, but he did so without shedding his previous role as head of business operations. Now you understand why he gets to the office at 5 a.m.

"I wasn't nervous at all, probably more confident," Waddell said of returning to his GM roots. "Whenever you step out of something you reflect back on things you've done and did and I think actually it helped me step back into the process. I know it had been seven, eight years, whatever it is, but it wasn't like I was out of hockey."

Waddell is unique among his peers in many respects starting with his dual portfolio, but also his relationship with Dundon is unlike any owner/GM relationship in the league.

"I can't speak for other people. We have a very unique relationship," Waddell said. "We talk multiple times, multiple times a day. We talk about everything going on here and all the stuff he's got going on. We have this open line of communication. To me it's important because he can tell me if he thinks I'm wrong and I can certainly tell him if I think he's wrong. And that's the kind of relationship I respect. He's my boss, he's the owner, but he accepts the fact that he's not in this business."

"As you know, Tom's an open book. There's no secrets, which is great," Waddell said.

The fact that this is not a traditional NHL GM job isn't surprising given that Dundon is not your traditional NHL owner.

He knows that and could not care less - less than less really - about how other people go about their business in the NHL and what other people think about how he runs his hockey team.

For instance, Dundon wanted no part of the tradition of GMs traveling with the team and/or being on the road scouting players.

That's what the scouts are for, the owner reasoned and if the GM is seeing players then he brings his own bias to the table as opposed acting as the ultimate arbiter when it comes to acquiring players through trade, drafting prospects or signing free agents.

"If Don never went on another trip I wouldn't question it," Dundon said.

There are few owners who take the kind of active role in the team that Dundon does. We sat in on the 2018 draft just months after Dundon bought the team and then again during the October 2020 draft during the pandemic. We also sat in on the free agency meetings with Dundon, the coaching staff and the management team.

Dundon directs those meetings, asking questions, making comments, referring to data and reports from around the hockey world.

"I have my way," Dundon said without apology.

"I don't know how he puts up with it," he jokingly added. But it's clear there is a high level of comfort that exists between the two, part of a natural evolution over the past four years.

"I trust him," Dundon said. "And I think he probably understands me better."

Dundon doesn't like long meetings and he doesn't like making email lists. Instead if Dundon thinks of something he wants to run by Waddell he calls him. And they talk and then later they'll talk about something else.

"It's just the way it is," Dundon said. "If there's something on my mind I don't write it down and make a list."

Shero, a Stanley Cup winner in Pittsburgh and son of Hall of Fame coach Fred Shero has known Waddell since Waddell's IHL days.

"Donnie's regular people," Shero said. "That's the type of person he is."

After the Thrashers moved to Winnipeg, Shero called on Waddell to do some scouting for him in Pittsburgh.

Then, before the NHL draft in Philadelphia in 2014, Waddell called Shero to tell him he was taking over the business side of things in Carolina.

"I was like, you're going to be the president of what?" Shero recalled with a laugh.

Shero praised Waddell's abilities as a talent evaluator, although he did question Waddell's sometimes creative spelling.

"He has a really good eye," Shero said. But sometimes he'd remind Waddell that the standard scouting forms do come with spellcheck.

Shero agrees that this relationship is likely unique among NHL GMs but the only thing that matters is that it works.

"That is a real strength of Don's," Shero said. It's relationship building and building a strong relationship with a coach or players or owner or ownership group is critical to success.

"It might be different (in Carolina) but that's the way the business is now," Shero said. "And there's nothing wrong with doing it differently. Whatever it is it's working, obviously. I'm really happy Don was afforded that opportunity."

Dudley and Waddell have crossed paths at various points in both their long hockey careers including working together in San Diego, Atlanta and most recently in Carolina.

"I've never worked a day for Don Waddell that I didn't enjoy going to work," Dudley said.

"First and foremost he's a very bright guy," Dudley said. "He understands situations very quickly."

"I don't know anybody that doesn't like Don Waddell," he added.

And Dudley has seen first-hand just how unique Waddell's relationship is with Dundon.

"Tom is very hands on," Dudley said. "Donnie knows he has to include Tom in virtually every decision and he does it masterfully."

It's not that Waddell and Dundon don't disagree at times, Dudley noted. They do. It's natural for an owner who wants people who challenge him.

"But Donnie's a very diplomatic guy. He's a very bright guy and he articulates situations very well."

It's simple, Waddell explained. "You don't tell him no, you tell him why," Waddell said. "So once you handle it that way then the communication's always good."

Dudley is an advisor to Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito now. But he sees plenty of good things going on for his former club.

"I think that team is a clear contender," Dudley said. "They have to be considered one of the favorites for sure, and that's something that hasn't been the case for a long time."

In 2019 Waddell was a finalist for GM of the Year honors, the same year the Hurricanes made the playoffs for the first time in a decade and advanced to the Eastern Conference final for the first time since 2009.

The successes on the ice have been part of a commensurate improvement in the team's bottom line. The marketing department has made the Hurricanes one of the cool kids in the NHL, whether it's taking advantage of Don Cherry's now infamous 'bunch of jerks' comment, the cult status afforded emergency backup netminder David Ayres, or the team's post-win storm surge ritual. Fans have responded by driving season ticket levels north of 10,000, the first time since post-Stanley Cup win in 2006 that they have been that high and more than double the 4,300 season ticket holders in place when Waddell arrived in 2014.

"It's one thing to have a team that wins, but it's also to have a team off the ice that's prepared to take advantage of it when you win," Waddell said in describing the symbiotic relationship between the business side and the hockey side. It doesn't happen organically, you have to work it.

"Once we had the bump from the hockey team we had a great plan to continue to build it and we've still got to continue to build it," Waddell said.

"We've still got a ways to go.

We've come a long ways but we've still got a ways to go." The team spends to the salary cap, something that rarely if ever happened in the past. And they've made the playoffs in three straight seasons the first time since the team moved from Hartford in 1997.

But with those successes have come expectations that are as high as they've bever been for this franchise.

"You've got to give Tom credit since coming in here," Waddell said.

"He knows the best marketing tool here is by having a winning franchise. To make this franchise the best we can in this market is to win," Waddell said. "And he knows that. I can talk to him eight, to 10, times a day and 95% of the conversations are about players. About players traded, players signing, players how are these guys doing, and a small percentage towards the business side of it. Doesn't mean he doesn't appreciate the business because he does but he leaves that to us here to operate."

You don't spend much time around Waddell at PNC Arena to understand that he relishes his role with the Hurricanes no matter which hat he's wearing at any particular time.

He meets with sponsors before games. On one recent game night, he is posing for pictures with fans outside one of the concourse clubs.
It's the same whether the Maple Leafs are in town or he's making sure a Michael Bublé concert goes off without a hitch.

Just as he once upon a time seamlessly moved from port-a-potties to hockey management.

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